A quick summary of present day to first play

First Expansion

Embarkation and Colonization - 30,000 BC - 8,000 BC

Humanity left earth to spread to the stars. First their nations sent them in sleeper ships, trusting that one day, generations later, they would land in a new utopia. A hundred years after that, the united government of the Earth sent them in ships boasting rudimentary faster than light systems, with the hope that their messages of success would come in tens of years instead of hundreds. And some did. The colonization of earth's solar system went quickly, and as the first new generations were being born on Mars, the Ansibles from further afield began to light up as well. The population of the Milky Way had begun.

Fracture - 8,000 BC

Each foothold made the next step easier, and soon humanity was strung out across the stars. Political, ideological, and economic divisions formed quickly and inevitably, dividing a briefly united species (). From a long period of turmoil there rose three dominant factions.

The government of Earth weathered the storm expertly, as it had done with many before, with obstinance and sheer numbers, and emerged essentially unchanged. A civilization of AI specialists found success through their use of computers to optimize their governance, economy, and war effort. And a group of scientists eked out a place in the galaxy with the use of extensive gene splicing, colonizing planets that others had abandoned as uninhabitable and producing soldiers with undeniable physical advantages.

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Exodus - 5,000 BC

These factions coexisted for a time, always expanding, always in conflict but never in all out war, until suddenly, and for reasons unknown, the interplanetary government of the Splicers disappeared. Citizens explained it as a collapse, many witnessed a withdrawal of military resources to unknown priorities. None agreed on cause or motivation. All outsiders knew was that when they moved in to investigate, and then to conquer, the edifices of the former ruling empire were abandoned, or simply gone.

Schism - 2,300 BC

Absorption of the abandoned systems was slow, with many still uninhabitable to unmodified humans, and soon slowed further by another unexpected shift - the AI specialists, known now as the Army of Sovereign Light, called off all expansion efforts and retreated behind their existing borders. Their era of empire was over, and their borders became immutable and impenetrable overnight.

The United Provinces of Sol were left alone, without competition, at the forefront of an abandoned frontier.

This was an era of lawlessness. The Provinces reached greedily into the lost worlds, and took only what they considered useful, leaving far flung and difficult worlds to fend for themselves. Loose coalitions formed in uncontrolled space, dominated by robber barons and pirate lords, and many fought fiercely against centralized rule, with some attempting to consolidate their own empires. Over time, one in particular gained traction, sweeping through unclaimed space and uniting the sector under one banner. They called themselves nNull.

Just a few years later, another new actor burst into the scene - in the decades since the retreat of the Army of Sovereign light, internal tension had been building. It came into view when a huge portion of their warrior caste, having dubbed themselves the Molten Legion, led a rebellion and were expelled from Sovereign space. They stepped into the wider galaxy, a legion already formed, armed with technology that had never been seen outside of Sovereign borders, and searching for a home to call their own.

The War - 1,537 BC

The Provinces, nNull, and the Molten Legion waged war against one another for a millennia, with the Sovereign Suns at the edge as an unyielding wall. Over time a fifth faction emerged from within the () of The Provinces - The Intersidereal Zephyrous Corporation, or IZC, formed in an advanced parallel to the East India trading company of old earth. Though technically a company under the control of the Provinces, the IZC enjoyed complete control and governance of hundreds of industrial and developing worlds, as well as exclusive trade rights and protection agreements from their parent nation, which they used as a sledge hammer against the other factions.

This was the state of the galaxy at the time of the incident at (), colloquially known as the Structure.

Conjecture - 7 BC

The five warring factions find and colonize the Structure, utilizing and exporting the precious energized liquid known colloquially as "goop." Conflict escalates, spurred by Molten Legion aggression and culminating with a flare of contrapossible phenomena that rendered most mechs and weapons on the structure inoperable. A few years later an academic paper is released simultaneously on one hundred thousand worlds in a thousand languages on trillions of devices. The conjecture proposes that reality is fundamentally malleable and formed through belief, either collective or recursive.