Alec Hargrove

Approximately 347 years ago.

On April 7th, 2124 Steven Hargrove and Alexandra Gabris were married in a Loire Valley Chapel. Nine months after the honeymoon, they had a little boy named Alec Hargrove.

Alec's father could render unimaginable landscapes with the realest of details within an instant. He was a lead software engineer at a gaming company called 'Virtual Construct Studios,' and they made him travel the world with his team to research and develop even greater worlds and architecture inside their games.

Eventually his job led him to Europe for research, and that was how he met Alec's mother three year prior to marriage, she was a waitress in coffee and pastry shop in France.

She was about to bring him his coffee over, but then turned to the right and flung the hot beverage into the face of a purse snatcher who happened to be running by the open windows.

She originally was a semi professional gymnast from Greece, but wanted to see the world as she learned to be a novelist. Her story telling was like no other. Alexandra and Steven hit it off very quickly, while the purse snatcher was arrested when he was still blinded by the heavy amounts of creamer.

Alec was a bright child from the start, as his father was a software engineering leader, he taught his son how to read at four and the basics of programming when he was just six.

When Alec turned seven, Virtual Construct Studios introduced one of the most popular gaming rigs in the history of video game entertainment. Including an MMO with dozens of planets and galaxies that each contained their own little universe of stories and beautiful cityscapes.

Two years later, fully automated housing units were adapted to maintain all apartment and household utilities for residences.

Not long after, neurostimulation beds were fully developed to prevent deterioration of muscle and body mass of the people laying in them.

When Alec was sixteen, he graduated two years early from school in America. He immediately went to university for computer science in hopes to evolve the equipment his father's company was producing. He wanted to share the worlds he grew up imagining about with his mom and dad and make them more immersive and be a beautiful experience for everyone.

During his time in university, he met a girl, fell in love, and promised to marry her after graduation.

At the age of twenty-seven Alec did it. He gained his doctorate in computer science and married his first girlfriend in the same chapel his parents were married in. Shortly after, the neurological computer systems he spent four years developing were perfected to the point of making the virtual world seem just like the real thing.

After selling his patents to the same company his father worked for, Alec could retire just before his twenty-eight birthday.

The twenty years he spent after that were going to be in high luxury with his parents that he cared for and his newly wedded wife. It was going to be a happy ever after.

At least that's what Alec was expecting.

Alec Hargrove had spent all of his life watching the evolution of technology as it rapidly grew more intelligent. What he didn't see was the consequences of each and every advancement humanity made.

As the gaming industry became more popular, there were less people outside of their gaming rigs. The only time they'd come out was to eat and exercise their bodies. Shortly after neurostimulation beds were available; people stopped coming out of their homes altogether.

Alec notice the world around him changing, but he didn't see the negative effects until it was too late.

When Alec went out to buy surprise tickets for him and his wife to go on an anniversary trip, he suddenly got a call she was in the hospital.

Alec's wife and very few others would still go outside to work out of the house. Her daily activities slowly became more and more challenging until she suddenly collapsed at work.

Back when Alec's designs were launched, big companies found that the more people they managed to keep inside Alec's equipment, the more excess waste they could get away with producing at their isolated manufacturing sites. Smog generation and fossil fuel burning rate was higher than they had ever thought possible.

Carbon monoxide emissions had increased enough in the last decade that the air made people with asthma or respiratory issues suffer from potential lung collapse and other severe emergencies.

The hospital she was rushed to put her into a life support respirator that left her bedridden and completely immobile. The hospital declared she had at most; two years before her lung cells would start fully decaying. Reality was a lot more cruel and only let her have eleven months.

Alec's happy life suddenly turned into a year long congestion of hell and pain. He stayed at her hospital bed until she finally let out one last whisper of a breath. He lost his wife to the world that was slowly dying around him. Alec felt responsible.

He didn't know what else to do but take up drinking, overtaking prescribed drugs, and suffering in silence.

At least twice a day, he would debate ending his life by downing his antidepressants, but found himself to be too much of a coward.

Shortly after hitting his mid-thirties, he received two DUIs, an arrest for drug abuse, and three weeks in jail; it was broadcasted on the national news programs. Had he not been driving a fully automated, self-driving car; his life would have probably been spent with an additional few years in a jail cell.

The court mandated him to counseling and community service. His fines were easily paid with what money he made making the machines he felt had killed his wife. The six hundred community service hours were spent fixing air filtration system to building complexes so the air was safer for the residents living there.

Counseling was the only thing Alec struggled with completing. He met twice a week with a Dr. Miranda O'Neal; A psychology major and therapist that was a near decade younger than him. Everything they discussed sounded very hollow to him, how could she possibly know how he felt?

She was practically a kid who was fresh out of school that was ecstatic to work with the man who practically reinvented the entertainment industry at her age. She originally suggested having their meetings through the virtual reality rigs, but he said that he refused to own one of the monstrosities he made.

After several sessions, she began to piece together all the changes caused by the events in Alec's life. He felt responsible to what was happening all across the globe, what everyone else saw as a marvel in technology was actually a demon that took part in stealing away Alec's wife.

The next step in her process was to make him change his perspective so he wasn't going to keep slowly killing himself.

After four months worth of sessions; Dr. O'Neal saw there was no change in Alec's mood, behavior, or even his expressions. It seemed almost like he was just running her through a loop of needless information that wasn't helping at all. She decided to take a different approach and began pulling strings with her old classmates.

Alec entered the office and took off his jacket and portable filtration mask. The atmosphere had gotten so bad that the denser gases of pollution were sitting at ground level, heavily populated cities had citizens wear filter masks if they ever went outside. The scene of black masks walking through the brown fog would look almost like a horror game.

When he sat in front of Dr. O'Neal's desk he saw a paper and an envelope on the desk. After waiting ten minutes for her to arrive, he stood up and curiously looked at the paper.

It was a note from the doctor saying that she knows talking with her was not gonna change anything for him. He was going to let this pain fester and grow until he would either overdose or drown in a bottle.

So she had left two options for him; she'd was gonna let him choose to either end the sessions and continue down the road of self torment, or he could own the pain and start making a change with the items in the envelope.

Inside the envelope was an accepted application to a company called 'Project Atlus.' At the bottom was an empty signature box for his name.

Dr. O'Neal's options left Alec him question the chance to be done with everything and he thought it over for a week. He researched Project Altus and found it was once foundation to preserve the environment in South Africa, the Amazons, and dozens of other locations. The toxicity of the air was so severe, they evolved into a full blown government program, later renamed 'Altus Recovery.'

Alec contemplated the actions of his therapist, and came to the conclusion that she was simply just as insane as him. He continued to think that as he signed the application.

His first day at the Altus facility made him realize just how much he was underestimating the capabilities of this company.

Inside an old storage warehouse, a group of over thirty men and women were assembling various machines all across the massive, open floor with such high intensity, you'd think it was the end of the world.

Before he could ask anyone what was happening, he met the Director.

A tall, red-headed woman stepped away from a project to him and introduced herself as the Director of Altus Recovery. She immediately began to explained everything to him without even giving him time to break away from the handshake.

'About a year beforehand, every nation's atmospheric science division discovered the carbon emissions hit a turning point of global effect. The burning rate of emissions and a lot of other human factors had triggered a new tears across the ozone. Stack that on top of the greenhouse gas effect it was causing; the natural temperature of the planet was going to raise by two degrees every year. At most, the world would become uninhabitable before they hit the twenty-year mark. The Earth was slowly killing all life inhabiting it.'

None of the countries were going to announce this to the public, as it would only cause mass panic of the inevitable. They all decided to let the world drift slowly into death rather than letting it get agitated.

The few rich and wealthy that dabbled in buying political knowledge and secrets also knew, so they started investing into projects like this one to save their sorry asses.'

The shock Alec felt from this news made him feel numb and wanting to go back to his lonely apartment and open the strongest drink he could find hidden in his shelves. The Director seemed to notice his despair and motioned him to follow her the machine she had just came from.

She slid open panel and showed Alec the contents; he glanced over and then stared at the inside with an open mouth. Inside were hundreds of baseball sized capsules holding human embryos floating in yellow translucent fluid. Alec forced his eyes to part from the machine, and could only look at the director with a gaze of confusion.

She smiled at him with a look in her eye that contained a hint of pride and determination. The Director told him that the world is undoubtedly going to end, but that doesn't mean it was going to end forever.

If Altus left behind self-sustaining machine to repair the damages, then the world could eventually become habitable again.Once they did that, a new generation of humans could be reborn to bring the Earth back to life.

Every word she said contained no doubt or concern, she truly believed the project was going to save the life on Earth. The feeling behind those words brought up a sensation Alec had not felt since he was a child, the ability to imagine a new world. Alec could only show a slightly pained grin and asked the director where he should start.

Slowly after that day, the pain in Alec's heart began to ease just a little.

By the time Alec's forty-eighth birthday came around, he was already leaving on board a rocket sent to the space station 'Savior' as one of its crew members.

He met his team and everyone was briefed by the Director about the final details of the project two days before the flight. The plan was to use Cryostasis beds during the entire four year trip to IO, one of Jupiter's many moons. They would then let the on board AI maintain the functions of the station and monitor the status of the planet for the appropriate time to wake up everyone.

The estimated time frame for awaking was three hundred years. It all sounded impossible at the beginning, but over a decade worth of preparations had changed that mindset.

Every step was made possible by the technology the team developed for the last decade of sprinting through ideas and mad-dash inventing.

The old neurostimulation beds would have seemed like antiques compared to the Cryostasis beds that prevented aging in the body for centuries. The new AI programmed to the station was one of the most advanced and adaptable artificial intelligence units ever created. Including its adaptability and rapid processing time.

Even power supply issues were solved by a new version of biologically grown solar cells they named 'Biosolinum Power Cells' as they were scattered along the outer hull of the space station.

Everything went according to the plan as everyone woke up from the trip and prepped the station. Every once in a while, they would have to nudge someone away from the windows, as the station view outside was of IO itself.

The moon of Jupiter was such a bright yellow, it would reflect a light hue into the windows, giving the metallic rooms a golden glow. The experience was so eye catching, no one could truly believe they had just spent three years traveling in their sleep to get there.

Once they finished installing and powering up all the equipment, they finalizing the setup for the AI system and everything went back into the Cryostasis beds for the long haul (the crew call it the long sleep).

A lot changed after that.

After Alec woke up, he found himself in an unexpected situation. The station had already been running a nearly two decades.

The station had awoke only some of the crew 302 years after sleeping, but a majority was still frozen.

Eighteen years have passed since the station began operating, but only a few people at a time would wake up. Alec couldn't understand why this was happening.

When he was awakened by the station, it's atmosphere was extremely different to when he first arrived. He went to the nearest computer to call the Director and figure out what was happening. However, the communication status showed for her contacts explained the reason for the morbid tension in the air.

The Director was gone. She went on a mission with eight other members to start the first recolonization process a year after waking up. The status under her name said, [Missing / Presumed dead].

He kept searching and found the details listed in the stations central forum.

Shortly after arriving, the communication with the team was cut off. No one knew what was happening back on Earth either, all satellite footage that was supposed to be transmitted was cut off after just 60 years after the long sleep started. All information regarding the whereabouts of the Director and Earth's status were unobtainable.

Alec collapses to his knees and felt his world crumble in once again. Nobody stopped what they were doing to help him, they simply kept going. They had all been in his shoes one way or another, they knew he needed time to himself.

He walked to his quarters without thinking and only when he sat down on the small bunk did he notice his tablet on the desk was blinking.

A message was sent to him eighteen years ago from the Director. Without question, he decided he needed to hear the message and pressed play.

'So this message will only be sent when you wake up. If I don't send the cancellation command, it means the mission has most likely failed and I'm dead or stranded.

That shouldn't matter though. There's a file listed in the Black box drive. Access it with the voice password 'Nomad,' then follow the instructions exactly as written. After that, you should be able to figure out the rest.

Thank you for being a part of Altus, without you we probably wouldn't have come this far. Good luck Alec.'

The message ended and Alec sat for a moment until the screen eventually shut off. Such a short message left him jumbled. He jumped up once he realized the content of the message, and ran out of the room as quickly as he could.

The crew members that just saw him sulk into his room barely five minutes ago were confused as to what could have made him change tune so quickly.

He ran down to the data lab and found exactly what the message was talking about. A massive storage file was hidden in the endless maze of data the supercomputer managed across the station server. On top of it being buried in the files, you needed to use a voice recognition password that only the on board AI could verify.

'Why was there so much security behind this one file?' A question that only fleeted across Alec's mind for a moment.

After verified, the program deployed from the file and began loading, there was no estimation for the file to complete loading its run, but the progress bar sat there empty for a while.

The computer was rendering the data, but it was taking a long time. Alec didn't care though. He didn't leave the room for a moment. He slept and ate in front of the computer screen for three days, just waiting.

He played the message to the others whenever they stopped in. They came in and out trying to talk him into going to his bunk and get a real meal, but he couldn't. He had to be there when it finished.

After the fourth day of waiting passed, the last ten percent of the progress bar finally jumped to completion with no warning. At the time, one of the younger crew members came in to drop off food and stopped when she heard the notification ping. She shoved Alec awake after he had fallen asleep in the chair.

He raised his head a little and bolted up when he saw it had completed the startup program. He confirmed the program access to run. After he clicked confirm, the program ended. Nothing else happened.

The young crew member watched Alec's face react with disappointment and she suddenly became enraged. She started punching the machines and kicking the walls out of frustration. She had been awake three years longer than Hargrove and when he was greeted with a message from their leader, a lot of people were actually jealous and a little upset that she chose to give him the password.

Now that the slight hope of the project being saved was false, she lost control of her emotions.

Alec tried to calm her down, but that only made her worse. She kicked the wall hard enough that the tray of food she brought was shaken off the table and spilled with a loud shatter of glass.

Now it was Alec's turn to get mad and threatened to bring other crew members if she didn't stop acting like a child.

She then shouted at him, "I am done with stupid fucking job!" Then stomped out as the door automatically slid shut behind her.

Alec fell back into his chair with a desire for a drink and let his head fall into his hands. The fatigue of the long sleep and four days in the chair were catching up to him all at once. While trying to stay awake, he began analyzing the situation

He said to himself aloud, "I don't understand, I did everything the files instructed. Why isn't it working?"

"Hello?"

He looked up and thought maybe he was hallucinating, but that voice was not in his head, it definitely sounded like came from a static speaker. He got up and looked around until he noticed a black sphere plugged into the corner of the room.

He walked over to it and picked it up, it had the same size and weight of a human head. On the top, there was a clear lens with an old camera beneath it, and in front was a speaker. He turned over the camera and thought maybe someone was listening through it, perhaps another crew member trying to talk with him.

He looked into the camera and asked back, "Hello?"

He didn't think the sphere was gonna reply back with a blood-curdling scream.