Humanity would be banished to the chasm, a region of space where the laws of physics twisted in impossible ways, where ships vanished without a trace, and where madness seemed to leak from reality itself. They had been branded as the face of humanity, though they were merely the crew of Earth's first deep space exploration mission. Three months later, the transport ships released 40,000 humans at the edge of the chasm, not just the condemned crew, but volunteers, families, and those who refused to let humanity face extinction alone. Six months later, human ships glided through the chasm like dancers, predicting rifts and surfing temporal waves. Two years after their exile, the first human ship reappeared near council space, then another, then a fleet.