Project Nemesis

Project Nemesis is a government program dating back to the 1960s and lasting until September of 2017. Their main goal was to preserve the human race from extinction.

Early Years
In the 1960s, astronomers discovered that the sun was part of a binary system, the second star being a red dwarf that hid just out of sight. However, this star's gravitational field was disruptive to life on Earth, and every twenty-six million years, there would be a series of extinction-level events (ELEs). The most commonly known occurrence was the loss of the dinosaurs. When they discovered this star, which they called Nemesis, they immediately decided to keep it a secret from the public while they decided what to do about it. Their discarded ideas included a cave complex in West Virginia and a giant space station that later came back into play.

Fire Lake
When they finally settled on uploading human beings into digital replicas in a simulation, they first had to pick a test subject. Juilliard Bolton, who was the Guardian of the Fire Lake Nemesis Project, designed the MegaCom system and chose Fire Lake, Idaho as the target town, unaware that he had a daughter there. Upon learning of Min's existence, he spent $4,000,000,000 on pseudoscientific research to make absolutely certain that she would be included in the Program. He chose her, Noah Livingston, Sarah Harden, and Ethan Fletcher as betas because they all shared the same birthday, September 17th, 2001.

After selecting his core subject group, he began the beta testing, which consisted of hunting down all four kids on alternating years and murdering them. Min and Noah began testing on their eighth birthday and continued every other year until their sixteenth. Sarah and Ethan began testing on their ninth birthday and continued every other year until their fifteenth, but unlike their counterparts, they were hypnotized before their deaths so that they wouldn't believe they were dying. After death, he would somehow transfer their consciousness from their old body into a cloned version, insert a tracking chip into their shoulder, and transport the new body to their designated "reset" spot.

Other Nemesis Projects
Unbeknownst to Juilliard, his technology was replicated four times in other towns, one of which was Huntswell, Wyoming. There were no betas used in any of the other Projects. Additionally, a self-sufficient AI was given full control of building a space station and terraforming Mars.
 * Nemesis 2 was composed of volunteers who knew the stakes beforehand. They did not make it out of their Program. It is believed that they sabotaged themselves and collectively chose not to continue to Phase Three.
 * Nemesis 3 was a group of twenty kids from Huntwell, Wyoming. Twenty of them banded together to kill the other twenty-seven and made it out more than a full year before Nemesis 1.
 * Nemesis 4 is, as of current knowledge, still asleep.
 * Nemesis 5 was scheduled but ran out of time to launch. These kids died in the apocalypse.

The Program
When the apocalypse arrived, all sixty-four sophomores were uploaded as digitized versions of themselves into the MegaCom, which simulated their hometown as a battlefield for them. The objective of the Program was to force the class to whittle their number down to twenty people by isolating the strongest of them as the most likely to survive. Fire Lake's Program went almost as expected, until Min Wilder and Sarah Harden hacked the system and convinced the Guardian to let them include every code in the regeneration process. All sixty-four kids who went into the Nemesis 1 Program emerged alive, as well as the Guardian.

After the Program
The goal of Project Nemesis was to eventually bring the human race back to Earth. However, this did not quite go as planned, and the AI brought their codes and regeneration clones up to the space station Chrysalis. This is where they emerged, living in the Terrarium biodome for six months after the Program ended.