Article 35 of The Contract specified that “The Parties shall contribute resources towards colonization outside of the Solar System.” This simple clause gave birth to the Gemini Project.
Originally planned to be the common goal and purpose of The Contract, The Gemini Project became merely a tool for Ephemeris Engineering and Qinlin Mining to gain a foothold in the Solar System. The first major mining and production facilities built outside of Earth’s orbit developed to construct and supply the Gemini. Once these facilities were built, they were quickly re-directed to more profitable
The Gemini herself was a generation ship, the first of several planned, that would take a group of colonists to the nearest potentially habitable solar system. They called their destination The Twins, a pair of planets orbiting both their sun and each other in the Goldilocks Zone of their system. While they had little data the planets themselves and other planets had far more promise, they rationalized their decision. Two potentially habitable planets meant twice the chance of success, or so they hoped.
The Gemini launched with one hundred families and supplies carefully calculated to keep them all alive and working together. It took fifty three years to reach its destination. Once it did, however, all communication with Earth suddenly ceased. The last transmission reported the Gemini was experiencing severe power fluctuations. Earth presumed the Gemini lost with all hands.
In the generation since Gemini left, however, other advances made the generation ship project nearly obsolete, and no other ships were constructed. After the Gemini lost contact with Earth, the Ahai became the first alien species to contact humanity. Their wormhole ships allowed humans to colonize other, more promising planets in space. A generation after the Gemini was lost, the Twins were no longer a priority for settlement and no follow-up mission to the planets ever occurred.
Unbeknownst to the people of Earth, the Gemini ruptured when it arrived at the Twins. The wreckage, and survivors, fell on both planets. There, they struggled for generations.
It is generally believed that the Twins became the first large-scale victims of the Hetarek. This is based on records identifying the “Speaker of the Hetarek” as one of the descendants of the doomed Gemini Project.