Introduction to the First Edition

When we began this project, we knew only that memory itself was failing. Fragments drifted through the Archive: lunar mission transcripts marked with strange glyphs; hymns sung by settlers who had forgotten their own origin worlds; dispute records from Martian monasteries that no longer exist. Each piece bore scars of interpretation, mistranslation, or intentional distortion.

We did not set out to produce a perfect history.
We do not believe such a thing is possible.

Instead, we have gathered these fragments into a living corpus, knowing full well that future custodians will question our selections, our reconstructions, our omissions. Some documents we include because they are beautiful. Some because they are terrifying. Some because, even in their incompleteness, they speak across the centuries more truthfully than any polished chronicle could.

This First Edition contains entries from the early Lunar Foundations through to the beginning of the Eridanian migrations. We have retained gaps, contradictions, and variant versions whenever authenticity outweighed clarity.

We offer these texts not as a canon, but as an invitation:
To study, to argue, to remember—and, when necessary, to forget again.

In the dust between stars, in the fading light of distant colonies,
memory is an act of resistance.

—The Historian Solar Reckoning Year 4086

The centuries scatter us.

Across the surface of the Moon, across the red deserts of Mars, across the black gulf between stars, our species has left behind more than ruins. We have left memories: fragile, contested, half-forgotten.
Some are preserved in the solemnity of official record.
Some survive only in prayer, in rumor, in damaged code.

This collection does not pretend to offer a definitive account of human expansion beyond Earth. Instead, it offers a witness to the persistence—and decay—of memory itself.

The texts gathered here are drawn from a wide range of sources:

1. Lunar expedition logs, once purely scientific, later woven into hymnal verse.
2. Mission reports, annotated centuries later by theologians seeking hidden prophecy.
3. Fragmentary chronicles of the first Martian schisms.
4. Early transmissions from the Eridan Exodus, interrupted mid-sentence, preserved only in partial echo.

Where possible, documents have been presented in their original form, with minimal interpolation.
Where gaps or contradictions exist, they have been preserved.
Where multiple traditions offer competing accounts, we have included them side by side.

Our method has been simple:
To gather, not to judge.
To preserve, not to purify.

This work will not satisfy those seeking certainty.
Nor should it. Certainty is the first illusion of a civilization in decline.

We commend these fragments to the future—not as monuments, but as seeds.
Interpret them. Question them. Bury them if you must.
And in doing so, remember that memory itself is an act of creation.

—The Historian
Solar Reckoning Year 4086