The world ended on July 7, 2268.
That was when the ‘ojh detonated our sun. It was nothing personal. In fact, they had only recently determined that our system contained sentients, but that was precisely why it had to be our solar system. Whatever it was – an entity, a machine, or whatever – that had caused the Cretaceous-Tertiary die-off had returned to Earth. It seems that this thing had been lobbing extinction-level events at planets on some sort of esoteric schedule for at least a half-billion years. The ‘ojh were the ones who actually figured out its pattern, more or less, after it whipped a comet at their planet of origin, about 1,700 years ago. Apparently, this time around, it was only hitting worlds that had developed intelligent life, in the early stages of interstellar exploration.
When the Sol system died, it took the ancient doomsday device with it. To this day, we don’t know anything more about it than what the ‘ojh have told us in the century-and-some between then and now: that it was seemingly made of dark matter, could manipulate gravity on a cosmic scale, and that it was apparently impervious to anything short of a stellar explosion. At the time of the destruction, just over 250 million of our ancestors were living out-of-system. In an instant, they became the last survivors of the human race.
That was our first confirmed encounter with extraterrestrial life.
That was when the ‘ojh detonated our sun. It was nothing personal. In fact, they had only recently determined that our system contained sentients, but that was precisely why it had to be our solar system. Whatever it was – an entity, a machine, or whatever – that had caused the Cretaceous-Tertiary die-off had returned to Earth. It seems that this thing had been lobbing extinction-level events at planets on some sort of esoteric schedule for at least a half-billion years. The ‘ojh were the ones who actually figured out its pattern, more or less, after it whipped a comet at their planet of origin, about 1,700 years ago. Apparently, this time around, it was only hitting worlds that had developed intelligent life, in the early stages of interstellar exploration.
When the Sol system died, it took the ancient doomsday device with it. To this day, we don’t know anything more about it than what the ‘ojh have told us in the century-and-some between then and now: that it was seemingly made of dark matter, could manipulate gravity on a cosmic scale, and that it was apparently impervious to anything short of a stellar explosion. At the time of the destruction, just over 250 million of our ancestors were living out-of-system. In an instant, they became the last survivors of the human race.
That was our first confirmed encounter with extraterrestrial life.