Generation ship

Their ancestors had launched this ship so their race would have a future.

The footage of that time included recordings of long-range scanners. Two entries were marked as important by their ancestors: the departure of all the arks to every corner of the known universe, and their planetary system's central star going nova, dooming all life in the system.

They had chosen to forgo untested technology like cryogenics, even knowing that this meant everyone who boarded the ark would die in space. Their hope was that at least their children's children would find a new home somewhere. But with the limited passenger space aboard the ship, hard choices had to be made.

To ensure a healthy population, people couldn't be allowed to just fuck around and hope their offspring have the right gene combination. From day one everyone aboard realized that procreation would be guided. People were allowed to have romantic and sexual relationships on their own terms, but all reproduction was strictly regulated. Every pairing was determined by what gene combination was needed to keep the population healthy. Ideally you would find a partner who already fulfilled that requirement, but if not a time would come when you were called upon to do your duty for the people.

A side-effect was that taboos about sex went out the window or the airlock, as it turned into an act of pure pleasure cut off from its reproductive aspect.

And so it was a healthy, and fairly happy, population that arrived at the system the refugees of Fontis had chosen as their destination. In the navigation array of their ark it was marked as Rebirth Haven, a system with at least one habitable planet and another habitable moon.

If only they'd known both were already inhabited, as their descendants found out when, many generations later, they finally arrived at the Arctis Planetary System.