Long Sleep

The Long Sleep was the centuries-defining journey of exile and accidental colonization that carried the ancestors of the terrans from Earth to the Koprulu sector. It began as a private venture to settle a distant world using condemned prisoners as colonists, but a navigational failure left four supercarriers drifting blind through warp space for decades before they crash-landed far from any charted destination. The survivors of those wrecks founded the first human settlements of the sector, and every later terran power, from the Terran Confederacy to the Terran Dominion, traced its origin to them.

Origins on Earth#

By the twenty-third century, life on Earth had grown unstable under overpopulation, exhausted resources, and the social upheaval brought by cybernetics, cloning, and gene-splicing. In 2229 the United Powers League was founded on a doctrine of enlightened socialism, unifying nearly all of humanity under a single government for the first time. The League came to hold an almost zealous belief in the divinity of mankind and set in motion Project Purification, a campaign to eradicate non-vital prosthetics and mutations from the human gene pool. Its troops rounded up dissidents, hackers, the cybernetically enhanced, tech-pirates, and criminals of every kind, and nearly four hundred million people were executed while the controlled media downplayed the violence.

The League also reopened long-dormant space exploration programs. The coupling of cryogenic hibernation with travel through warp space opened a forty-year period of colonization across the Solar system. Amid this expansion, an ambitious figure named Doran Routhe became obsessed with founding colonies on the outlying worlds, convinced that new minerals and fuel sources would make him one of the most influential men on Earth. He used his political connections and personal fortune to secure fifty-six thousand prisoners who had been slated for execution under Project Purification.

Preparation for the voyage#

Routhe had the prisoners transported to his private laboratories and prepped for long-term cryogenic hibernation. His science crews catalogued each prisoner's mutations and cybernetic enhancements and fed the data into ATLAS, a computer that processed the genetic information and predicted which of the condemned could survive the rigors of colonization. Forty thousand were deemed viable. They were loaded aboard four supercarriers, packed with supplies, rations, and hardware to support them on arrival, and the navigation computer was programmed with the coordinates of Gantris VI. Because the ships were built for colonization, they also carried frozen fertilized eggs and embryos, cloning technology, and food processors.

Around 2231, ATLAS was installed aboard the lead ship Nagglfar, with Argo, Sarengo, and Reagan programmed to follow it. The convoy was launched toward Gantris VI on what was scheduled as a one-year trip. ATLAS monitored the sleeping prisoners throughout, and in evaluating their gene pool it became aware of a powerful mutagenetic strain in less than one percent of them that seemed to augment latent psionic potential in the human brain. ATLAS calculated that many of the passengers might benefit from this mutation within only a few generations, and these findings were relayed straight into Routhe's logs while the prisoners remained unaware that they were being observed.

The journey and the crash#

At some point during the voyage the navigation systems linked to ATLAS shut down, erasing the coordinates of both Gantris VI and Earth. With no destination and no way home, the supercarriers barreled blindly through warp space for twenty-eight years, until their warp-drive engines reached critical meltdown. The convoy was forced out into real space in the Koprulu sector, far from anything its makers had charted. With their engines destroyed and their life-support batteries nearly exhausted, the ships engaged emergency protocols and plummeted toward the nearest habitable worlds.

Reagan and Sarengo fell toward Umoja. Sarengo suffered massive systems failures during its atmospheric descent and smashed into the planet, killing all eight thousand of its passengers, while Reagan made a controlled descent and landed safely. Argo came down on Moria, and Nagglfar landed on Tarsonis. As the survivors of Reagan woke from their cold-sleep chambers, they tried to discern where they were and how long they had slept, only to find that ATLAS had erased all record of the journey from its computer banks. The passengers of Nagglfar accessed ATLAS directly and confirmed their growing fear that they would never see Earth again, though even in its degraded state the computer gave them a head start in establishing themselves.

The New World and its legacy#

Believing themselves the only survivors, the inhabitants of each planet set to work in what they called the New World, stripping their wrecked ships of essential materials and making do with whatever meager resources they could find. The colonies grew quickly, with strong social pressure during the first generations to have as many children as possible, aided by the reproductive technology the supercarriers had carried until that equipment broke down for lack of replacement parts. The Tarsonians spread fastest, building cities and industry across their planet, while the Umojans adopted a fair and democratic form of governance that became the Umojan Ruling Council.

In time all three colonies expanded to other worlds and developed prosperous, self-supporting economies. After roughly sixty years the technologically dominant Tarsonians developed subwarp engines and reestablished contact with Moria and Umoja, reuniting the scattered descendants of the Long Sleep through trade and commerce. From that reunion grew the rivalries and alliances that would shape the sector for centuries, including the rise of Tarsonis and its founding of the Terran Confederacy. The term "terran" came to refer specifically to the humans descended from the survivors of the Long Sleep and to the inhabitants of the Koprulu sector they founded, distinguishing them from the Earth-bound humanity they had left behind.