It started off as a bit of a joke to the researchers at UCL - the investor (no one really knew who they were - they operated behind the moniker of Casting South Solutions and no one had ever met them) keen to look for parallel worlds beyond our own. However the money was good and after the discovery of the alternate earth was revealed by governments it suddenly became much more plausible that there really might be other worlds out there to discover and the research became a lot more exciting. They filed reports every year of course, progress on what they had found - occasionally a woman going by the name of Emily Appleton would come to listen to their presentations and her visits seemed to correlate with increased funding opportunities although it was never clear what her personal interest in the research was.
The field of alternate universe research blossomed with theoretical physics groups around the world getting involved and collaborations with new soul technology research groups leading to explorations of the neighbouring ‘space’ so to speak.
It soon became clear that in current investigations, Earth and Earth2 were the only two reachable worlds within what was dubbed the ‘local cluster’. Nothing further afield could be detected or reached by the current technologies. The echo of the ashen word was all that remained to betrayed its existence but it had been destroyed beyond any ability to visit or utilise it. After this, more echos were seen within a distance that could be counted part of the local cluster, dozens of dead worlds that had faded hundreds or even thousands of years ago, succumbing to an unknown disaster where it was theorised that their energy had been sucked dry by some external force. A few researchers looked at the two remaining vibrant worlds that remained and wondered if they had anything to do with it in times gone by…
Three years after the discovery of the ‘local cluster’ a researcher at Dundee stumbled upon something new - a tiny pocket universe within reach of the local cluster but previously undiscovered.
Endeavours by soul technology companies, most notably Tabula Rasa, managed to send souls out in cloned bodies to this new pocket universe to explore. The question of whether this was a previously undetected but old or new area of space remained unanswered - the landscape of the world suggested it was astonishingly new but there was no conception on how such a space could have been created or even if it would be physically possible to do so. The only clues were a couple of research papers from the lab of Dr. Geoff Burns who had died (although some insist he merely vanished) in 2016 and the presence of a postcard from one ‘Norma’ to a ‘Sophie and Cassie’ (the discovery of which would for many years be blamed on an elaborate prank) that was found discarded on one of the inexplicably perfect beaches in the pocket world.
From here the researchers were able to detect further pocket universes stretching out into the void beyond the local cluster - each with increasingly odd properties and unusual rules of physics as if someone was playing around with the settings of creation - each a stepping stone into the unknown and with more stepping stones becoming apparently each time they looked.
Decades after the discovery of the stepping stone universes, the researchers discovered something new for the first time that filled them with excitement. A new world had been discovered but this one wasn’t just another stepping stone but appeared to be an entirely new and fully formed parallel universe, on a par with Earth and Earth2. The edge of a second cluster had been found with unknown potential within it and multiple universes within it.
First contact is ready to be made…