The following recorded interview is a recounting of the events of Athena as told by one of its black ops agents.

My name is Nathaniel James Oliver. I was born on the 12th of Fall, 1988. I was twenty-one when everything went down.

I am a Westlander; a native of a body of land located westward of the world I live in. I’m also part of a celebrity/military lineage; My grandfather was a war hero, my father a war scientist. My mother was an actress, and that profession, in her family, stretched back as far as she can remember.

My father’s dead. A casualty of war. My mother was on bad terms with him before his passing. She never told me he died. Found out from a soldier forwarding his belongings almost a half season after he was put in the ground.

I joined the military soon after, for two reasons. One was to spite my mother, the other was to carry on my father’s legacy. Make him proud. Maybe make myself proud in the process.

That day never came. Still hasn’t. I’m prone to self loathing, I’m told, so part of me thinks it never will.

I couldn’t actually serve at 17, so I spent that year training. I did enough that a man named Bei Liang sought me out, and recruited me into West Athena’s Special Ops Program. We were called Wasps.

I served four years of a twenty year long war. All over one thing. Same thing it always is.

You’d think the amount of tv shows, movies or games covering this would raise awareness of the dangers warring for it could pose. But if history has taught us anything, it’s that people can -- and will -- find any reason to go to war. It’s in our blood. It’s all we know.

So what was it over? I can tell you it wasn’t a deity. I can tell you it wasn’t a purge of an “inferior” race. I can tell you it was, more or less, not a dick swinging contest between two countries. I can tell you it wasn’t a series of mistakes committed by one man. And I can tell you that we weren’t savages. None of us were truly out for blood.

Our world favored advancement -- if not unity -- above all else. And at the time, advancement meant control of one thing.

We called it AquaCell.

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AquaCell is a spacebound, bluish substance found on one our world’s moons -- Aegis -- in the year 1961, by scientists Harold Forte and Robert Maple. They were pioneers, in this regard, in that they were the first to discover what the rest of the world soon learned; AquaCell was a technology far more advanced than our own. Nobody knew where it came from, and once they knew what it could do, nobody cared.

It’s...I don’t know, weird, trying to describe how it works. I’ll explain it as best I can.

Imagine planting a tree, or a crop. Say it was key to your livelihood, that this was going to be the thing that put food on your plate, clothes on your back, and money in your pocket. Now imagine you lived in an area where maintaining your livelihood was virtually impossible.

AquaCell would turn a complex situation into a simple one. I’m guessing solving this problem would normally cost thousands of dollars -- or more than that hypothetical farmer would have, at least.

If that farmer had even a small drop of that liquid, the cost of building and maintaining his livelihood would be virtually nonexistent. Just a small drop, and that tree would outlive his entire family, present and future.

It seems like a leap that something like this could be done for anything more than a plant. We all thought so too. Until we saw it done for electronics, automobiles, buildings, even weapons and armor. AquaCell didn’t just increase life expectancy, it improved the quality of whatever it touched, and allowed new ideas to be easily built on existing ones.

We found this thing in 1961. That we even had bases on each of our four moons by that time was impressive enough. We had colonies there at end of the decade, space stations in the 70’s, entire cities in the 80’s.

Athena’s progress, we assumed, could only go forward from there. You’d think that, with all AC could offer, it would literally kill worldwide conflict. Our biggest issue -- our fear of lack of resources? This...destroyed it.

Or so we thought.