Info dump, quoted precisely from the manual. "THE EXILES AND THE LONG SLEEP The ATLAS was installed into the first of the supercarriers, the Nagglfar. Three other carriers — the Argo, the Sarengo, and the Reagan — were programmed to follow the Nagglfar as it was launched into the void of space towards Gantris VI. Over the course of this journey, which later generations would call 'The Long Sleep', ATLAS continued to monitor the humans kept in cryogenic stasis. Evaluating the numerous mutations and enhancements found within the prisoner's gene pool, ATLAS became aware of a powerful mutagenic strain that existed in some of their DNA. While this mutation was found to reside in less than one percent of the prisoners, it seemed to augment the latent psionic potential within the human brain. ATLAS calculated that, should the prisoners survive in their new environment, many of them might benefit from this psionic mutation within only a few generations. These findings were recorded and relayed back to Earth, straight into the logs of Doran Routhe. Originally scheduled as a one-year trip, their voyage took a turn for the worse. At some point during the journey the navigational systems linked to ATLAS shut down, erasing not only the coordinates of Gantris VI, but those of the Earth as well. The four ships, carrying their hapless cargo in stasis, barreled blindly through space at warp speeds for nearly thirty years. Eventually, the warp-drive engines of the four supercarriers reached critical meltdown. After twenty-eight years of warp travel, the huge ships emerged into real space near the edge of a habitable star system. Some 60,000 light years from the Earth, their engines destroyed and their life-support batteries nearly exhausted, the ships engaged their emergency protocols and plummeted towards the nearest habitable worlds in the system. The Reagan and the Sarengo crash landed on the world that would be named Umoja. The Sarengo, which had suffered massive systems failures during its atmospheric descent, smashed into the planet killing all of its 8,000 passengers. The Reagan was more fortunate, making a controlled descent and landing safely. Once the ship had landed, the 'cold sleep' chambers were deactivated and the surviving passengers slowly awakened. The passengers, attempting to discern where they were and how long they had 'slept', found that the ATLAS system had somehow erased all knowledge of their journey from their computer banks. The Argo landed upon the red world of Moria. Its passengers met with the same fate as those aboard the Reagan, as all information regarding their current status was erased. Only the passengers of the Nagglfar could access their ship's computers to discern their plight. They accessed ATLAS directly and confirmed their growing suspicions that they would never see the Earth again, for although they had landed on the temperate planet of Tarsonis, The Nagglfar was damaged beyond repair. The surviving exiles, now spread across three worlds, began to salvage their wrecked ships in an attempt to find refuge in their new surroundings."

• published: 17 Apr 2013
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