Notes taken from a prisoner during the reign of the GG. Exact reason for imprisonment has been scrubbed from any permanent records...
They say our home world was torn in half and that is why we left. I'm beginning to think that this isn't a literal interpretation. The Home History Erasure leaves us with so little information to work with though and any information that can be found is always debated.
Historically searches for the home world start with backtracking what is known of the First Ships paths. Much of this info was either scrubbed or never tracked so looking back on it requires a lot of guessing. After potential courses are determined, solar systems with asteroid belts or other signs of fractured planets are studied. To date, none of these have been able to find anything past the vaguest candidates.
For my expedition, however, I went in a bit of a different direction. From the start it was assumed the First Ships actively took part in obscuring their path of travel. Too much common information is missing to believe they didn't play an active role in making the home world difficult to find again.
Admittedly there were a lot of dead ends at first. As our understanding of the First Ships grew though we were able to find several patterns of interest in their record keeping. We tracked down a handful of families who likely helped with the data erasure. In the families we found was an elder Geometers and convinced them to tell us what they knew about their family.
The Geometers told us their family kept a small collection of records in secret. The General Galactic found out and raided a majority of the data, but some has been passed down through tradition. We got the feeling this secret exchange of knowledge was more extensive than they were leading us to believe. The topic was not pressed however as we did not wish to threaten our invitation to their knowledge related to the home world.
It did not take long to find a couple of very promising paths for the First Ships. Even better, we were able to get a more accurate date of departure than anyone had before us. We plotted several regions to check records of and, if necessary, send in person exploratory missions to. It took about ten years to narrow it down to the most likely planet.
The records of the planet, like many planets without colonies, were poorly maintained. This particular candidate had some unique features that would typically have been noted. It was suspicious that these features were left out of the records. It was tidally locked with its sun and reported to have some ruins. Reports also suggested it was habitable in emergencies, for small groups of people, if they had appropriate self sustaining greenhouses. It "Looked as if the ruins were left by a race that died out after over farming the small habitable belt."
As we made the trip closer to the planet it became clear there was more going on. No flights went through the nearby area and we had to purchase our own ship to charter a path. Many of the locals had no information about the planet's drift pattern so a lot of work went into finding exact coordinates. Locals began to give responses to our conversations that felt very standardized (a common occurrence when the General Galactic has scrubbed a local culture of knowledge). For our last couple of hops we avoided contact entirely as most the crew felt uneasy.
Once we reached the planet we were amazed. One half was covered in baked clay, one in ice too thick for the scanners we had brought, a ring around the middle sparkled from crystal formations, and there were immense impact craters defining the planet's outline. We realized no matter if this is the home world or not, we had to study this scientific marvel. We set up three teams: One to stay aboard the main ship, one in the ring's northern area, and one in the ring's southern area. One ground team was to explore the desert and one to explore the ice.
There was a quickly discovered dominant form of life on and under the surface. A large variety of bacteria were found to create a majority of the crystal formations. The crystals were highly porous and could facilitate a number of chemical movements by types of bacteria. Subterranean bacteria colonies were also discovered and consisted of both internal crystals and more rock-like shells. Some colonies were symbiotic in nature while many competed for various chemicals. It was an incredible find, it seemed like a form of life made out of rocks and crystals. (Macro-Cellular Silicone Life)
This world closely matched several of the myths passed by Geometers, including the unlikely tale about the world being split in half (in this case, there was evidence it was forced into being tidally locked which split the world into the hot and cold halves). Our team believes it is the most likely home world candidate to have been found to date. We'll have to come back with better tools for examining the life to see if there are similarities with our own biology. And in the meantime, we must not tell anyone of these findings. The General Galactic has ears everywhere and if they catch any hint of this we'll all be silenced one way or another.