my name is naijela kincaide, and i was born on mars.

in 2019, earth sends up it's first fleet of liquid-hydrogen fueled nuclear rockets to colonize mars. my great grandfather, or perhaps great-great grandfather was the one who designed the rockets. they, the military personnel and several environmentalists, land in what would be known as terra primerus (and eventually argenta minoris, where i was born), which was basically a outland site of military bases.

the environmentalists began work on the terraformation of mars. basically, all they did was release carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which made it thicker, eventually warming up the planet (the greenhouse effect), melting the polar caps so there would be oceans and rivers and such, and allowing vegetation. of course, this process takes a long time (approximately 50 years), so early martian-humans were required to wear oxygen masks as well as other necessary devices.

i was born in 2066 in argenta minoris, which was where my father, tristan kincaide, worked as an astrodynamicist/aerospace engineer. i also have a twin brother named quentin and a baby sister named tegan, but they're not important ;).

9 years later, in 2075, my father got a call from the government. we moved to the largest city in helvetica, perhaps all of mars- argenta majoris. no questions asked.

around this time, huge numbers of terran and martian-humans had been dying suddenly and unexpectedly from a strange strand of cancer-causing radiation embedded in everyones genes. top scientists and doctors discovered that the root of the problem was from the original nuclear rockets that were launched in 2019. don't deal out the judgment yet, though. you see, mars would have never been colonized, but for nuclear rockets. right now, you use chemical rockets, which are so ineffective because they don't produce enough delta-v to get anywhere in a significant amount of time. you're forced to rely on meticulous transfer orbits, such as the hohmann transfer orbit, taking anywhere from 6-12 months to reach mars.

to make a long story somewhat shorter, my father died a sudden and unexpected death in 2084 (the present), and that's when all this government-calling-city-moving business came to light. turns out, he was working on a classified (and i do mean supremely CLASSIFIED) project known only to about 7 human beings as OPERATION: VESPERTINE.

the premise of it was this: when you look at a star, you're not really looking at that star, you're looking at the light from millions and millions of miles, possibly light years away. who knows if that star has already exploded in the present, because the light is in the past. you're time traveling just by looking at it. so if you could somehow exceed the speed of the light coming at you, you could arrive at that star before the star's light arrived where you were; ergo, time travel.

it's not as crazy as it might sound. no, i take that back; it is precisely as crazy as it sounds, but even albert einstein's special and general theories of relativity allow for time travel.

that being said, i was the only one who could possibly be considered to come back to 2008 to fix the little radiation problem (yes, i needed to come back this far) because my father was spearheading the whole project, and since he died, they knew i wouldn't come back and try to take over the world and ruin the future. or the present, rather.

the only other problem with time travel is that little equation E=mc2. according to that, with the speed of light as your constant, if you increase the energy of an object, the mass will also increase. all that means is that if you go faster than the speed of light, you'll explode into a million pieces. that's why there was a lot of care put in to the manufacturing of the craft that would take me from 2084 to 2008. it's basically a pressurized capsule within a capsule of absolute zero. 0 kelvin, absolute zero, is so cold that it virtually stops the movement of particles. no particle movement, no explosion into a million pieces.