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Prologue

The Ulysses Initiative

Excerpt from: Martin & Sanderson AP UN History A Textbook, 23rd Edition; by Benz Romero et al., 2469

Chapter 4: Pre-Unification Space Exploration

Section 6: The Ulysses Initiative

The Ulysses Initiative began with the discovery of what was then simply known as "The Anomaly"—now known as the Ulysses Wormhole (though wormhole is not an entirely accurate description)—just beyond the Heliopause, in 2143, by the Tiānyǎn Space Telescope. This led the East-Asian Space Administration—the federal space agency of the Greater East-Asian Union, officially formed in 2100 and since expanding to much of Asia and Oceania from its original seven countries—to divert the EAUSV Zhèng Hé, equipped with an experimental FTL subspace communications array, to investigate the anomaly.

The anomaly, at the time, was determined to be a natural semi-stable subspace tunnel, though contemporary research suggests it is an artificial bridge through an undiscovered parallel plane.

Further probes were sent to explore the other side of the anomaly, finding a G-class star system with seven planets, whose location was unable to be determined through pulsars. The system was named Tarsonis by the lead scientist of the exploration project.

The fourth planet, Tarsonis IV, an arid world with a single supercontinent, 27-hour day, and almost the same gravity as Earth, was looking to be the prime candidate for the first extra-solar human colony. However, the planet is nowhere near perfect for habitation. The four moons cause intense and unpredictable tides, making any settlement near the coasts—of both its oceans and inland seas—practically impossible. The system's star is also exceptionally active, creating solar flares that could be detrimental to a potential colony.

However, even with Tarsonis IV's flaws, the opportunity to reach a habitable planet outside the solar system—at a time when faster-than-light travel was purely theoretical—was too good to be ignored, thus, the Ulysses Initiative was proposed. The original proposal of the Initiative, drafted by a coalition of the GEAU and NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), calls for four ark ships, carrying half a million volunteer colonists each, to be built in low earth orbit.

Further deliberation, with more input from other UN member nations, reduced the initiative down to six ships, each carrying a quarter million colonists, built on Earth and assembled in orbit. Though the proposal to build the ark ships was rejected, the design would later go on to be the basis on which the first generation of the Destiny-class colony ship was built.

The six Dandelion-class colony ships finished construction and assembly in April of 2155, and all supplies and personnel were embarked by August 2157. On October 4th, 2157—exactly two hundred years after the launch of Sputnik I, the first artificial satellite—the flotilla left low Earth orbit and began the 23 billion kilometer journey to the wormhole.

The flotilla entered the orbit of the Ulysses Wormhole less than two months later, and after final preparations and system checks, entered the event horizon of the wormhole as 2158 dawned, marking the start of a new age for humanity.

For more details about the Ulysses Initiative, its aftermath, and the Ulysses "wormhole", see Appendix 4B and 4C.

Excerpt from: The Ulysses Initiative: The Opportunity, The Catastrophe, and The Aftermath; by Issac N. Banks, 2476

Introduction

Of the six Dandelion-class colony ships of the Ulysses Initiative: UICS (Ulysses Initiative Colony Ship) Dandelion, Chamomile, Hibiscus, Edelweiss, Chrysanthemum, and Hyacinth, only three have known fates.

The first, the Chrysanthemum (UICS-5), exited the anomaly in the outer regions of the Deneb system, and landed successfully, with all systems intact, on Deneb IIb—now known as Unity—and became the beginning of the Commonwealth of Man. Essentially, Chrysanthemum perfectly executed the plan, albeit on a different but better and more habitable planet than originally intended.

The second, the Hyacinth (UICS-6), was found by CMS Julius Robert Oppenheimer in 2246 in the orbit of Beta Aquilae III, with its entire crew and passenger complement dead from starvation. The Hyacinth suffered catastrophic reactor damage when it was ejected from the anomaly, leading to the crew prematurely waking the colonists from cryosleep, causing food shortages, which ultimately led to the demise of all aboard. The Hyacinth was later moved into the orbit of Unity to serve as a museum ship.

The third, the Edelweiss (UICS-4), was also found by the Commonwealth during a routine exploration survey of Beta Cygni in 2278. It exited the anomaly near the primary star of the system without any damage, and upon a negative scan for habitable planets, the crew decided to maneuver the ship into a stable orbit around Beta Cygni A and set up periodic re-awakenings for system checks. It remained in limbo until it was found and brought back to Unity, with all its crew and passengers still alive, who were disembarked and given the choice of settling in the Commonwealth or returning to the United Nations. The Edelweiss was later given to the UNE in the waning days of the Third Cold War as a gesture of Commonwealth goodwill, and was also later converted into a museum ship.

With the completion of the UN and later Commonwealth Sentry Arrays, it was confirmed that there were no other Dandelion-class ships left in the Milky Way, as well as no signs of any other human colony.

Notably, none of the exit points of the ships were the intended target of the initiative. Rather, it was Tarsonis IV, an arid world with almost the same gravity as Earth. Though there are alternate hypotheses, the predominate theory regarding the position of Tarsonis is that it is part of the mid rim of the Koprulu Cluster, an isolated globular star cluster of roughly a thousand stars, about 7 million light-years from Earth when the Initiative was launched, and about 9.8 million light-years at the time of writing (AD 2476).

This theory was formed in 2289 by researchers at the California Institute of Technology, initially supported by a re-examination of the probe data of Tarsonis, using pulsar data and contemporary astronomy to locate the star system, whose position matched that of the Koprulu Cluster at the time. This theory is further supported by the fact that the exit points of the Chrysanthemum, Hyacinth, and Edelweiss form a rough line to the position of the Koprulu Cluster at the time. Given the anomaly's apparent stability when it was probed, it would appear some event caused disruptions mid-transit, causing the Edelweiss, Chrysanthemum, and Hyacinth to drop out of the anomaly on the path to the destination, with the ships remaining in the Milky Way as a result of a delay between the entry of the Hibiscus and Edelweiss.

This theory, combined with the cosmopolitical climate of the Third Cold War, was what led to Grand Marshal James Dienes launching Operation Lighthouse in 2329, with a mission to re-establish contact with survivors if possible and to investigate the origins of the anomaly. It was projected to arrive in the Koprulu Cluster in the twilight of the 25th century, barring any unforeseen circumstances.

Communication with the task force was lost in 2418 due to the distance and was unable to be re-established.

The anomaly is, to this day, still a mystery to mankind. Though it is often called the Ulysses Wormhole, a wormhole in the scientific sense—an Einstein-Rosen bridge—is a thing it definitively is not. There have been thousands of attempts to explain the anomaly over the years, yet none can be proven with the data provided by mid-22nd-century automated probes. So the anomaly remains that to this very day: an anomaly.