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The late 2070s weren't a good time to be alive. After a century of world-scale pollution despite the terrible costs, a civil war in America between fossil-fascists and equally destructive eco-fascists, and a third world war between China and India leading to limited scale nuclear strikes from most of the countries involved, the world was finally dying. Nobody said anything outside of internet communications, but the total loss of the Amazon, the acidification of the oceans, a five degree rise in global temperature, and constant superstorms left Earth a scoured rock fit only for humans and those species which could live in the cracks of their cities. Superstorms raged multiple times a year, while at the same time terrible droughts left the land a barren desert. Attempts at ecoforming the wastes of Earth had yet to show any progress that lasted a year. An accidental contamination of hardy lichen in Hellas Basin on Mars had produced more of a greening effect than scientists working to restore the Earth.

Denique Evrett lived in northern Europe, which meant she was lucky. The great glaciers, while nearly gone, still had remaining pieces, and while the droughts were still bad, and the freezes had gotten worse, it was still easily habitable. Her grandmother had fled to Europe alongside an exodus of other Americans at the start of ACW2. Denique spent her life in university doing everything she could to find a way for people to continue living, even if technology collapsed alongside the ecosystem. A plan that could be used by the surviving remnants of humanity after all the systems had been leveled and all that remained was the impoverished dust of civilization and the bones of a planet. She produced this plan as her doctorate thesis in anthropology, and claimed it could get stone-smacking primitives back to the height of the 21st century technologically and restore the environment to early 20th century standards within 300 years, with only the available resources remaining. Academia loathed her. The internet had mixed opinions, but always loud ones. The various government agencies and private projects that claimed to have these exact goals in mind quietly and dutifully put none of her recommendations into practice. She had a knack for ignoring all of it.

Synthpop bopped and jingled loudly at the sleeping woman. Denique woke up in her tiny, cluttered, luxurious, three room apartment and immediately turned off the alarm on her tablet. She dragged herself from bed, and stumbled into the bathroom to clean up and force herself to become human, as opposed to the groggy zombie of the morning. She was still young, in her mid 20s and only just out of university. Her dirty blonde hair contrasted against her nut-brown skin, and needed quite a bit of taming until it was under her control. Her green eyes stood out behind the curtain of hair, a pair of emeralds shining beneath a tangled crop of wheat. Denique's stunning mix of features was often assumed to be a product of mods, but she took pride in the diverse ancestry that produced her features. She stood at nearly 6 feet in height, and kept in shape. She stepped into the shower and worked over her skin quickly with the soap and water, taking care to keep the shower under three minutes in order to save on cost against rationing. Once clean, she put on her favorite pair of jeans, a blue-black blouse, and the pink headband she'd worn since starting college.

Stepping out of her bathroom into her kitchen/dining room, Denique checked her tablet for notifications from any of the jobs she had applied for. After a few hours of going through and finding that all her applications had either not been looked at or had been denied due to her infamy in the field she'd trained in, she decided to head out and spend what little money she had left from her parents on food. She had been offered a few jobs by various small production companies that wanted her to be a mouthpiece for their political agendas, but she turned them all down. The streets outside of the apartment building she lived in were relatively clean, and the crime rate in the area was low, for Amtown. The air was crisp, though Berlin never really got too cold anymore. People here still mostly spoke English, though German had crept in at the edges alongside the two-dozen or so other minor languages of the city. Denique carried her tablet in a purse patterned with a print of 'Starry Night' alongside a few essentials.

Denique was still out shopping when The Gateway appeared. She was passing a group of body modders when she got the ping from the news site she preferred (they had been snarky and pessimistic about her paper when it hit the internet, but less so than her academic peers) on her tablet. The group of modders, mostly made up of furries that had taken the eyes or teeth or claws of their favorite species with one who had replaced his hair with feathers, all looked at their phones, tablets, or AR displays. As a single mass, the group started chattering among themselves excitedly. Denique passed by long enough to be out of the group's purse snatching range before opening her tablet. Her mouth dropped as soon as she pulled up the article.

It was a live feed of the Earth-Luna L1 station. It was dwarfed by a massive ring shaped structure made of a shiny metallic material, more than four kilometers in diameter. It dwarfed the station, and from the POV of the drone that had taken the picture, it was dramatically silhouetted against the moon and the comparatively tiny station. The moon wasn't visible through the ring. Inside the ring could be seen dark flitting shapes passing in front of something very bright. The sudden appearance of the ring came with a signal which was still being analyzed by several powerful AI. Denique stood agape looking at her tablet for a little longer before rushing home.

Synthpop bopped and jingled loudly at the sleeping woman. Denique woke up in her tiny, cluttered, luxurious, three room apartment and immediately turned off the alarm on her tablet. Before checking any job websites, she checked for any news on the ring or the signal it had emitted. The internet was awash in speculation, and at the top of the list, the tech firm Chariot claimed their latest AGI had cracked the signal and translated the contents. The signal was pure audio, compressed into an extremely efficient file type that hadn't been used yet by humanity. A voice neither male nor female spoke a simple repeated message being spoken in a dozen languages, most of which weren't recognized. The two that were known were identified quickly as Sumerian and a very early form of Chinese. Three of the best guess languages were thought to be the language of Mohenjo Daro, a precursor to Olmec, and possibly the language of the Chavin culture, though the last was still heavily debated. The remainder were thought to be ancestors to many of the languages throughout the world, and covered a wide range of the planet.

The message (roughly) was this: "To the fittest among you, we offer a home that will test your mettle but which is an easy paradise for the worthy." The message had the world in uproar, and many in the political Left wanted immediate colonization efforts so that the billions on Earth wouldn't have to live on a dying world. Right-wing elements pushed to have only those who had managed to complete some kind of test be allowed access, claiming adherence to the wishes expressed in the signal, with each group stating they had the correct schema to weed out 'the unfit.' The space corporation that owned the L1 station, Horizon Tech, began drawing up plans with the aid of their lead AGI, and put out a call to those both on Earth and in offworld colonies for a labor pool to be placed on a truly massive exploration and colony ship. Denique went through the process of giving them her resume and linking her controversial paper, though didn't expect it to fruit anytime soon.

The next day, she received word that she would be expected to join the xenoanthropology team in a month.