Yours is a proud and technologically advanced race, just now taking its first steps in space. Your written history dates back about four millennia, but archeological evidence shows an advanced civilization may have existed at least 10,000 years ago. What became of them is not known, little is found beyond ruins, mostly stone foundations and nothing more. It is almost as if every building was raized to the ground, every scrap of their civilization was taken or destroyed. The result of a devastating war? Or did your predecessors simply pick up everything and leave?

Further back in the geological records are indications of some sort of calamity, a massive cataclysm that appears to have been worldwide. Almost 20,000 years ago, something laid waste to the entire surface of the planet. A passing black hole or other massive body? An energy wave from a supernova? Or some kind of space storm your science does not yet understand? No one knows for sure.

As your people begin their exploration of space, tantalizing hints begin to appear that only deepen these mysteries. Space probes detect what might be ruins on several of the solid worlds of your system. Eventually, these indications are confirmed by more sophisticated probes or by crewed missions. Furthermore, core samples from the moons and planets show conclusively that almost 20 millenia ago, the same cataclysm that devastated your world hit every planetary body in the system...at the same time! No known phenomenon is capable of this.

Meanwhile, deep space listening stations and radio astronomy arrays begin to read odd signals on some very unusual wavelengths. Some may be the communications of distant intelligences, but others are magnetic pulses from the edge of your own solar system. Remote instruments show nothing there, yet the strange pulses continue. Space probes pinpoint the source of the magnetic pulses, an apparently empty point in space. They also show that so far away from the planets of your system, the radiation of deep space is deadly, even with ordinary shielding. A way is devised to surround a ship with a biomagnetic field that simulates the protective field produced by most planets.

A crewed ship is built and dispatched to investigate these odd magnetic pulses. The mission is uneventful and fairly predictable...

...until the ship...disappears!