Long predicted, long known, the Peak-22’s explosion, a star seventy-seven light years away from our home planet, would be the death of humanity and the planet as we know it, the core split asunder. Unless we expand to the stars… unless we expand to the planets beyond. And yet, even the most optimistic had no staying power before reality. Even the best satellite colonies were self-sufficient for a mere three months without the scheduled shipments, and the furthest we had ever gone would last up to an hour longer before being obliterated with the rest of humanity. Ships — glorified satellites — traveling with the basic colony starter set would never be able to travel the minimum thirty-three light years, and Peak-22 was anything but ordinary; it was the largest star for hundreds of thousands of light years; larger than any in The Milky Way and all other local galaxies neighboring ours. Anything to survive would have to be compact and durable, yet capable of traveling extended periods of time at light speed. And so, Project Digit was born. Around five decades before the predictive models showed that it would be impossible to escape the brunt of the explosion, in an unprecedented show of modern-day cooperation, everyone with any influence, power, or talent came together to digitize humanity: government entities, corporate empires, and extremely wealthy individuals to name a few. And they had succeeded… sort of. To expedite their process, they trampled every law with impunity, directly ripping lines of code and graphics from every available VR game and simulator on the market, and even those still in development, reappropriating those teams to the project with unlimited overtime. Conflicts in code were smashed under the manpower trained through educational programs, then attracting the generated talent through the countless ads and patriotic messages, each promising immense benefit packages. But glitches were inevitable, unintentional or contrived. I am one such person they attracted, and, on December 31, a year before the deadline, a day before the first people were digitized – myself included – I’d have slipped in a few hundred thousand lines of code of my own, to facilitate the destruction of utopia.