Sci Fi Premise
How is this for a sci fi setup.
Was thinking it could run into a massive interspatial epic like GOT in space. Not sure if it's been done even.
London, 2030. The city runs on cheap alcohol, cheaper cigarettes, and the quiet desperation of a population squeezed by inflation and unemployment. Global mineral shortages have gutted tech manufacturing and killed the electric car industry, leaving Britain grey and idle. Then, against all odds, a peace deal settles the Belarusian border, and Steve Links, a British Special Forces intelligence officer, finds his post gone unnervingly quiet.
The calm isn't coincidence. It's clearing the runway.
Governments unveil a fix for the energy crisis: instant travel gateways, sold to the public as cheap, green transit. What no one knows is that the technology was gifted by an advanced race who call themselves humanity's ancestors. They aren't truly alien. Long ago they fled Earth ahead of a mass extinction, and millennia of survival on hostile worlds reshaped them into something barely recognisable, strong once, but now frail and dying, desperate for the gold and platinum needed to keep their colonies alive. They didn't build the gateways to move people. They built them to harvest them.
Step through, and your body doesn't travel. It's cloned. The original is shipped to off world mining asteroids, prized for muscle that builds fast and wounds that heal faster. A biological copy is sent home in your place, wearing your face, living your life, for a while.
Steve feels the cost personally. Commuting through an old underground station to his post, he and his wife Jess are told at a fertility clinic that his sperm count has dropped to zero, just two years after they had their first child. He's not alone. Across the globe, millions of prime age adults who've used the portals are falling ill with a strange, non contagious sickness. It isn't a virus. It's their duplicates breaking down, cell by cell.
Steve's colleague Arri never gets sick, and he starts to suspect why. A lifelong medical condition seems to make him unreadable to the gateway scanners, meaning he has never actually been duplicated at all. Digging through fringe forums to understand what he's found, he stumbles into a hidden network already listening back: a third human lineage, another group who escaped Earth generations before an earlier extinction, evolved beyond recognition, and gone into hiding after the miners nearly wiped them out.
They bring resurrection science, android engineering, and starships. What they want in return is simple: human numbers and human strength, fused with their technology, to build an army capable of winning back what's been stolen, before there's no one left to save.