The first shuttles to orbit for civilians began taking off three months ago on July, 2212. They took around 50 passengers each to the spacedocks in orbit to be sent out to the newly constructed colony ships. Before that, the shuttles were mainly filled with engineers, construction workers, and scientists. And of course supplies, the un-ending need for supplies. That was the major limiting factor. Specifically food. Water could be found in passing comets, building material from asteroids, but food needed space, and despite the name, "space" did not have a lot of area for the cultivation of crops.

This meant that if the earth's surface was to be more or less permanently uninhabitable, they would need to find someplace else to live. Mars was still in the process of being terraformed which would take a few hundred more years. However, various planets and moons on the horizon seemed much more "manageable" and they were only a few centuries away so getting to those places was deemed the priority. Cryostasis had come a long way, so food was only required for after the settlers had touched down at their destinations. The 48 different ships were each equipped with their own unique atmospheric generators and other habitation equipment specific to the planet or moon they were aiming for.

Now with all this easy stuff figured out, next came the hard part: figuring out who was going and who was staying. Surprisingly, the rich did not necessarily get their way. Money grew to be meaningless, but of course nepotism still held some sway. Only those with the proper connections, often important colonization scientific leaders, head engineers or astronauts, had any chance of making their way onto the limited 4000 cryo-cells onboard each of the 48 ships. And then there were the gifted.

A peculiar ability had been slowly surfacing in the past few decades among certain individuals of the human population. It started with a few people that felt a little too lucky when it came to dice rolls or coin flips. As these individuals began popping up widespread, scientists began conducting tests specifically focusing on studying these individuals. By now, around 1 out of 10,000 humans had the ability to move objects with their minds. They were very minor shifts, however, undetectable by the human eye for the most part. When rolling a pingpong ball down a forked tube, a telekinetic could make it shift toward the direction they wanted 8/10 times. Actually moving the ball itself on a flat surface was a task only the most powerful could accomplish. Still, though, these individuals were deemed to be the next step in human evolution and were given priority aboard the colony ships.

So what about those left behind? Surprisingly, the majority of humanity had unified in the common goal of preserving their species. Many of the engineers and construction workers building the shuttles and rockets knew they would not make it. The governments worked together to collect historic artifacts and genetic material to bring aboard the colony ships in order to "seed humanity amongst the stars". This gave them a way to appear righteous yet it wasn’t entirely out of the goodness of their own hearts, because through this, they were able to maintain their power and keep the populace from falling into disarray. Unified by this goal, most people felt a certain peace brought on by the idea of a noble sacrifice. In hopes that their efforts would save humanity, the people did not fall to panic. At least until the screams started happening.

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Dying to the nanomachine wave, now dubbed the "Rust" because of the reddish orange hue it took on at a distance, was very painful to say the least. The nanomachines actually kept you alive throughout the process until your brain stopped. Even if your breathing or heart stopped, the brain could be kept alive by pumping blood from another source. You would still feel all your parts shifting around, painfully growing things that shouldn't be there, but you couldn't die. Some could argue that people never actually died during the later waves as the whole ground became coated in living material. In extreme cases, there were reports of people who had killed themselves through less destructive methods like suffocation or a clean bullet through the head being revived by the nanomachines only to find themselves fused to the floor unable to move.

The Rust was not a quick or violent apocalypse. The slow painful spread was like a nagging feeling in the back of your head that slowly drove you to panic. And so eventually despite all efforts, people did. People began rushing for the major space shuttle launch sites clamoring for the last few remaining seats. NASA launch sites became the most heavily fortified locations in the US. It became very common to find dead stowaways on spacebound supply shipments as people smuggled themselves in without proper equipment.

A few people decided to set up independent fortified "Survivors Camps" in isolated locations. Ocean oil rigs, underwater research stations, desert camps just to name a few. Some went up the highest mountains or to the north and south pole hoping the cold would protect them as the nanomachines were shown to function slower in the cold. Some dug deep underground hoping the nanomachines would wash over them and leave them in their bunkers. A few billionaires in China pooled their resources to set up the largest underground self-sufficient base in the world. When it comes to survival and self-preservation, humanity's ingenuity and adaptability comes in full display. As they struggle against the inevitable, against all odds, there is a nobility in such desperation. Even as they scrabble for life there is some satisfaction in knowing they did all that they could even if the struggles came to naught.

So now we come to our story, the story of those left behind.