In the year 2137, humanity faced an irreversible climate catastrophe on Earth. Rising seas swallowed cities, and droughts turned once-fertile lands into deserts. With no other option, world leaders united under one banner: Project Exodus. Their mission? To colonize Kepler-18b — an exoplanet 490 light-years away in the constellation of Lyra.
Kepler-18b was long thought inhospitable — a "mini-Neptune" 6.9 times Earth's mass, with a thick atmosphere rich in hydrogen and helium. But AI-powered telescopes aboard the Stellar Voyager revealed something miraculous: under the swirling clouds, a layer of supercritical water existed — and beneath that, a rocky core with pockets of geothermal energy.
Using fusion-powered drills and terraforming nanobots, humans created the SubCloud Cities, floating megastructures suspended in the thick atmosphere, powered by solar storms and helium-3 mining. Crops were grown in vertical farms fed by the planet’s dense water vapor. Artificial gravity fields stabilized living conditions, and biosynthetic lungs purified the air.
By 2150, Kepler-18b was home to over 80,000 pioneers — scientists, engineers, and dreamers — who called themselves Skybound. Unlike Earth, society here was egalitarian, data-driven, and symbiotic with nature. They didn’t just survive — they evolved.
They had turned a gaseous giant into humanity’s second cradle.