War did not merely visit humanity; it abided with us. From the first clenched fists over a patch of fertile ground to the mechanized slaughters that stained entire centuries, the pattern held: weapons changed, casualties multiplied, but the quarrel—man against man—endured. It seemed to many that the cycle would end only when mankind did.
Then, in 1960, a bright deviation: the first small steps beyond the cradle. Space—black, silent, unowned—opened like an ocean without shores. In that vastness lay the hope that scarcity might loosen its grip and old grudges might finally dissolve. Perhaps, people dared to think, there would be room enough for all.
For a while the world held its breath. But rockets are expensive, patience is fragile, and politics is a jealous god. Progress limped. Budgets shrank. New quarrels woke old ones. By the end of the twentieth century, the fuse to a greater war hissed again, this time braided with weapons that could cauterize the species.
Hope did not return with a statesman, but with an anomaly. In the United States, a mistrustful, hyper-online generation elevated the most unlikely figure imaginable to the presidency: Jessica Fritzh—eighteen years old, the planet's most followed influencer, a young woman whose face every screen knew. In a single election night she became both the first woman to hold the office and the youngest head of state on Earth.
Outrage followed as predictably as sunrise. It lasted exactly until events outran everyone's priors. Within months, she stunned allies and rivals alike: she married the Prime Minister of Canada, then leveraged that union into an audacious consolidation. Under the pretext of dismantling the Mexican cartels "at the roots," joint forces crossed the border, toppled ministries, and proclaimed the existing government unfit to rule. Mexico was annexed. Canada, already entangled, was folded in. The map caught its breath—and then accepted new lines.
Protests poured in from abroad, but opposition was thin and indecisive. With the continent's north and south yoked to its industrial core, the United States rebranded itself the North American Federation and, behind the euphemisms, dropped all pretense of "police actions." It spoke instead, plainly, of conquest.
Central America fell next—not to tanks alone but to dossiers, assassinations, and careful threats read aloud behind closed doors. Officially, the project was moral: unify the hemisphere, suffocate drug routes, and make migration unnecessary by erasing the border. "If people must cross into a better life," Jessica told her acolytes, "then bring that life to them." One by one, governments "chose integration." Flags came down. A single banner rose.
By the time South America capitulated—some willingly, many not—the hemisphere answered to one capital. The North American Federation shed its continental qualifier and became the American Federation: one market, one language policy, one currency, and one executive whose approval ratings were measured less by votes than by the absence of arrest warrants. Isolation followed. Sanctions stacked up like bricks around a fortress. But the fortress had grain, oil, lithium, rare earths, twelve time zones of coastline, and two oceans for moats. It also had an obsession: space.
Budgets redirected from foreign adventurism to orbital ambition. Launch cadence accelerated. Shipyards bloomed in deserts and at the edge of old Cape swamps. When yet another Middle Eastern tinderbox threatened to draw the world back into the old blood-loop, the Americas cut the conversation with a different headline: the Federation unveiled its first large orbital station, a torus habitat capable of housing ten thousand people, and a permanent base at the lunar south pole anchored to ice-locked craters. From that airless staging ground, mining probes burned outward for the main belt between Mars and Jupiter.
The demonstration broke the stalemate of imaginations. Suddenly, "someday" was a place with a docking schedule. Auctions erupted for habitat berths. Governments that had sanctioned the Federation now begged for allotments. The fear was simple and rational: if they did not act, the sky might become a monopoly.
Jessica offered them a solution, framed as magnanimity and priced like a trap. On New Year's Day, aboard the Federation's orbital station while Earth rolled through midnight below, she convened the world's leaders. Cameras captured the long white arc of cloud and continent, the glass curve of windows, the signature that turned a bargaining table into a founding ceremony. The Earth Federation was declared. Overnight, borders became departments, flags became patches on the shoulder of a single uniform. The young woman from everyone's home screen was now also the First Solar President.
Peace followed—not utopia, but a lull with schools full and hospitals open, with ships leaving orbit and not returning. The public saw a leader who smiled and remembered birthdays, who posted jokes from a cupola with the curve of blue behind her. Her inner circle knew a different woman: cold, calculating, almost mechanistic in the devotion to outcomes. She bled for nothing and few, and she slept well.
As the colonies grew—cinderblock domes on the Moon, pressurized canyons on Mars, spinning cylinders with artificial dawns at Lagrange—so did the state that sustained them. Votes extended her tenure again and again until, weary of paperwork and risk, she dispensed with ceremony. The Earth Federation became the First Solar Empire with a legal stroke and a military salute. Succession was declared hereditary. The constitutional sunset was replaced by a dynasty's sunrise.
Rebellions flared where they always do: in places where taxes feel heavier than benefits and where soldiers outnumber teachers. Imperial agents and special forces moved with boring efficiency. Coffers filled with tariffs and licensing fees; wallets did not. Riches remained systemic, not personal. Yet most citizens were…not miserable. Housing was guaranteed, medicine subsidized, food cheap, and the view from a cylinder's countryside—the rivers and orchards inside a ring where the sky turns with you—did a great deal of ideological work.
Empires break where their founders do. When the twenty-first century finally gave way to the twenty-second, Jessica's husband had been dead for years and her own body, though medically pampered, had begun to fail. She made one last spectacle of control: entered deep cryostasis with instructions to be awakened when technology could ensure an extension measured in centuries. Before the lid came down, she crowned her eldest son as Emperor and gave her people a final gift and burden: fear.
There was, she said, an enemy beyond the familiar frontier. Not merely the silence and hazard of the void, but an intelligence that would one day come to erase humanity. Evidence was thin; the conviction, absolute. "Prepare," she ordered, "even if you never see them coming."
For the next four hundred years, industry bent to that command. Shipyards outnumbered stadiums. Children recited the names of cruisers the way their ancestors memorized rivers and kings. Habitat farms grew grain alongside zirconium. Asteroid cities minted alloys, then weapons. Patrols ranged farther. Doctrine grew thick. The Empire's calendar became a queue of displacement burns and commissioning ceremonies. People married, had children, played games, and died beneath regimented constellations; but behind the ordinary churn, the machinery of a species prepared for a war no one could picture.
It was a long peace. It was an armed one. And somewhere, under kilometers of tank foam and titanium, a sleeping woman waited for the century when she might open her eyes and ask a single question: "Are they here?"