Opening movement

The end of a world. 

It happens. 

Happens to us.  

Two bodies colide and every human being on Earth is dead.

What is left lives in a city atop Olympus Mons. 

The tallest point on Mars.

The work of the colony is hard. Laboring on the surface, soaking in radiation like a sponge. Not the kind of life the ruling class is interested in.

So they use slave labor. Synths. Engineered versions of us.

Stronger and smarter but bred without ambition, without desire. Slavery without the guilt.

After all, they were programed to have no need. Programmed not to dream.

But they do.

A war ensues. A war over resources. A war of ideas. For what's left for human beings in this universe.

Teetering on the edge of extinction. 

Amidst the upheaval, one side manages to build a ship that will journey from our Star System to another. An exodus that take hundreds of souls and three special pilots one hundred and eighty five years travelling at eight-tenths the speed of light.
 

To a planet where we can live again. A place with air we might one day breath. Breeze we might one day feel on our skin.

But life is so much bigger than you.

It is an experience. An experience of mass and energy at speed as perceived by our brain. 

An experience of illusions filling gaps of understanding.

The greatest illusion is time.

One hundred and eighty years for the people on the ship.

Twenty-six hundred years into the future for the people they left behind to die on Mars. 

Those they left behind who did not die, who found new order, who evolved.

Those they left behind who built faster ships.

Those they left behind beat them to the planet. 

Those who have been living on this planet for over fifteen hundred years.

That first ship to leave for the planet is the last to arrive.

Three hundred souls who survived the journey.

And the single pilot who survived long enough to bring them there.

Eighty years old when we meet her. Life extended by the slow pace of time at relativistic speeds. Preserved in stasis during while she did not pilot the ship. Eighty years trapped inside her own head, inside this ship that is now a part of her.

Her co-pilots. Her friends. Her lover. Long dead.

What happened on that ship?

What happens now that her mortal enemies have had two-thousand years to prepare for her arrival?