Halcyon Chimera synopsis

Present day, present time. America is the world’s most powerful nation, and china is on the rise at an ever closer second place. You wonder who’s economy needs who more. Is it an age of economic friendship, or a very polite cold war. And then, of course, the Aliens arrive. The scientologists have a field day, the North Koreans claim simultaneously that the Alien ships are both evil western imperialist aggressors and artifacts of superior DPRK technology. Everyone else is scared, some more than others. The Fermians tuck their tails between their legs, whilst the Saganites naively declare victory (The Historians, on the other hand, say nothing with a smirk on their faces, holding out for the final ‘I told you so’). But the time to celebrate will come later – prepare for first contact!
You’ve seen enough movies to know what’s going to happen next, but you get ready for first contact anyway. The President gets ready, the Prime Minister of the UK gets ready. And lo’ and behold, the aliens don’t start glassing the planet, they actually land and make first contact – in Beijing. They were nice enough to open a secure line of text communication with you, however. So you, nonplussed, insist that there must be some of mistake. ‘’India next. You third.’’ That is all they say. Indeed, they do get to you eventually, but they seem more interested in China and India. All in all, negotiations with a completely alien race go better than most negotiations with your own species.
But therein is where the problems begin. The aliens are not little green men or Klingons, but they're not some sort of eldritch abominations either. Their psychology is completely different, but the laws of operant conditioning and kin-selection still apply. At the end of the day, they’re probably more similar to you than what you’d find in the pelagic zone. But those few differences create a lot of large problems. The aliens, Vho as they call themselves in your presence (to them you are ‘Terrans’ rather than ‘human’) find it difficult to understand the concept things such as officers or political ‘leaders.’ Communicating by flashing patterns across their skin, fiasco strikes as the Vho accidently induce a grand-mal epileptic seizure in one of the members of your envoy. Oops. On top of that, Chinese Uyghur radical Muslims fail spectacularly at a suicide bombing attack aimed at your alien friends. The Vho have a hard time wrapping their heads around the idea of different factions inside a nation, and accuse you of trickery. Meanwhile, the American military detects thousands of Vho ships passing through the solar system, and you accuse them of the same thing. Pakistan begins armed conflict with India out of jealousy, and eventually limited but escalating conflict begins between ‘Terrans’ and the Vho.
Pakistan and India nuke each other to glass. The Vho and the Humans (by which I mean the Americans first, and the Chinese reluctantly later) begin open war with the Vho. The Vho mop the floor in open warfare with us, but both you and the Vho are both surprised at how relatively well we are doing given the technological gap. This is when we first really noticing that something about the Vho is amiss. They push us into retreat, yet consistently fail to follow through in their attacks. They have thousands of craft to bomb us from orbit, yet they only push us through with ground attacks. The strategists and game theorists are confused, but still paint a rather bleak projection for how the war will go. And then… they just leave

You claim victory on the grounds that your goal was simply not to lose. Congratulations. For the first time in America’s history since the Revolutionary war, you know what it is like to be Vietnam. The jubilation is short lived, however, as you find many of the aliens have left a lot of stuff behind. So much technology to reverse engineer, so little time. And God help you if those filthy Chinese get their hands on it first. But as you reverse engineer their tech, some interesting things are discovered. While the Vho could travel between stars had a very impressive understanding of gravity, they had a difficult understanding of electromagnectic phenomenon. Only through thousands of years of Darwinian trial and error were they even capable of understanding electronics slightly better than we did. You also find out why they were here. The Vho were in a war against a highly aggressive interstellar ‘roam-and-rape’ species known as the Cynx. The Vho’s technology required that they make pit stops at areas of high gravitational concentrations such as a star or star system. In spite of all the ships that were passing through the neighborhood, when the Vho said they were only landing on Earth to give a friendly hello, they were telling the honest truth. Oops.
So now you know that there are dozens of different alien races in this galaxy alone. You also have reverse engineered the technology to greet them. So what do you do now? Well, of course only one person or country can represent the planet at same time, and how do you expect to be on the same level as the aliens if you still fight wars amongst each other? The only way for Man to travel space now is to unite together, and give up war and other primitive human weaknesses. But in a world of International Anarchy, how do you decided who is right and who is wrong, who is in charge? With a Supranational government, of course. And how do you decide who has the right to rule the entire planet? Whoever wins no-hands-tied World War 3, of course. Might DOES make right, after all. Again, oops.
And so the UK, US, Russian, and Japanese alliance fights a war against China and it’s continental European allies (sorry Germany, three world wars in a row and you have to be the bad guy) in the ultimate war for peace. Cataphract 6, a weaponized viral pathogen, kills even more people than the alien-augmented technology of the military. Eventually the Anglicans and their Allies win the war, and countries are reduced to little more than prefectures. It is, of course, very hard to get everyone on board with your New World Order/One World Government, but just by coincidence, technology being used by researchers is disseminated amongst the masses, much like the internet and its original role as a tool for physicists working on particle theory. This unites the people of Earth into the Union of Man. The truest form of democracy, where everyone’s opinion is equally valid until the decision is made, where sheer first-past-the-post consensus determines what is right and what is wrong. Numbers matter; they may have lost on the battlefield, but the Chinese still really won, anyway
So now it’s an unspecified hundred number of years into the future, and we meet our main character at the start of our novel – Uentsi Kapwepwe, or ‘Keppers’ for short. He is Master at Arms Petty Officer in the Sky Guard, currently serving aboard the Iowa, a heavy-fighter. To Keppers dismay, he is assigned to act as a handler for a Vho in an officer exchange program. He’s seen many of them on the battlefield, but never one up close. He is immediately taken aback by its naivety. Keppers is just glad he won’t have to deal with him for long, because their ship is finally returning to Earth, and his tour is about to end.
Next thing he knows, he’s awake in the middle of a hallway. Cryosleep. For whatever reason, an hour of your memory prior to entering the cryopod is obliterated. For an hour after you wake up, the brain runs on unconscious autopilot. The result is  a jarring one moment you’re there, the next instant you feel like you’ve been instantly teleported somewhere else. As military police, Uentsi has been woken up an hour before the other enlistees.
Uentsi checks there headings. Somethings wrong. They’ve woken up too early. He checks the telemetry and heads to the bridge. They’ve made a little detour into the alpha centauri system. Apparently a capital ship… just fucking disappeared. Not only was the Iowa rerouted to investigate, but half of the entire Earth planetary defense force along with it. Out of nowhere, all the ships in the armada a being hailed by an emission that says – in untranslated English – ‘I am coming. I am becoming.’ And finally ‘I am here.’
Next thing he knows, Uentsi is in a landing pod with his charge, being dropped off on a dead rock. Whatever happened between then is obliterated by cryosleep. As he enters the base, the first person to greet him is a soldier ‘on loan’ from the Army named Corporal Jessica Hamza. Brown skin, redhair, and eyes with slits like a cat’s – the genetic retrofits of Serran colonist. Her nickname on the base is 'skittles.' "no relation to the Captain James Hamza, of course" Turns out she’s his adopted daughter (she is also a quadruple amputee, her arms and legs and spine replaced with prosthetics as a result of the damage she’s taken in combat, though she tries to keep it hidden from the other soldiers). A total of thirty people (plus one newcomer and one Vho) live on this godforsaken rock. There are several important people among them, other than Hamza. They are Major Zelaya, who runs the base, and Warant Officer James "Buzzkill" Engel, a gunship pilot. Uentsi is told that the Iowa had another emergency call, and the captain was able to get permission to drop Uentsi on the base (it was on the way) knowing that his active service was over soon and it would be his only chance to find another ship headed back for Earth in the next decade.
We get to learn a little more about Uentsi. He is one of the few unlucky people with a neurological disorder that prevents him from having dreams. More than anything in the world, he wants to go back to Earth to rejoin the Union. He wants to plug himself in and go back to sleep forever, so that the conscious thoughts of others can become his dreams. He also has another secret. His coping mechanism, for stress or boredom, or combat is what appears to be an imaginary friend, some girl he refers to just as ‘Annie’
As they all shoot the shit back and forth we learn about the others as well. Zelaya is a Union Jingoist, Engel even more so; and he has a habit of constantly getting under Uentsi’s skin, constantly calling him a ‘commissar’. Hamza was an orphan of the Serran civil war. Uentsi used to serve on the Saif al Shams (Sword of the Sun) with Captain Hamza, and was there when he won his medal of honor. Captain Hamza also was the one to oversee Uentsi’s first spacewalk. The naivety of Uentsi’s charge, who the personnel begin to refer to as ‘Friday,’ stirs up trouble as well. For example, he asks the question ‘what, exactly, is a human?’ Engel answers with an operationalized definition of humanity that conveniently excludes everyone other than Han Chinese living on Earth, dismissing billions of colonists as ‘outliers.’ Political Black Box State Theory is discussed (‘planetvilles’). As they talk, piece by piece, we hear the above story of how the Human race fumbled first contact, and how they were all united by world war and the Union.
While it seems like just a weird but unremarkable event, one time Uentsi is sitting in his room and blinks – only to find out that he has fallen asleep for several hours. He wakes up sore and with a bruise on his arm. They are all sent out to collect a monthly supply drop, supplied via interstellar missile. Engel has modified his gunship to also be capable of heavy-life work, and has removed its life support systems in favor of a life-support suit capable of providing cryosleep. For some reason he can’t explain, it terrifies him. As he travels outside the base for the first time in a month and looks at the sky, Friday points out to him where the black hole their planet is orbiting is – you have to look for that slight warp in the background glow of the other stars nearby. This scares Uentsi, too; the concept of true nothingness, where not even the laws of conservation of mass and energy are not sacred.
He later has a conversation with Zelaya about this, and he brings up the history of the Union, and why it was created. The human mind is small, it is weak. It cannot even process more than 150 people at a time as being ‘human.’ The idea that humans would be able to comprehend the vast size of the universe – or on the other end of that scale, the quantum mechanics holding it all together – is about as sensible as ants understanding why an ATM was placed on top of their anthill. So the quantum physicists developed the Union. A system where minds were linked together much like computers to increase the human brains limited processing power. Minds at rest or idle are borrowed to enhance the processing power of those doing the thinking. This eventually went worldwide, creating the Union and a literal Jungian collective unconsciousness.
We also learn about how, exactly, the ships in the Human fleet operate. They have nuclear rocket engines for propulsion, and a Nicoll-Dyson phased-array laser (the Icarus Array) orbiting the sun combined with solar sails. This is good enough for interplanetary travel, but not interstellar. Enter the gravity-well drive.
Despite the massive size of the observable universe, relativistic models cannot account for 70% of the mass-energy present. The unknown source of this gravity spread throughout the universe has been referred to as ‘Dark Matter.’ According to string theory, all matter is made up of vibrating subatomic strings. Gravity’s string is a closed loop, and so it can escape our observable matter and interact with this dark matter. Dark matter’s gravity escapes and interacts with ours, and so we feel the effect of gravity from matter that we cannot account for. The problem with string theory has been that while it ties together quantum and relativistic theory together, it lacks testability. This is the problem with most quantum theories, forcing us to resort to though experiments. Not with the Union, anymore. It just understands. It comprehends. It knows. Even if it tried to explain how it works to us, if we ourselves our not integrated into the union, it would be beyond our comprehension. The only way for us to comprehend is to feel it for ourselves.
And so the gravity well drive. It functions by using particle accelerators to create micro black holes to tear through space-time. These channel all the gravity along a certain vector that would escape into space-time back into our observable matter. Through this, the ship is pulled by the full force of the planet or solar system toward it, literally falling through space toward its destinations. This greatly reduces travel time, and combined with solar sails, nuclear rockets, and cryosleep, interstellar travel is now possible. Oddly enough, not even the Vho understood gravity as well as the Union does. A medieval soldier does not need to understand gravity in order to exploit it in the operations of a trebuchet, and the same with the Vho who invented the gravity well drive in the first place.
A month passes, and Uentsi goes out again for another collection of dropped off supplies. As Uentsi looks up at the stars, he notices every so often that some of them blink on and off, as if something in orbit were blocking them. As they return to base, Uentsi sees something fall from the heavens like a meteor, but very large. A single uncharted meteor is very easy to go unaccounted for, but not that one on top of all the other anomalies Uentsi observed in the sky. He checks Astrogation charts, and nothing should be within their planet’s orbit to account for any of these phenomenon. For some reason, Uensti can’t let it go, and asks Zelaya if he can go and investigate, after getting refused, Uentsi commandeers a rover, and drives over to where he suspects the object landed. To his dismay he finds a massive debris field (and a few severed limbs) of what appears to be a Human ship. He finds the black box and examines it, discovering that crashed ship is the Iowa, right as Engel and Hamza show up to escort him to base. When he returns, he is Interrogated by Zelaya, who asks a bunch of erroneous seeming questions. Uentsi asks him what the Iowa was doing in orbit around their outpost, and Zelaya swears that he has no idea. When asked why he thought it crashed, Zelaya responds that Union ships do not crash – only lithobrake. Weird things begin to happen to Uentsi and he starts to doubt his sanity and his memory. In addition, Engel becomes increasingly confrontational, and seems to be actively fucking with him (ie, the 'no soap, radio' joke).
Then, Hamza, too, says that something seems amiss, and suddenly realizes that they have an intruder on the base right before a Cynx raiding party bursts from the vents and begins shooting up the place. Completely unprepared, they are only saved when Friday steps in, crawling through the vents, ripping Cynx to pieces with its bear arms. At the end of the firefight, Zelaya’s platoon has taken two fatalities. One private dies of wounds in combat, while their cook dies of a heart attack during the commotion of the fighting.
Hamza knows that where there is one squad of Cynx, there’s a shitload more in orbit, and suggests they send out as distress signal. Engel says it won’t make a difference as communications by laser would take weeks to reach the nearest Union ship anyway, “right, Zelaya?” Uentsi asks how Hamza knew there were intruders and the concept of ‘soldier sense’ comes up. The unconscious brain is able to process much faster than the conscious mind. It picks up on details that the conscious mind doesn’t notice, and puts two and two together. But the best it can do to warn that little homunculus they call ‘consciousness’ is give it the feeling that things are wrong, or off; the feeling that you’re being watched. Hamza asks who ‘Annie’ is – in the middle of the fire-fight Uentsi had been having a conversation with her without knowing it. Uentsi tells her that Annie was a close childhood friend who died in an accident back when he was living on Earth. Both Uentsi and Annie were orphans. Uenstsi asks Hamza if he’s going crazy, and she says that reactions like that are normal combat stress reactions. Hamza herself once started singing Ode to Joy while pissing her uniform. They both realize that without reinforcements, none of them are going to survive. Hamza offers Uentsi some of the contraband moonshine that she and the late cook have been making, and Uentsi throws regulations to the wind and accepts.
Dropships full of Cynx raiding parties are detected and as they prepare to be breached, Engel sends Uentsi to the comms center, and finds Zelaya having a realtime conversation with a captain of Union starship (Zelaya is taken aback, as the door was supposed to be electronically locked). No point in hiding it now, Zelaya admits that the entire time there has been an Armada in low-orbit around the planet, and Iowa had been forced to stay there as part of a quarantine. The ships in orbit send down a detachment of Jaegers – Sky Guard equivalent of SEALS – and the Cynx are dealt with. A Cynx ship is detected in a 1:1 orbital resonance with the planet. Several more Cynx capital ships are detected in the planet’s L3 Lagrange point. Zelaya interrogates Uentsi again, with slight subtle twists in his words, and Uentsi’s answers become more inconsistent. Engel confides in Uentsi that contrary to what it would appear, he’s a horrible speaker with a stuttering problem. Engel says that he has every single thing planned out six ways from Sunday. He is a good speaker because he has already thought of all the possible outcomes of every single conversation. Uensti begins dreaming again, and is starting to completely doubt his reality. The surviving crew of the base are evacuated to orbit aboard the Protagoras as the base is nuked to glass.
Just in time, the Saif Al Shams arrives and begins to engage Cynx fighters. Turns out SASh was the ship that was supposed to make the routine checkup on the base, picking up Hamza, several of the personnel, and Uentsi along with them. SASh hails the fleet, and requests clarifications on what is happening. While everyone is in commotion Uentsi slips out and goes to the communications center and begins hailing the SASh. Major Zelaya then shoots him with a Dazzler, rendering him unconscious.
When he comes to he is handcuffed, but dragged back to the bridge of the ship. Just as they are about to be over whelmed, The Cynx take damage from a vector originating from within the black hole’s singularity. A completely alien ship pulls itself from the singularity, traveling at super-relativistic speeds. Takes the entire human fleet all the way to Earth in an alcubierre field, before slipping back into subspace. The ship begins to make contact with the Protagoras, and the Protagoras begins to make laser communications with Earth. The Union already knows what is happening, and already has plans…
As the alien ship begins requesting to speak with Uentsi, the Major shows him the classified information that he has been withholding, hoping it will jog Uentsi’s memory. He displays video recorded from the black box of the disappeared ship they were sent to investigate. In the footage, the ship is at Alpha Centauri prepared to make first contact with an unknown alien race, as according to a message it had received before. There is a gravitic disturbance, and a broadcast declaring ‘I am coming. I am here,’ followed by a ship phasing through out of a wormhole-like anomaly. The alien ship maneuvers parallel to the human one, and out of a docking hatch emerges what appears to be a man. As the humans respond in kind, they send a man out of the airlock to greet him/it. As they reach for each other’s hand, there is a massive explosion.
Detection of pions suggests that the alien ship was made of antimatter, and that when they touched, they annihilated each other. The Union guesses that the only logical explanation was that the aliens were made of dark matter – anti matter being the substance they are made of, but could not react with our matter until they phased through, resulting in the explosion. It would also appear that the aliens are not really alien, but from a dark matter Earth. The best explanation is that they evolved on an Earth where none of the mass extinction events happened, where simple mistakes we made that knocked us back thousands of years technologically were not made by these ‘aliens,’ who call themselves the Nephilim. Friday asks if this means they are human, referencing the earlier conversation about what makes a human, human. The Nephilim almost exactly fit Engel’s descriptions. Zelay says no, and discusses how certain conditions cause co evolution, producing the same features without being related (insects, mamals, and birds evolved sperately, but there are species of each that have wings.) and that the ‘human’ shape of the nephilim is the result of the human body plan being the best suited to living on a planet like earth. Zelaya says that the Nephilim are not human because of genetics, but Friday objects and says that by that definition, Corporal Hamza is not human either.
As the Nephilim decide that the humans are stalling them, they begin targeting Union ships. Zelaya has Engel, Cpl Hamza, and Friday evacuated to the SASh, and then takes Uentsi to a room for interrogation. He then has Uentsi secured to an operating table and begins psychologically torturing him. When Uentsi was handling the Iowa’s black box, he was activating it’s transponder (what led the Cynx to them in the first place) – though he denies it. When he was hailing the Saif al Shams, he was really broadcasting topsecret information. He then shows Uentsi the recordings on the Iowa’s blackbox. When they were hailed, there was not only a gravitic disturbance, but a magnetic anomaly as well. Many of the crew experienced headaches, loss of consciousness, stupor, or seizures. Because of Cryo amnesia, Uentsi does not remember this. Union then ordered all the Iowa to the outpost. Uentsi was woken up last of the crewman, and as his brain was running on unconscious autopilot, he began to behave erratically, speaking words that were not his own. He was then to be taken down to the outpost for quarantine, and Friday was not woken from Cryo till after Uentsi was fully conscious. (Vho do not have the amnesia problem) while the Iowa was to remain in orbit with the rest of the fleet for study.
The crew of the Iowa began to act erratically, and were ordered to be put into cryo and then woken up to observe their unconscious behavior. With each thaw they became more psychotic, finally engaging in acts of rape and self-mutilations before crashing the Iowa into the planet. They had been collateral damage in the Nephilim’s precise assault on Uentsi’s mind. Friday, being so completely different Neurologically, was unaffected. What the Nephilim had done was that they planted ideas into Uentsi’s mind. Zelaya then goes on about the difference between the Driver – the unconscious mind – and the Homunculus – the conscious mind. The Homunculus is useless. The Homunculus is vain and petty. It does nothing but think about ‘I’ and its own self-importance. The Driver does all the work, and the Homunculus takes all the credit. The Homunculus causes pain. It’s what makes us flawed as human beings. And the Driver constantly deceives it. It feeds the Homunculus lies and warps reality into something that the Homunculus finds acceptable. The entire time Uentsi was on that outpost, he’d be a Manchurian puppet for the Nephilim, faithfully following all the protocols that had been planted into his mind, while the Homunculus had kept insisting that his actions were actually of his own free will.
Uentsi continues to deny this, and Zelaya continues. He talks about how the Homunculus – and even the Driver – is bad with memory. There is no difference between the dreams Uentsi wishes to have back, imagination, and memory. All memory is stored in the Driver. When you dream, memory is pulled from the driver in the form of imagination to construct new ideas from the little pieces. When one remembers, they are simply imagining things based on the details of past events they have experienced. And so every time that someone remembers something – the homunculus pulling details  from the driver – the memory remembered is the one saved by the Driver, based on the Homunculus’ reliving of the events. Every imagining of the event overwrites the original event. And so the more something is remembered, the poorer and more full of holes it becomes.
And this is where Zelaya gets Uentsi; show’s him that he can’t keep denying the reality that is presented to him. He brings up all the records of Annie, in the form of the journals they had written, and forces him to confront her – not simply the fictitious ‘character’ that shares the same name. Annie may have been Uentsi’s childhood friend – both orphan wards of the state – but she was hardly the perfect little sisterly girl Uentsi thinks she is. Annie did not innocently die in some accident, she hung herself. She was not ‘innocent and imaginative,’ she had schizophrenia and had to deal with constant assault from hallucinations. She was not allowed to become one with the Union, as her schizophrenic thoughts would pollute the collective unconsciousness. Uentsi held back from joining the Union because he did not want anything to come between them, and promises Annie that he wouldn’t, but starts linking up with the Union anyway behind her back and for the first time In his life he begins to have dreams. When he walks in on Annie hanging herself, he becomes too neurotic to be allowed to sync with the Union, and joins the Skygaurd. Zelaya even convinces Uentsi that he had taken advantage of her neurosis and molested her, though admits later that he had been making it up.
Zelaya then expresses how scared he is of the Nephilim; and how he needs Uentsi – now broken and malleable – to help him stop them. This is the first contact scenario that SHOULD have happened on Earth, but never did. The Big One, where humanity is faced against an alien intellect that can think circles around us and everything the Union has achieved has been to prevent this sort of event from happening. The entire crew of the Protagoras and Zelaya himself are members of Unit 1488, a government controlled Human supremacy agency – secret police feared in rumors more by the Vho than even the colonists.
Uentsi then heres gunfire and Friday bursts into the room, ripping Zelaya to pieces. Engel has hacked into the Protagoras and has revealed everything to the crew of the Saif al Shams, and Hamza, Engel, and Friday decide to mount a rescue operation. Engel reveals that he was the gone-into-hiding cyber terrorist ‘Koba.’ When Uentsi arrived, he had intercepted all the communications between the Union, the Iowa, and Zelaya. Engel had forced Uentsi at gunpoint into his cryosuit, froze and thawed him, and interrogated him. When Engel was sent to retrieve Uentsi from the Iowa’s crash site, Engel had secretly downloaded all the information from the Iowa’s black box. The entire time that he had been on the outpost, he had been gas-lighting Uentsi. And with every single jingoism, he had secretly been mocking Zelaya.
As they become separated in fighting, Hamza makes it back to the SASh, while the Nephilim begin to speak psychically with Uentsi. While Uentsi becomes angry and is enraged at how he has been used by them, the Nephilim say that they have done nothing that he has not already done to himself. There is no difference between whether they  deceived his driver, or whether Engel deceived the Homunculus; conscious or unconscious the actions were still his own. The Nephilim reveal that they had wanted Uentsi to return to the Union, spreading the protocols they had laid into his mind – the overwhelming idea of evacuating Earth. The Nephilim were alone in their universe, while ours was filled with life – thousands more civilizations outside the milkyway that we had yet to even discover. They only discovered us by chance, as they felt the effects of gravitic disturbances caused by our use of the gravity well drive. We lived on the same planet, our bodies passing through there’s without either of us ever noticing them. They decided that we would be their successors, but we would not be able to explore the universe and surpass them because the universe was dying. In order for us to have enough time to reach not only other stars but other galaxies, they would have to dump dark matter energy into our universe to stave off heat death – a literal maxwell’s demon. But it would come at a cost – our and their Earth would sync into the same space, annihilating each other and destabilizing the solar system. The process has started and cannot be stopped. Now the Union has stopped Uentsi from dismantling it, there is no time to evacuate Earth.
Learning this, for the first time in his life, Engel is speechless. An event he had never seen coming. He had never wished for this to happen and merely wanted to save those within the Union, never to destroy them. As Engel escapes to his gunship, the Nephilim tell Uentsi that they will let him see Earth one last time. As the envelop him in an Alcubierre bubble, Friday wraps himself around him and the Nephilim teleport both of them to the surface of the moon overlooking Earth. As he enters hypoxia, Friday drags Uentsi’s body to a mothballed lunar base and resuscitates him. They manage to get aboard the mothballed ship Mosingrad, which they manage to bring back online with a little remote help from Engel. Friday and Engel enter cryosleep as they clear Earth’s blast radius, the explosion caught by their solar sail propels them to the nearest star system that they believe the SASh to be headed to. Engel floats through space headed towards the nearest colonized planet in his cryosuit, He is revealed to be the narrator of the story, and has to endure once again cutting himself out and to ‘stand-alone’ from the rest of humanity as he floats through infinite space by himself. Without the Union, there is no central defining organization of what it means to be humans, and without a homeworld, humanity is force to spread itself among the stars.