Orpheus

1

Alright, let me tell you the story.

The year was 2118.  All seemed normal; normal, until you saw the dust kiss the sky; a mix of brown and white against an infinite blue.

Our planet had changed quite a bit in the past 50-60 years. Most financially extractable petroleum had been drained clean by 2048, and like insects to the light, coal soon followed. I mean, it was never meant to be a problem; most estimates said we'd find viable alternatives by then. But we were so preoccupied with getting the last barrel of oil out, we never stopped to ask what we'd actually do after it was out.

Humanity struggled on for a while after that; countries fell, fools rose. Alternatives like solar and nuclear power did exist, but they just couldn't keep up with the demand. People became unhappy, unhappiness bread contempt; wars broke out. "We must look to our own, and avoid committing the mistakes we did in our past." is what the President'd said at the time. Other countries followed suit, and we began boxing ourselves in.

A united world; a novel idea. Couldn't be a more blatant lie by the end though.

Humans: we are... well among many things, hubristic. Too sure of ourselves; we thought we'd rule the Earth, but in the end it was the dust that conquered us all. It began to show up in the breeze against our face, the water in our glass, the food in our plates. And then, well, the crops began to die. Not all at once, not overnight, but you could tell they were dying. A slow choke; it was madness, a lethargic madness. Nobody had any idea on what to do, or what not to. All we could do was watch us tear apart at the seams. By 2095, the government had shut down NASA, among other things; the nation didn't want to put money into exploring space; not when you have hungry mouths to feed.

But then four years later, it all changed.

See, in 2099, the Earth began facing strange gravitational anomalies; stranded satellites would go out of orbit for seemingly no reason, instruments would fail; it was chaos. Meanwhile, things were getting worse; we just couldn't keep up with the food demand.

You know what a headache feels like, yeah? Of course you did.  What do you do then? You pop a pill, move on with your life. We treat the symptom, not the cause. Works brilliantly well in the short run. But it's not really great long term, is it; treating the symptom? That way you don't fix the problem. And when you don't fix a problem, it grows; it grows old with you. 

That's what happened with us.

Smarter minds soon realized that all the wars, all the "popping pills" we were doing, were ultimately taking a serious toll on the environment, or at least what was left of it; the government had to come up to terms with the fact that its efforts to sustain life on Earth were... futile. So it brought back NASA, in-secret of course; they didn't want even more unrest from the populace. They already had a lot on their plates, metaphorically.

They sent unmanned probes towards the source of the gravitational anomalies from the Resilience, an in-orbit space station that they never bothered bringing down. And what they found was truly astonishing; a wormhole, behind the orbit of Mars, leading to the outskirts of a solar system with three planets orbiting a neutron star.

By this point, everyone knew the Earth was dying; it was only a matter of time before the last of the crops would die and the dust would replace the fields for good. So, in secret, the government sanctioned the Orpheus mission, the mission that Riley was about to embark on...