Chapter 1 - Contact

At first the strange repeating blips picked up by the SETI array seemed a technical fluke. Erroneous calculation coughed up by an aging machine. Funding was already ridiculously tight, with government and private sources slowing down to a trickle, direct result of years of beaming coded radio signals with no conclusive proof that any intelligent life was actually out there. Most of the space agencies had changed their focus towards military and security applications. 

Humans and wars have advanced far necessitated by the ever escalating threat of mutually assured destruction of nations. Wars were now fought with such deadly accuracy and impersonal actions, strategic penetrative assaults by covert black ops teams, death raining from miles above ground by remotely operated UAVs. The world simply compartmentalized human deaths and moved on.

Which is not to say that humanity was lost. It flourished. Peoples of the world actually were better off. The usual petty bickering put aside for mutually altruistic gains. Dissenters often simply faded from the news, disappearing from the face of the earth, or very occasionally, conveniently involved in some fatal mishap.

Focus was now geared towards the development of human technologies to harness what was left of the world's resources. The oceans and other seemingly inhospitable environments were now colonized. Enormous bio-domes housing the world's civilization. Yet, there was the undeniable fact that earth was running out of natural resources.

Then SETI caught some strange blips from far off in space. Something was transmitting back, a data package so multilayer, there was no possibility of it being anything else but intelligent life. The message, coded in all the languages of humanity was clear and simple - 

They Are Coming. Prepare Yourselves.