INTO THE BLACK

There was Earth or what was left of it. Choking air, poison rain, acid oceans. We needed to find a new home. a new place for the human race to survive. A new hope for mankind.

The day to begin my deep space mission has come. I am nervous but in a good way, ya know. Excited and scared at the same time. Hell, I don't know what I'm feeling. Maybe I'm feeling everything all at once. Mom and Dad would have been proud of me. I wish they had lived long enough to see me get where I am. They had me late in their lives. Mom was a theoretics engineer and Dad was a professor at a ivy league college. Seems like they hardly had time for sex, let alone a child. There were lots and lots of nannies and babysitters I can tell ya. Till Mom got me an au pair. Dad passed away last year at the age of 102, Mom went shortly thereafter at 99. They never could stand to be very far apart except where their academics seperated them. But 102 and 99 you're thinking? That's nothing special now what with the anti aging drugs that had been developed. Hell, people are living to be as old as 115 years and that's the oldest yet. However these are first generation users who were already along in life. The new generation, like me, well....there's no telling how long we might live. This is what makes all of this, this whole operation of going deepspace exploring possible. Everyone was or had been trying to crack the code of the mystery of how to get a human through the depths of space and back to earth again in the same lifetime as everyone else. I mean, what good is it to send out a mission that reports back in 150 years and the people who cared about the mission are long dead and there's no one left who give's a shit? Faster than light travel was a bust. Turns out Albert Einstein was right after all. Warp fields, ion engines, solar sails, nothing ever seemed to work or at least work right. So many failures resulting in so many deaths. To many people thinking externally.

It took a tiny little wisp of an Hindu man who happened to hold Doctorates in microbiology, herbology, entomology, nuclear physics and botany, to think internally and crack the code. He held a 3rd degree blackbelt in Karate as well and was a firm practitioner of Yoga. Oh sure, the data collection and information retrieval system wouldn't lose one scrap of technical telemetry but it's the human factor which is the main driving force behind all of mankinds endeavors now and the reason for our multi-cultural/national crew. Factor number two in making all this possible. Most of Earth's governments finally saw the long term effects of where current events were leading. The recycling technologies came to late for it to make any difference. The world was in the crapper and the governments of the world knew it. Most of the public brushed it off as conspiracy theories dreamed up by some crazy attention getters but it was a conspiracy, from the start. If the general world population knew what the truth was...well all that's just better left unsaid. It's was really to late to repair the damage done, so that's why we are reaching out. Outward, out there among the stars, into the Black.