Prologue to a Prologue
The moon landing was a worldwide phenomenon, with millions across the globe gathering around their televisions to watch in awe. Everyone had known history was being made, and many were eager to say they witnessed it firsthand. But, that’s where this reality separates from ours.
Emboldened by their first big victory in space travel, humanity reached even further, driven by the competition of the international community. Multiple other countries were inspired by the United States setting foot on the moon, and had decided to jumpstart their own space programs. Before long they were neck and neck with the U.S. and Russia, the two biggest figures in space travel at the time.
There was a distinct boom in space travel technology following each seemingly impossible goal we met. By 1980 we had a space station orbiting every major planet in our proximity and a self-sustained outpost on the moon, and scientific flights throughout our system were now commonplace. Using our furthest-reaching station orbiting Saturn, we were even able to launch a fleet of probes past the boundaries of our solar system.
But when the connection to each probe’s visual feed was lost, presumably to a fault in the onboard computers, the governments who participated came together to set up a much more reliable manned expedition. This was led by volunteers from the United Kingdom with aid from the United States, Russia and Japan onboard the vessel Scout 7, which was launched from Saturn’s orbit in August of 1980.
The crew was meant to venture a decent distance out from the edge of our system, then turn back for the three year return trip. They were also field testing another new technology which relied on freezing the subject to death, only to revive them at their destination in order to conserve oxygen. This also had the interesting side effect of keeping the subject from aging anywhere past a few days while in stasis.
By spring of 1983, scientists were predicting the Scout 7 would leave our solar system before the end of the year. The mission control room back in Europe watched the camera feeds sleeplessly as the Scout got closer and closer to the “vanishing point”, the roughly pinpointed location where the fleet of probes went offline without any apparent reason other than malfunction. And to nobody’s surprise, the same anomaly manifested again.
The crew was all thawed and ready to pass the threshold, sitting mostly in silence recording notes to their pads and monitoring the situation. The last thing we received was from the communications officer of the Scout 7, Reggie Mellene, relaying that oxygen levels were still above seventy percent and there were no technical issues. And in an instant, the camera flickered to black and the comms surrendered into a dull static.
