Pathfinder Zero – A Twelf Original Story

When the United Earth Coalition announced the Pathfinder Initiative, A desperate endeavor, an audacious plan to send five vessels across 4.2 light years to establish a permanent research outpost on Proxima B.

Hana knew her path was clear.

Despite being only nineteen, she submitted her candidacy, forged new protocols into the application itself, embedding her own AI-built propulsion simulations directly into the quantum application packet, a move so bold and technically impossible that her file was flagged... not for rejection, but for recruitment.

Millions applied. Only a hundred were selected.

She was the youngest ever chosen. The first non-military pathfinder. A prototype.

Chapter One: The Girl Who Looked to the Stars

In the year 2191, Earth was changing.

The coastlines were gone, seas had risen, and promises had been replaced by progress. Cities had stretched skyward. But for all its advancements, humanity had hit a wall, an age of brilliance, but not of meaning, the spirit, the why, was fading.

And yet... humanity endured.

Except for her...

...As if she belonged to something older… or still to come.

They said she was untested. Too idealistic. Too emotional, But emotion, she believed, was the most powerful form of propulsion.

She was given a title no civilian had ever earned, They Call Her...

Pathfinder Zero.

Her bedtime stories were not fairy tales, she devoured stories about deep space exploration, ancient civilizations, the diaries of the first orbital engineers, quantum pathways, the notes scribbled in margins by visionaries who wanted more from the stars.

To be Continue...

Hana Quinn was born in what used to be Florida, now known as the Sunbelt Archipelago, a chain of floating settlements tethered above the Atlantic. Her parents were engineers. Their world was metal,  wire and wonder. But Hana? She wasn’t just interested in making things work, wasn’t progress, it was a question, a choice, a spark of meaning.