The soul, which is spirit, can not dwell in dust;
it is carried along to dwell in the blood.
It began with a ship, the Icarus. It was aptly named it appeared, because it too came to represent humanity’s attempt to reach beyond its grasp.
A single starship that was the pinnacle of the one world government, a joint United Nations endeavour that was supposed to deliver humanity the stars. The cost of the project was astronomical, greedy individuals sought to exploit the desperate need for humanity to reach the stars as the great nations of the old Earth footed more and more of the staggering bill that threatened to bankrupt the global economy. It was supposed to be an investment in the future of mankind. But instead threatened to be its undoing. Everything hinged upon the moment of truth when the Icarus’s Jump Drive was to be powered up and Captain Taggart would take his ship, and the brightest minds of humanity to the nearest star.
It failed.
The Icarus and all its hopes and dreams vanished in a flash of light plunging the human race into darkness. It was a darkness shrouded in the spectre of war. A war that spread like a virus over the land and through the peoples as creed battled creed, race against race and ideologies clashed against the monolith of capitalism. As the world sank even further into the fires of civil war brilliant men toiled on re-kindling hope. While nation states began to seed other worlds by booking passage on interstellar starships operated by a peaceful alien species known as the Orion’s, who ferried their colonies to the far flung corners of known space. It was expensive and one prized nation sat in the forefront of the newfound Galactic imperialism.
One nation, however, had grown fat from the profits of the Icarus project and in turn used those profits to in turn extend its vision of human development over the colonies. It was a nation that was eyed with envy by those that had been lost everything investing in humanity’s future. Nations that recognized the fact that human destiny had been stolen from them and reclaimed under a single banner.
The United States of America.