Earth, in the near future, is not so different to what it is today.

Technology has progressed, of course. It is normal to find such things as electrically-driven vehicles on roads, personal computing devices embedded in eyewear and contact lenses, medicine capable of treating almost any medical condition from Alzheimer's to HIV, cancer to Multiple Sclerosis, cryogenic freezing, genetic engineering, and so on.

The biggest change on Earth was thanks largely to the efforts of John Thomas Locksley, the director of the European Propulsion Project that had been set up at the behest of an anonymous and secretive cabal of donors, who had provided hundreds of billions of dollars, the source of which was never disclosed to the public of any nation. A station was built over the course of ten years, with the purpose of setting up an orbital factory and launching platform for spacecraft. Thanks largely to continued funding from these anonymous donors, NASA, British Aerospace, the Russian Space Agency and several others, were tasked with working co-operatively to develop long-term spacecraft capable of transporting people over long distances and in a form of temperature-induced stasis. It took many years, but eventually the project came to fruition, and the Inter-Stellar-Transportation-System was born. The first stage of the project involved six vessels, all ready to be sent to nearby star systems, carrying a crew of seven. The members of the crew would all be selected from various participating nations, including America and Canada, Britain, Russia, Japan, South Korea, and the European Union.

The attitudes and dealings of people and governments, corporations and charities, churches, temples and mosques, had largely remained unchanged. War still happened throughout the world, people still starved, and scarcity was still a problem that meant Capitalism was still a necessary economic force in much of the world. Not to mention the regular prediction of the end of the world, the prevalence of pseudo-scientific ideas being proposed for education in schools throughout the western world, and the ignorance with which some political extremists treated minorities and women when it came to critical issues. The concerns of people across the planet had begun to result in widespread unrest in many countries, while in others, they existed in blissful ignorance of what their governments were involved in.

It was during the launch of the fifth of the ISTS vessels when everything changed forever on Earth.

This is the story of what happened.