Sofia Nikitas was born on the Moon. Her mother was English, her father Greek. She grew up playing in the dormitories and agricultural domes of a base constructed beneath the regolith of the Sea of Tranquility. In early adolescence, she began taking her turn tilling the soil and tending the sewage-recycling plant. Supply packages from Earth were rare and infrequent. The home planet had its own share of troubles, and little to spare for its outposts. What the base lacked, it had to acquire through trade with the other settlements and stations scattered across the lunar surface. Life was hard, but it was possible—at least in the short term.

However, as Sofia completed her first decade and a half of existence, it became apparent to the inhabitants of her home that the human presence on the Moon was doomed. The smaller science stations began to founder as they ran out of the materials necessary to sustain life. When an essential piece of equipment broke and a replacement could be neither obtained nor printed, the inhabitants had little choice but to move elsewhere. And so refugees from failed outposts began to arrive in leaky rovers, having driven hundreds of miles across the unforgiving terrain, their presence putting additional strain on food production and air recycling systems already operating well beyond any margin of safety—systems that simply hadn’t been designed to be indefinitely self-sustaining. People slept in corridors. Water was rationed. Nobody had enough to eat.

On Sofia’s fifteenth birthday, her mother wept openly, afraid her daughter wouldn’t live to see her sixteenth.

But then, when things were at their lowest ebb, the Multiplicity came calling.

For a century and a half, humanity had been carelessly leaking radio and television signals into the cosmos. At the height of human civilisation, the planet blazed across the radio frequencies like a miniature sun. And at the bitter end of the doomed twenty-first century, a trading vessel from the Goblet Cluster clipped the edge of this emissions shell and decided to investigate.

What it found was a race on the verge of terminal catastrophe.

* * *

The trading ship touched down on the Sea of Tranquility two days after Sofia’s birthday. Instead of a limited future of austerity and decline, she now had the chance to grow to maturity in an expanding civilisation. Welcomed into the Multiplicity of Races and provided with aid and succour, the reinvigorated humans quickly blossomed from their home system, spilling out to the surrounding stars.

Sofia travelled widely, first with her parents and then, later, on her own.