The Horizon Beyond.

A little bit before schedule, the Earth rocked in balance. Centuries of global warming had ravaged the planet, and remnants of humanity's survivors stood together in a handful of fortified megacities. Outside, a waste land stretched—a brutal, merciless, and inhospitable place. But man was not yet ready to give up. They had greater things in mind.

It was simple what they desired: to conquer the stars.

And so the Genesis Project, a titanic undertaking of the world's powers to place the best and brightest of human civilization into the vast unknown, to terraform alien worlds, and secure ultimately humanity's destiny, was born. The Ark Fleet, an armada of colossal starships, was the ultimate embodiment of human civilization's greatest feats of engineering. It was in these vessels that human civilization had placed its final bets.

Among the personnel was Adeline Cruz, a young, prodigious engineer and one of the leading experts in terraforming technology. Her family had been a reputation builder through the provision of sustainable energy, and them was who she was going to bring hope to. But this was no dream realizationally family mission—this was survival.

The fleet's mission was to Hera-9, a planet in the Alpha Centauri system with all the ingredients of being the perfect choice for humanity to colonize. There was only one catch: until then, nobody had ever successfully completed a mission there. The risk, the distance, and the unknown all combined to make it the ultimate gamble.

Adeline and the hundreds of scientists, engineers, and experts were given a challenge more audacious than all the others combined. 4.37 light years wide, the Ark Fleet had only one opportunity to get there.

The journey took years. As the fleet cut through space's emptiness at high velocity, time itself moved into eternity. The passengers aged, and some, like Adeline, became disillusioned with the glacial rate of progress. The rest of the cosmos beyond their ships was a blur of stars, and the vision of a new world faded farther with each passing year. But every now and then a voice would shout across the communication frequencies, reminding them of all the reason they had set out.

"We are the last hope of humanity."

Tragedy awaited on arrival night at Hera-9.

Suddenly while they worked, onto their screens came a colossal, inexplicable anomaly—later named the "Cosmic Rift." It suddenly seemed to appear from nowhere, a tear in space-time, and destroyed the fleet's navigation system. The Ark Fleet was immediately lost. Vessels were scattered throughout the galaxy, light-years of open space separating them. Adeline's vessel, The Horizon, was misplaced in a different quadrant of the universe altogether.

The communication arrays were deployed, and the ships now found themselves distanced from each other. Without any way to communicate with the other ships and having limited supplies, Adeline was now faced with making the most important choice of her life: stay on course and try to find Hera-9, or head for another planet—maybe one that would give them the resources they would need in order to survive long enough to reunite the fleet.

As the ship's systems rebooted, Adeline discovered something strange: a signal. Faint, yet definite. It wasn't from another vessel, and it wasn't from Earth. It was a message, encoded in a sequence she'd never encountered.

"We are not alone."

The signal was from a nearby star system, not far out of their way from the path they had been routed off. Adeline couldn't help but speculate whether this was a distress call, or merely a signal that there were other civilizations out there in the universe that theirs did not exist with. The possibility of finding another intelligent life and what that would mean to them gave her a spark of hope.

The decision had been made. The Horizon would attempt to follow the signal.

Weeks were folded into months as the crew moved across unmapped space. Everyone was on edge, food and water rations running low, and uncertainty crept into every heart aboard. Adeline stood steadfast, leading her crew through the emptiness. But what they discovered when they finally arrived at the origin of the signal rendered all of them mute.

They went inside, and discovered an artificial workplace—a gigantic, ancient station in orbit around a dead star. Clearly, the station had existed prior to the existence of humanity. As the Horizon approached, they were hailed by an alien vessel, metal and streamlined, with technology three centuries ahead of anything that the human Earth had ever possessed.

The alien vessel hailed Adeline's. It was something they could hear, but the words were meaningless:

"We are the Keepers. You are the Seekers. Do you wish to seek what you have lost?"

This discovery of this race ages past—a race which had preserved civilizations time and time again—was a wonder to humanity. That this was survival against all hope was clear. The Keepers, as they referred to themselves, offered not only a promise of rebuilding but of renewed life.

Back on earth, the news spread like a wild fire. The country—no, the world—came together, as it had not come together in a hundred years. Human beings had always looked up at the stars and prayed for a miracle. But now, the stars had looked down.

As Adeline was about to meet the unknown, standing before the alien spaceship, she saw that this was not a mission to survive—it was where man was going to stop feeling alone in the universe.

And as the Horizon crew prepared to make their own initial steps in this new, unknown galaxy, Adeline couldn't help but wonder what the future held. But one thing was certain: the horizon was no longer an edge but a start.

A Horizon Beyond was a story of hope, survival, and discovery, the kind that had been the very nature of human excellence since the world began. It spoke deep within the hearts of Americans, where reaching beyond the unknown had always been in the veins of the nation, a declaration that no challenge was too daunting and no horizon too distant to achieve.