OOC

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The human species, Homo sapiens, believe themselves to be alone in the four percent of the universe that they can observe. In the darkness outside whisper the ancient echoes of a long-gone race whose powers are unimaginable.

In 2016, a revival in the search of knowledge in the Final Frontier led by star of the TV show Project Luna, Doctor Jacob Andrew Reach, leads to the early colonization of space. Using new technology, he is able to tell the people of Earth that there is other life out there...
Quickly the race is on. Governments scramble to begin founding colonies in space as corporations begin trying in to the massive vault of wealth locked by the otherworldly key. The inhabitants of Earth squabble with one another as soldiers begin gearing up for long-range colonization.

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Jake Reach sat at his base, analyzing the latest readings on his laptop. The "colony" was him and a group of close scientists and was named after him. He was the first man to permanently settle in space. One did not simply settle in space; but Dr. Jacob Andrew Reach, Ph. D., wasn't a regular guy. An eclectic billionaire self-made from his software engineering, he had moved to the moon to pursue his work in extraterrestrial life search. The other technicians were electrical engineers, physicists, chemists, all serving some role in this operation. Together they had built the RXTSD, or Reach Xtra-Terrestrial Scanning Drone; a small unmanned spacecraft. After all, when you're a billionaire you could afford to spend money on this sort of venture. The majority of them, though civilians, worked under no small authority of NASA; Reach's contributions over the past two years having earned the crew the Space Flight Medal, Congressional Space Medal of Honor, and Exceptional Engineering Achievement Medal, among other laureates. Indeed the crew was internationally recognized and was almost more famous than megaathletes such as Kobe Bryant.

Jake was, in street terms, an "alien hunter" and a "conspiracy theorist", respectively to the Discovery channel and his critics; though he preferred the title "extraterrestrial theorist." In fact, the Discovery channel actually hosted a TV show with a new episode weekly tracking the progress of the mission. Reach had first come to the public eye when he was still working for NASA after discovering unreplicable anomalies at the Roswell crash site. This is where his critics began to deride him, until he made another discovery at a meteorite crash site, believing the common anomalies to be evidence of panspermia and possible extraterrestrial life. This was when 46. He was now 51. He had been offered a deal from Discovery to create weekly updates on his research, which ended up being the funding for Project Luna. This simply-named program entailed the building of Reach Colony as well as the development of the RXTSD. The program was a huge success, both the mission and the TV show of the same name.

Dr. Sergei Koskovickz, a Russian cosmonaut who had flown with the Soyuz program several times, set up a camera as Reach finished his analysis and sat down in a red chair. "In pyet," he started counting in his native tongue, "chetri, tri, dva, raz..."

"Thank you for tuning in once again to Project Luna. We've got some big news for you all, set up nicelike on your new projector system." He made a clandestine twitch with his thumb, turning on the projection showing the staff sharing a bottle of champagne. "We've discovered..." He laughed and looked at the screen. "Yes, I know we've been partying. And do you know why?" A great big smile emerged from above the soulpatch on his chin. "Two days ago, we celebrated the fifth anniversary of this show. Five short years, and only two of them up in space. So I'd like to thank you all for faithfully watching as I reward you with a nice bit of information." He made another click, showing a slide of an illuminated trail of radiation near a ball of ice. "This is Europa. And this is the RXTSD, the Reach Extraterrestrial Scanning Drone. Now you people watching, are the first to see this. This is an experimental drone that we've developed with radioreceptors to measure radiation." He clicked back to the trail around the icy body. "This is Europa, frozen moon of Jupiter. The characteristics of the ice have developed theories that liquid water below could serve as a location for aquatic life. Our drone has picked up radioactive anomalies similar to those from Roswell and Site 31B. What this means is that we are saying that there are the same signs of extraterrestrial life as from the previous site, further confirming the possibility of panspermia. Not only that, but our drone has detected a faint trail, light years away, originating from the Archenar solar system. If this true, then we have picked up the first puzzle pieces to the origin of life..."