Around the star Wolf 1061, four lightyears from Earth, we found a planet different from ours, but not impossibly so – Wolf 1061ca.
Using the same biotechnology that saved Earth from the Climate Emergency, we dispatched terraforming vehicle-factories, designed to seed the atmosphere with processing enzymes. The journey took over a decade. Our goal: to cool and rejuvenate the planet, before releasing plant and animal life engineered to thrive there. Millions of settlers were to follow.It was not to be so. The terraforming derailed, turning the atmosphere toxic, killing much of the planet’s existing life. The xeno-engineering team began publicly calling the planet by a name that had once been a joke, a nickname that captured its fate as a failed dream: Icarus.
The terraformers were ordered to mothball the orbital facilities and return to Earth. But in defiance of the political storm gathering around Icarus, the hydrologist Di Hemler led a small team on a clandestine drop to the surface. She was seeking an answer to the question: what had derailed the terraforming so disastrously?
During deep microwave surveys, the small team discovered an anomaly, which rapidly turned into an impossibility: deposits of exotic matter (exotics), thought previously to exist only within the hearts of collapsing stars, lay beneath the ground. These ‘impossible’ materials had corrupted the enzymes and rendered their output toxic. The process which had saved Earth would – here – render it unliveable.
Yet exotics themselves were beyond price – as fuel for interstellar travel, and technology beyond the dreams of previous generations. The United Development Agency (UDA) was quick to find value in the catastrophe.
