The following conversation proceeded as it always did, with Joon flirting while Jessica stonewalled. It was a scene everyone in the mess-hall had seen before and most just rolled their eyes at.
They all knew that Jessica had her eyes on someone, and that certain someone had his eyes on her too. Even Joon knew this, but he still refused to give up.
Fortunately, just when Jessica looked like she had had enough and was about to blow her top, her trusty Vice-Director cut in and grabbed his younger colleague by the shoulder, "Joon my boy! Stop bothering the Director and come have a drink with this old man!
"Uh," Joon shuddered visibly, knowing from past experience that despite Carlos being old, he was more than capable of drinking him under the table.
The younger man tried to refuse, but Old Müller had a death-grip on him, one he was incapable of escaping.
Carlos Müller would be turning 150 this year, but while he was currently acting as a research scientist here, he had originally been a soldier and, to this day, he had kept up with his physical training.
Joon, on the other hand, had always been a pure scholar, so even though he was almost 100 years younger, he found himself loosing out when it came to a contest of raw strength with the old man.
In this situation, he only had one hope to avoid getting hammered, then waking up tomorrow with his head pounding miserably, so despite feeling a bit pathetic doing so, Joon turned to the woman he had just been courting for the past half-hour, only to find that Jessica had already run off to the kitchen.
Seeing the goddess of his heart make a bee-line for a certain young military officer who was currently moonlighting as a chef, Joon’s expression darkened considerably, his teeth grinding as he wondered just what the brilliant, talented, and beautiful Jessica saw in that useless waste.
"Give it up already," Carlos snickered, clearly noticing where Joon was staring, "No matter how much those two try to deny it, they’re definitely a couple already."
"Hmph," Joon snorted, "I’m a hundred times smarter and more handsome than that bastard, why won’t Jessica pick me over him?"
Because you always act like an annoying, stuck-up prick, Carlos thought to himself before dragging his unwilling captive over to a nearby table, pouring him a glass, not a shot, a glass, of synthetic whisky then forcing him to down it in one gulp.
5 glasses later, Joon was splayed out on the deck, foaming slightly at the mouth, while the old man was only slightly buzzed and now looking for his next victim.
Meanwhile, Jessica and her ’definitely-not-my-boyfriend’ had slipped out of the party and made their way to the research facility’s upper observation deck.
Staring out at the red-dwarf through the filtered screens, a young man with dark green eyes smiled slightly sheepishly as he broke the silence, "Congratulations on the breakthrough today, Jess."
Smiling sweetly, Jessica turned to her old friend and nodded, "Thanks, Trev."
An awkward silence descended upon them next, with neither of the pair really knowing what else to say.
Just like old Carlos had said, the two of them were basically a couple already, with Jessica Zhang and Trevor Ashford having met over 20 years ago back in university where they had been studying together.
Of course, Trevor was an ordinary student struggling to keep up with the material, while Jessica was the undisputed top of the class, but that had never stopped the two of them from getting along.
Even after they graduated, with Trevor joining the military and Jessica entering the general workforce, the two had always kept in touch, visited each other, and even celebrated holidays with each other’s families on numerous occasions.
At least, when both their families were still around, that is.
Everyone knew they were a couple in all but name, but neither Jessica, nor Trevor had ever worked up the courage to make it official.
Perhaps they were scared that something might break if they took that final step, or perhaps the two of them just felt enormously pressured by the current crisis facing humanity, but whatever the reason, they were stuck, unable to move forward.
Feeling helpless, Jessica was about to call it a night when her terminal suddenly started ringing
A second later, Trevor’s terminal also began vibrating.
Immediately, the awkward atmosphere lingering around the pair vanished as they swiftly summoned communication screens to see what had happened, their faces both turning pale with fright in the next instant.
.....
Around the same time Trevor and Jessica graduated, Spatial Tears began to appear at random in Terran Alliance territory.
The first recorded incident was in early 2769, when a cargo-ship hauling supplies to a newly established research station at the edge of alliance space detected an anomaly along their path and stopped to investigate.
The anomaly turned out to be a small rift which occupied roughly 30 cubic kilometres of space and persisted for a couple minutes before collapsing in on itself.
It was a scientific curiosity, and several private and government research traveled to survey the site afterwards, but nothing much else was thought about it at the time.
Over the following year, several more rifts, or Spatial Tears as they came to be known, were detected by interstellar ships.
These Spatial Tears ranged in volume from less than a cubic kilometre, to over 100,000 cubic kilometres, which caused a few among the more jittery scientists and politicians to worry, but still didn’t rise to the level of serious concern among the Alliance High Council.
Why not, one might ask?
Simple. Because space was vast.
With the advent of the Warp Drive in the late 22nd century, humans began spreading out from Earth at a rapid pace.
By the year 2770, 129 worlds had been settled, thousands of orbital habitats had been built, and even more research outposts and military bases had been established across over 1,000 solar systems.
100,000 cubic kilometres was the equivalent of a cube with a side length of 46.4 kilometres, which while not small, was less than a spec of dust compared to the alliance’s territory.
It was thought, at the time, that the chances of any adverse effects on people or property within the alliance as a result of these Spatial Tears was infinitesimally small, so life just carried on as usual.
Still, just in case, a couple of military and private research groups began looking into the Spatial Tears with a whole host of objectives, like determining why they were forming, where they would form, what kind of effects they had on the local space, and so on and so forth.
A few people even began looking into what kind of defences might be needed to stop or neutralize these rifts should a Spatial Tear appear close to somewhere inhabited.
Over the years, researchers determined that the Spatial Tears completely erased everything they touched, but in their wake, they also left behind ’something’ that was neither energy, nor matter, yet also seemed to have properties of both.
Exotic Essence, as it was later dubbed, seemed to have many interesting properties, so more people began looking into ways to utilize it, but overall, they still constituted a tiny minority.
The nonchalance the Terran Alliance took towards Spatial Tears continued on like this for another couple of years before, in 2772, a single event changed everything.
The Kelsi System was approximately 217 lightyears from Earth and had a single inhabitable world which was colonized by the alliance in the early 26th century.
Over the following 250 years, Kelsi Prime, known more commonly as Serenade, saw an explosion in population and tourism, resulting in there being an average of over a billion people in the system at any given time.
It was an idyllic world that had never seen any kind of major trouble, so when disaster struck, it took everyone completely off-guard.
Up until then, Spatial Tears had always been minor events, with at most 3 or 4 small rifts opening in a narrowly confined area. These tears would linger for a few minutes, then vanishing once more.
On the morning of February 28th, 2772 Earth Standard Time, however, over 10,000 Spatial Tears flashed into existence in the Kelsi System, many of them covering no less than a trillion cubic kilometres.
The biggest Spatial Tear dwarfed all the others and was a monstrosity that stretched nearly a million kilometres in length and was over a thousand kilometres in width at its widest point.
The Spatial Storm, as this new phenomenon was later titled, wreaked havoc across the entire Kelsi System for over 12 hours before it finally abated, and in its wake it left hundreds of trillions of credits worth of damage and ’erased’ over 100,000 people from existence.
Thankfully, only a few of the smaller Spatial Tears actually struck populated areas or ships, while the overwhelming majority simply swept through empty space, but everyone understood that things could easily have been much, much worse.
At one point, the primary Spatial Tear had come within a million kilometres of Serenade; had it actually made contact with the planet, rather than just 100,000 dead, the casualties would likely have been in the hundreds of millions.
The entire population might even have been wiped out.
The Spatial Storm itself was already a terrifying problem, but as if the Heavens were determined to mock humanity’s complacency, they threw another curveball at the alliance.
Not long after the Spatial Storm abated, reports began flooding in from regions close to where particularly intense Spatial Tears had formed about strange mutations occurring in plants, animals, humans, and even materials.
Upon investigating the situation, alliance scientists discovered large quantities of Exotic Essence had seeped into everything within a wide radius of the impact zone, causing all kinds of strange and inexplicable phenomenon to occur.
Whole regions of Serenade had to be quarantined, using similar protocols to those you’d expect from a deadly radiation hazard. Large swaths of the planet soon became forbidden-zones, adding another layer of fear to the existential dread everyone was already feeling.
Needless to say, no one in the alliance dared to take the situation lightly anymore.