Their effect on the human way of life, however, was much greater. No longer were they simply superheroes, like Captain Noble, The Sista Clique, or Lt. Rashard Bonds and the Alpha Initiative, or supervillains like Hysteria, Sarcophagus, Labyrinth, and London Omega, participating in world-shaking events; but they (and their powers) had entered the workforce as contributing members of everyday society. In many situations, the presence of hyper-beings increased efficiency and effectiveness.

For example, construction companies that hired hypers with certain power sets, such as super strength, pyrokinesis, and metal-bending, could complete jobs in a fraction of the time, while film studios would hire optical illusionists, like Graphica, to design and create special effects on-set instantly, instead of hiring an army of visual effects designers to do it. And of course, several government agencies took advantage of metas in a variety of ways.

While these advancements all seemed positive, Dr. Beck theorized that the over-usage of hyper-beings in several areas could have an adverse effect on society. And she was right. Dr. Beck watched as unemployment skyrocketed, and many portions of the country and the world began to exhibit patterns, which could possibly lead to an all-out war between hypers and humans.

Dr. Beck’s exhaustive studies led her to research the full history of hypers, whose true integration into larger society is popularly believed to have begun not long before the Great Quake of 2016, which in her time, happened a little more than a century prior. Dr. Beck believed that she could find some answers if she delved deeper into that time period, and studied the beginnings of the hyper-integration era. However, as she began researching, she could only find very general information about the time – population statistics, political climate, arts and entertainment, etc. But when it came to detailed historical accounts, there seemed to be nothing about the ten or so years leading up to Great Quake of 2016.

At first she thought that perhaps she wasn’t looking in the right places – after all, it was the 22nd century, and the technological and informational advances that had occurred in the previous twenty years alone were insanely comprehensive. In fact, if you wanted to know the blood type of Abraham Lincoln’s cat, you could find it. But for some reason, a whole decade of information was missing from every physical and digital archive Dr. Beck checked. And believe you me, she checked hundreds of archives from all over the world. For the next twelve months, she became obsessed with finding out what happened in the early 21st century. But she became even more obsessed with trying to figure out how a whole decade and a half could have just disappeared from the timeline.

She attempted to bring attention to the anomaly by giving interviews, conductingseminars, and writing articles and books about it. But for some reason, her work was met with quite a bit of scorn from the academic community. Furthermore, her intimation that hyper-integration would lead to cataclysm in the book “How the Mis-integration of Hypers is Killing Us All” was seen by many in society as anti-hyper, and even anti-American in some circles. While she did have support from communities that suffered from the unemployment caused by hyper-integration, that support sometimes came in the form of violent protests and hateful rhetoric, which ultimately undermined her thoughtful and considerate ideas.

Dr. Beck’s reputation in the academic, political and social world was beginning to take major hits, and she would soon become somewhat of pariah, despite the fact that her research was sound, and the patterns she was seeing were indeed dangerous. She decided to take drastic measures.

She developed a plan to bring together a team of scientists, engineers, historians and scholars, and travel back in time to the gap in the timeline, to find out what happened then, and figure what is about to happen in the future. She used all of her resources and called in all of her favors, and was eventually able to get a vessel built – it was called the Interceptor. She also gathered together nearly a hundred brilliant and extraordinary people to join her expedition team, including a woman named Cynthia Quantic, who was a hyper-being with the ability to move back and forth across the space-time continuum.

After six months of prep, everything was ready. Dr. Beck and her team loaded onto the vessel, and Cynthia began the process of taking them back to the early 21st century. However, something went terribly wrong, and the vessel ended up nearly 500 years in the past. But more importantly, they ended up being bumped off of the Core Reality timeline. They were definitely on Earth, but it was definitely an alternate reality. The planet was uninhabited by any species. No humans, no dinosaurs, no animals, no aliens, no nothing. Additionally, the trip had nearly killed Cynthia, and she was now in a coma, which meant they could not initiate a return trip.

After the first initial days of chaos and panic, Dr. Beck took charge, and began to organize the team in way where they could start a brand new society from scratch. They had a cache of brilliant minds, and a world full of untapped resources. While they would still hold out hope for Cynthia to recover, she stressed that it was important for them to march on in a civilized and forward-thinking way. This was the beginning of the planet that would come to be known as Super Earth One.

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