2069: The colonists, now digital, leave Mars in spacecraft hosts to explore the galaxy.
After the colonists became digital, their ambitions changed. There was no reason for them to stay on a planet when they were able to travel to the stars. They created a fleet of hundreds of spacecraft that could travel close to the speed of light, allowing them to explore the galaxy without the limitations of a biological body. Before the attack, the Martians moved their digital minds into the spacecraft and left Mars, heading out of the Solar System in all directions. Their plan was to replicate themselves and their spacecraft hosts at every opportunity, spreading out like a rapidly expanding sphere until they lived throughout the galaxy. According to their calculations, this would only take around 100,000 years; a blink of an eye in a universe that was already billions of years old. Some of the colonists like Lian left humanoid copies behind to fool Earth, knowing that the attack was imminent and that would certainly be killed. But although a copy of her died, it felt no sense of loss because it knew other copies were safely on their way to the stars.
