For the next hundred years, humankind became increasingly grumpy about being stuck on their home planet. Still, they didn't do much about it. They tossed their garbage around and fought madly over the remaining natural resources and watched the temperatures rise and worried about things in a vague way. But that was it.

Until Professor Vincent Arnold discovered Nullspace.

Some say he was brilliant. Some say mad. Some say that he was actually rather ordinary and happened to get lucky. Everyone agrees he was searching for an innovative way to use quantum-tunneling effects to remove cholesterol buildup from the human bloodstream. Unable to convince underpaid grad students to subject themselves to this dangerous, untried procedure, he made himself the first test subject.

He experienced a moment of extreme disorientation and hallucinations, then found himself in one of the campus coffee shops. The startled, caffeinated students told him that he had simply appeared out of nowhere, along with a wave of force that knocked several people over.

Running back to the lab, Professor Arnold found much of his laboratory destroyed. However, thanks to a stunning amount of private funding that suddenly materialized, he was able to recreate his research out in the middle of the Nevada desert -- just like researchers creating the first atomic bombs more than a century earlier. The results remained somewhat unpredictable, but were consistent enough that the scientific community had to accept it: a form of teleportation was possible.

However, it did nothing for his cholesterol, and Vincent Arnold died of a heart attack before the research was anywhere near complete.

Nullspace studies were taken up by his most talented assistant, Carmilla Jones. It was under her direction that the first vehicles were moved using the Nullspace technique, and an important factor of the process was discovered: it would not work unless an actual person was operating the vehicle. Carmilla Jones herself made an almost fatal error during one experiment: she managed to move herself, but not the vehicle, and crashed into the destination point at 70 miles an hour.

As specified in her will, they saved all salvageable parts for research. Still, she wasn't quite expecting to wake up with her brain wired up to a new experimental vehicle and the remnants of her body kept alive by artificial support. The new Carmilla module (when she wasn't sulking) was capable of using Nullspace for great range and high accuracy. When she was sulking, she was known to expel her crew and randomly destroy things by materializing too close. The Carmilla module was retired, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. However, by now using Nullspace for long-range space travel was beginning to look like a possibility.

The Astronomics Institute was formed by the corporation that owned the copyright on Vincent Arnold's Nullspace technique. It recruited talented people from all over the world and set them to work designing and building the first Nullspace ships, assembling them in orbit from the (somewhat decrepit) international space station. There was no scientific consensus on the best design to use, and several different approaches were tried. One by one, the prototype ships were designed and sent off with a minimal crew. Some of them were successful, in that they did not instantly explode. None of them actually returned.

After a while, it became difficult to recruit members for these doomed crews. They tended to represent only the human extremes: the extremely brave and adventurous, who simply couldn't imagine space travel proceeding without them, or the extremely apathetic and depressed, who simply couldn't get jobs doing anything else. One particularly gloomy, yet fashionably dressed, crew was given the disparaging nickname "Astrogoths" by the other crews. They were comprised almost exclusively of impoverished artists not particularly interested in space travel. It was widely believed, even by the "Astrogoths" themselves, that their mission was a lost cause. They were given the most dangerously experimental ship the AI had ever designed, using the temperamental Carmilla module as its control computer. They were given a good supply of recreational drugs. They were given a nice party and sent off into Nullspace still slightly hungover.

One month later, their ship returned. They had captured all sorts of interesting images of other parts of the galaxy, and they were out of coffee.

The AI, excited, decided that the Carmilla module was the key. They gave the "Astrogoths" their pay, sent them off, and staffed her with a new crew handpicked from the most daring and stalwart of the other crews. Then, they were sent off to investigate an apparently life-sustaining planet named Arcturus that had been identified on the earlier mission.

Three months later the ship returned -- without her crew, general life-support having been severely damaged. The Carmilla's log recordings revealed the crew acting funny after a while in Nullspace. They apparently went back to normal after entering realspace again and beginning the process of analyzing Arcturus. Then, after a while, they started acting funny again. The last, chilling recording shows the captain running down the halls with an axe, roaring about how he's by God going to break out of this tinplated prison if it's the last thing he does. Naturally, it is.

The Astrogoths were invited back, somewhat sheepishly, and sent to investigate Arcturus. Interesting side note: axes were never actually removed from the standard ship's equipment list, although this was suggested from time to time. The AI continued experimenting with crew assignments and ship design, but the only really successful combinations always mimicked that first one: a brain module like the Carmilla, and a crew comprised of the artistic, the despondent, the fashionably dressed, and the caffeine dependent.

Astrogoths was no longer a disparaging term, and in time, the Astronomics Institute came to be known as the Astrogoths Institute. Colonies were established and the era of human exploration of space had truly begun at last.

Do you have what it takes to be an Astrogoth? Well, you can get the t-shirt anyway.