Tranquility

Armstrong Base here, please respond. Is anyone listening? Please respond.

— Repeated multiple times, day after day, by several voices.

Cold and Silent

In 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human to walk on the moon, followed by Buzz Aldrin as the second. Alexei Leonov, a few weeks later, was the third. The race was won by the US, but by the thinnest of margins, and it turned out to be a marathon. Success and failure alternated for both the US and the USSR, each pushing to claim the "high frontier". By the early 1980s, several small, permanent bases had been established, with rotating crews, and making them self-sustaining was the next goal. By then, China and India had footholds, as well, each cluster of domes and tunnels set far enough apart the odds of open conflict (or worse, defection!) were low.

While technology progressed, humanity, as always, did not. Nationalistic fervor increased, relative to Baseline. The USSR remained intact, despite the increasing economic stress of keeping pace with, or exceeding, the US. China remained staunchly Maoist, and India accelerated towards theocratic Hinduism, while the US became increasingly jingoistic, treating its allies in Europe with increasing disregard for their national needs. Anyone could see the various forces of history were akin to iron rods pushing against each other with equal force, requiring only the lightest touch to set them flying apart.

That came in 1999, when the British handover of Hong Kong triggered a Chinese push to also reclaim Taiwan. US forces moved to stop this; the Soviets took the opportunity to push into Pakistan from their long-established Afghani strongholds; India felt this was a perfect chance to claim disputed territories from China; and it was not long until the world was consumed in nuclear fire. Who shot first is lost to history; what matters is everyone who had nuclear weapons figured they might as well use them. The end was, of course, devastation, worse than most fictional predictions. Those not dead immediately died from radiation, starvation, and general social/ecosystem collapse.

And overhead, the lunar bases -- now unintended colonies -- could only watch.

The Message

The BREACH first-in team, arriving a few miles from the remains of Sydney, quickly got the basic picture. High (but tolerable in short exposure, with appropriate gear) radiation, the land still draped in ash,a grey and soot-filled sky overhead, nearby communities that had not been directly destroyed still lying in untouched ruin following years of fires, plagues, and famine. Scouting showed no human survivors near to the breach; what animal and plant life remained was minimal. Food webs had collapsed in countless ways, and while it was possible the local situation was atypical, it seemed unlikely survivors would be found anywhere nearby. Nonetheless, radio scanning began, in the hopes someone might still be talking, somewhere.

They were overjoyed when they first heard a message. They did not respond immediately, wanting more information about the world before possibly saying something to mark them as enemies. Then, while discussing responses, they traced where the signal was coming from. (After all, on an alternate world, it would not due to assume where or what "Armstrong Base" was. Rule One of Breach Club is don't assume you know what Rule One is anywhere else.) This added compleity, to say the least.

Any response they made would be suspect. With limited knowledge of the details of this world's history, they'd easily trip over the most basic questions, leading to their contacts most likely assuming they were survivors on the wrong side of the war. Discussing breach travel with 'locals' was explicitly forbidden, for many reasons. Even beyond that, what could be done? It would take an unthinkable commitment of human and physical resources to build an orbital launch facility from scratch, hauling in a few tons of material at a time, which would also include building all the infrastructure, from generators to sewers, to support several hundred people working for many years (where levels of background radiation would likely kill most of them, even with protective measures.) Even the bleedingest of hearts also had to acknowledge there were worlds where humanitarian aid could affect orders of magnitude more lives for a fraction of the cost.

Orders... with no record of who issued them... were eventually received. No reply was permitted, and discussion of the matter was severely restricted. Tranquility was formally designated simply Wasteland-5, classed as both low-value and dangerous, and was to be forgotten.

So of course, it wasn't.

The story leaked within weeks, and something of a global cultural phenomenon grew from it. The concept of a world's last humans trapped a quarter million miles from a dead, empty homeworld seized the public imagination. Petitions to "do something", (with no actual, practical, options of what to do provided), flooded governments. Multiple novels, anime, and prestige TV presented very fictionalized and overly dramatic ideas of what the past two decades of life within the lunar settlements might have been like.

As far as BREACH knows, no one's managed to re-open the portal without authorization yet. The frequency was not leaked. So, probably, the call remains unanswered.

World Type

Alternate History

Divergence

1969

Current Year

2023

Truly Alone?

Humans are notably hard to kill as a species. At one point in the past, the total human population was estimated at a few thousand, and the species not only survived, but prospered to the point where it could nuke the planet. Given a base population of about 6 billion on Tranquility in 1999, it's almost impossible every single person not in a moonbase is dead in 2023.

So where are they? Very isolated, scattered, either without radio, or unable/unwilling to respond. With the Cold War continually warming, no "Peace Dividend", and perennial nuclear tension, fallout shelters grew larger and more complex through the 80s and 90s. The technology used by lunar bases to keep functional in a closed ecosystem was developed for these bunkers, propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding.

Prevailing winds, geological remoteness, and dumb luck have left some parts of the world more habitable and less radioactive than others. There are probably hundreds of tiny communities holding on, though it's certain that birthrates are very low, and survival past infancy even lower. Odds are at least a few such groups will, over time, beat the odds and begin to expand, though it will be centuries before they could restore enough infrastructure to reach the lunar colonies -- which, by then, will either have perished or developed to the point where they will be sending ships to Earth. (Which would be, in effect, an invasion of frail, but technologically superior, "Lunarians" against strong, primitive "Earth men".)

The closest thing to a viable plan to deal with the moon bases is to locate one such survivor group, claim to be representatives of the pre-war government, and try to bootstrap them back over 1-2 generations, not dozens. But even that calls for far more resources than are available.