Prologue
It was not a nation famed for it's power nor for it's wealth nor the power of it's army or size, there was nothing truly impressive in the grand scheme of things but they were the only ones left.
The great catastrophe shook their species to their very core, all polities be it nation state, supranational entity or some sort of trade pact. Every single politician of every type and skill tried to first avoid it and then was resigned to ameliorate it.
It was truly a disaster, and like all disasters it came in waves first was the ukrainian war which caused multiple other wars by proxy, food wars to be more precise.
Violent dictators and warlords alike could gain or hold on to power simply through stealing and hoarding any food stuffs they could get their hands on, millions died on the african continent for any stupid reason ranging from ideology to ethnic differences along tribal lines. Europe was supposed to take some of the refugees but it could no longer do so as itself was struggling with feeding itself, thus the massacres intensified all across even stable parts of Africa like Botswana or Rwanda, eventually Egypt used it's food production as a geopolitical tool to convince multiple other polities to jointly fund a wall across the Sahel staffed by autonomous drones programmed to kill on sight, they hoped to take care of refugees in batches of millions as taking everyone who was coming was impossible and the ones who were told to return to their wartorn homes sometimes to states which wanted to cleanse their ethnicity became violent,the damages from the initial refugee wave further reduced the ability of states to process refugees and further motivated the creation of the Sahel wall.
For a while things settled in a new normal with the war over due to the natural death of Vladimir Putin it was hoped that the food wars and the refugee crisis would subside but this was only the beginning, the massive glut of people in sub-Saharan Africa made fielding large armies easy and cheap encouraging warlords to attack each other with increasing ferocity and after a while microprocessors stopped being produced as a result of the collapse of the mining industry of cobalt and other necessary raw materials which came mostly from Africa as a direct result of the food wars.
The whole of the earth yelled at that point, Western Europe nearly collapsed the east of Europe fell In to abject poverty, the only country that was not massively affected being Romania as it was one of few European states that could both satiate its need for wheat and as a large producer of computer parts it had gathered a stockpile of precious minerals that could last a while.
Russia on the other hand was on death's door it's massive demographic decline combined with Central Asian immigration lead to the eventual dissolution of the federation with multiple civil wars being fought simultaneously by multiple groups, any wheat it produced was quickly ruined by its collapse, millions of russians and other ethnic groups moved west mostly to Poland and Ukraine and overwhelmed the local authorities, unlike an army immigrants don't need a command structure or supply line just some motivation and the collapse of The Russian Federation motivated millions to head west, and with the local authorities strangled by such large numbers of people a new refugee crisis arose. The Ukrainian State proposed something similar to the Sahel Wall but the US which provided a significant percentage of the first wall's funds refused and instead adopted a more isolationist policy, this is because it was wary of the same thing happening on it's own soil as a result of South American immigration, thusly it signed a deal with the Mexican state for a joint customs union meaning that South American immigrants could no longer go through Mexico to enter the US and with the southern Mexican border being much smaller the US-Mexican states decided to build a wall there instead.
The Ukrainians and polish states were on their own and failed miserably at maintaining stability, once more the Ukrainian wheat fields lay in ruin not by a foreign army but a horde of refugees. With another food crisis looming the US further dug it's heels in and declared that the us navy would no longer safeguard foreign merchant ships, this meant that every nation had to build and use it's own Naval fleet to guard it's trade ships making imports and exports prohibitively expensive and destroying the economies of multiple rich nations.
After the disintegration of multiple states came a massive meteor which burned a significant chunk of earth's atmosphere raising global temperatures by 2 degrees and killing hundreds of millions of India's people because that's where it hit, more specifically it killed on impact half of the indian population severely injured another 25% and because the indian state could no longer supply water, law enforcement and other utilities due to the crippling meteor another 10% of the pre-impact population died without being harmed directly by it.
And because you are not truly fucked until you are diseased Covid-19 came back with a vengeance killing hundreds of millions of people all across the world, and more worryingly it targeted younger people this time 15-40 year olds specifically, the chinese were hit the worst, this is not because other countries didn't lose more people mind you, but because China was already facing a baby bust and had to pay the pensions of hundreds of millions of pensioners with a comparatively much smaller and diminishing group of young people, and covid killed approximately 95% of china's young adults leaving it almost destitute.
And because things weren't already bad enough earth suffered a solar flare so large that it sent the planet in the stone age for 7 years, this is because a solar flare of that magnitude was already due and when it did come it fried almost the entirety of the electrical grid, precious few electrical devices remained, millions upon millions died mostly because the majority of medical equipment was fried to a crisp and very few new computers were being produced because the food wars were still going on in Africa.
Oh I forgot to mention climate change was still a thing throughout all of this and accelerated because of all the wars and riots and the massive meteor further thinned the atmosphere.
Because the planet was basically in an apocalyptic state, plans to escape it were drawn up. They were discarded one after another one until they settled on the Neptune Project, in it humanity would construct massive generation ships to leave and find another planet like earth to colonize, at first the project was discarded and more plans were created before a technological breakthrough was achieved, the obvious problem with any generation ship are the impossible logistics. How many people do we need on each ship to avoid inbreeding?, how many ships are supposed to produce food and which ships harvest and purify water for the colonists? It would be impossible for every ship to produce it's own supplies so a particularly high degree of specialization would be a must, but due to a recent discovery in food preservation specifically cryogenic freezing these burdens would suddenly get lighter.
During regular refrigeration water forms in to crystals which slightly damage the food quality, now this doesn't mean that it is bad to eat quite on the contrary, the small tissue damage sustained by food stuffs merely gives it a stale taste and texture BUT! When we talk about freezing people, LIVE people with the expectation to wake them back up again then we are talking fiction, the afford mentioned crystals will impale the fragile and soft brain tissue of the subject causing death.
However after decades upon decades of food wars people began eating older and older and older food, and people started experimenting with food preservation ranging from basic traditional methods previously ignored or unheard of, all the way to radiation treatments to kill any bacteria present on the food in order to skip congelation all together. And because experience is the greatest teacher people started getting very good at it, to the point where scientists using expensive and hard to come by equipment successfully manipulated the afford mentioned crystals in such a way as to avoid major damage to organs, originally this was done in order to extend the shelf life of rare meats of extinct animals like beef as a reward for high performing people, then it was done to extend the shelf life of organ donations thus saving thousands of lives after the 7 year period of technological collapse following the massive solar flare, people no longer had as many specialized freezers for the organs because most of them were burnt out beyond any repair, but because of this method doctors could just throw them in a very closely monitored fridge as opposed to wasting space and electricity on hundreds of smaller ones.
In an act of desperation a few researchers decided to try freezing a live human subject from the neck down, when they succeeded they also tried again but over a longer period of time whilst also sedating them, again they succeeded, they then came up with a capsule controlled by either a human or an a.i. which could feed the head of the subject intravenously with air and other necessities even as the subject was sedated, thus it became feasible to build millions of these actually kind of cheap pods and house the earth's dormant population as it would require far less food and supplies since their bodies wouldn't have to be constantly fed, only the heads. The populace would awake in between very long intervals of sleep lasting centuries in order to procreate and exercise their frozen bodies.
And so in an unprecedented act of cooperation and comradeship the human species understanding that the damage to the earth was far beyond recovery, banded together to escape their prison just as generations before them decided that survival was more important than the nuclear annihilation of your ideological enemies this generation understood that it was either the stars or a very slow death, as 4 billion people trapped on a rock with no resources was a recipe for extinction.
The mines in Africa were reopened as much as they could be, farms ruined cold and decrepit as they were roared without fear of attacks onwards fulfilling their quotas for project Neptune, and the fruits of their labor paid off.
On 1 December 2178 hundreds of thousands of ships lunged in to the great unknown searching for a new, home and they carried with them 4 billion people from all the nations of the earth and of the human species!
Except for one.
You see the government of Romania was never that competent, and so they forgot to make any reservations for any of their people, they even contributed to the project as much as they could in grain shipments and the last of their computer parts and raw minerals. But their officials forgot to add their population to the logistics planning, and when the day came none of them could board the ships because everyone was supposed to have a specific place so as to leave as soon as possible, there simply wasn't enough space for even a single person.
So they just left without them, the Romanians on their part stormed all government institutions and killed everyone inside out of anger, the last thing the rest of humanity saw of earth was a mob entering the Cotroceni Palace and the still living AND screaming body of the Romanian President on a literal cross hands AND feet nailed to it, together with all members of parliament being tortured to death in all sorts of creative ways, all the mayors were impaled, all the mailmen were maimed, priests tried to calm the situation but any who dared to go near the ocean of violence and anger were swallowed by it, the army didn't even try to intervene and stop the maelstrom of bloodshed, they just ran with any guns they could carry, the mob seemed to ignore them perhaps out of respect.
And so the sedatives started putting the passengers of the ships to sleep, they were shaken by what they saw as they left the atmosphere but now they were calm and waited to see which one of the many stars of the dark cosmos would be their new home.
But believe it or not this would not be the end for the Romanians either
It was not a nation famed for it's power nor for it's wealth nor the power of it's army or size, there was nothing truly impressive in the grand scheme of things but they were the only ones left.
Such was their luck
