Human History

## Origin of Life on Earth

According to the common ancestor theory, the similarities between the various sapient species, the vast majority of which that are known to exist being bilaterally symmetrical, bipedal, and tetrapods, are due to the fact that there was a single extremely advanced humanoid species that distributed its genetic information throughout the galaxy in a sort of mass panspermia.

There have been several proposed mechanisms that guide this parallel evolution. Hypotheses range from a "cosmic engine", or some unstoppable and universal force directing all genesis groups towards a similar appearance with all species that do not become intelligent bipeds being incidental, to hard codes in the DNA that will always become dominant, to simply being due to a long series of coincidences.

The leading theory, however, is that a humanoid form lends itself well to a larger and more powerful brain, as gravity does the majority of the work when walking, saving valuable calories for powering sapience.

No two species as of yet discovered, discounting *H. s. unus*, *H. s. navitas*, and *H. s. faeles* as they are significantly modified human subspecies, have been close enough to produce offspring medically unassisted. However, humans and yemun are capable of producing offspring with medical assistance, simply requiring genetic therapy assisting the chromosomes in properly combining for the creation of a fetus. This is a result of genetic similarity between the two groups even greater than that between *H. Sapiens* and *Pan troglodytes*, the common chimpanzee. The reason for such a similarity was under investigation from open first contact to authiik first contact, when it was found that the yemun species is a genetic branching of the human species propagated by the authiik in an attempt to preserve human life in the event of a neyanta attack on Earth, then called Yeritii Ka.

## Paleolithic

*Australopithecus* is the first ape species known to have used stone tools over three million years ago. The first species that was officially classified as an archaic human is *Homo erectus*, though the intermediary between *Australopithecus and H. erectus*, known as *Homo habilis*, is sometimes included as well.

It is largely accepted that *H. erectus* and/or *H. ergaster*, both species of the genus *Homo* residing in Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago, were able to create and control fires between 800000 and 700000 years ago for the purpose of cooking food, providing warmth, and as a source of light in the dark.

The first *Homo sapiens* are believed to have diverged from *Homo erectus* approximately 200000 years ago, sharing Earth with other similar subspecies such as *Homo neanderthalensis* and *Homo devoniensis*. The exodus of *H. sapiens* from Africa into Eurasia approximately 100000 years ago drove the other species of the genus *Homo* to extinction through a process of interbreeding and competition for territory and food. Humans began burying their dead, producing music and art, and built more complex tools as the early stone age progressed.

In the year 25612 BCE, the authiik species discovered Earth and occupied the planet. As the ice age was still occurring, their temperature restrictions applied less strongly than it would in the modern day. The original intent was to colonize the planet, but upon the discovery of intelligent natives, the authiik opted instead to place starships in orbit for semi-permanent observation.

Later, the authiik began experimenting on humans in an effort to create soldiers for a coming conflict they had been warned about by the early bomure. The human genome was experimented with and clones were produced due to their size and strength exceeding that of the Neyanta's soldiers. The clones had a number of differences from their human predecessors, both mentally and physically. Authiik DNA was integrated into the clones to lend some familiarity to them and incorporate useful genes to duplicate necessary organs, and their basic personality was altered to make them more obedient. These were designated as "Yumane Dat" or "Second Primitive Species"

Earth's humans, now believing they were being used by these alien creatures, rebelled. The authiik retreated from Earth, seeing the struggle as a waste of resources that could better be used for the coming war, and took their technology with them to prevent their discovery by the neyanta, and a sample of the modified human genome to continue their experimentation with cloning. This was later used to create the yemun, or "yumane teya" (third primitive species) on Yaart.

Humans then returned to their former lives, the memory of their existence gradually lost to time.

## Mesolithic

The mesolithic is poorly defined, with some parts of the world having adopted plant and animal husbandry before and after the generally accepted average date of 10000 BCE. Marks of civilizations that have entered the mesolithic include flint tools and byproducts of their creation, supplies used for fishing, and wooden objects such as simple boats and bows.

Agriculture would become commonplace around 10000 BCE, giving rise to permanent settlements and civilization grew from that point onwards.

## Neolithic

By the beginning of the neolithic, the *Homo* species *neanderthalensis* and *devoniensis* had gone extinct, leaving only *H. sapiens*. During the period, crops and animals became domesticated, with the earliest domesticated animals being the wolf, which would go on to become the numerous dog breeds that would be found worldwide, and the first domesticated livestock species were sheep, goats, pigs, and cows. Permanent or seasonal settlements were established, and pottery use became common.

Construction of structures from mud bricks led to the increasing permanence of settlements, further established by stone walls to contain livestock and protect villages from aggression from other settlements. The first wars were waged during this time as well, fought to secure slaves, livestock, and other valuable items taken from outside villages for use by the aggressor's.

The concept of the state began to solidify in the later years of the neolithic alongside the creation of fabrics, such as wool and linen, and the most primitive writing systems.

The rise of metallurgy, first of copper, which was first mined between 6000 and 4000 BCE, later gave rise to the bronze age.

## Antiquity: 3500 BCE - 400 CE

The bronze age is marked by widespread use of systems of writing for record keeping and administrative purposes. Advanced metallurgy of the day involved the combination of copper and tin for the creation of bronze. Trade routes arose to trade valuable materials across the known world, routes as long as from Great Britain to China.

Between 4000 and 3500 BCE, the authiik third extragalactic fleet visited Earth's middle east. Their language was reintroduced to a small number of humans, mixing with native languages and influencing the evolution of the shapes of cuneiform that would come to be used in nations surrounding what would become Iran.

Prominent civilizations of this era included the Hittite empire, Ancient Egyptian kingdoms, China, Korea and Japan, The Harappan people in the Indus river valley, and the precursors to the Greek city-states living on Crete and Cyprus.

The iron age is marked by a shift in metallurgy away from copper and tin and towards ferrous materials, such as iron and steel. Religion, agriculture, and artwork advanced during this time, and the rise of local empires began, such as Rome, Assyria, and a continuation of the various Chinese states.

Antiquity ended with the fall of the West Roman Empire, leaving only the Byzantine Empire in the 5th century CE.

## Middle Ages: 400 - 1400 CE

During the middle ages, civilization spread to new areas on the planet. China continued to unify and divide again and again. Islamic empires spread across Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. The Mali and Songhai kingdoms rose in Western Africa. The fall of Rome left massive tracts of land ungoverned, who then grew into their own feudal and manorial systems. The Byzantine Empire continued to rule as the successor to the Eastern Roman Empire, along with aspects taken from Greek and Persian culture. Russia began forming as Kiev Rus'. The Aztec and Inca Empires grew in Central and South America respectively.

Global missionary religions began to grow dominant during this time. The oldest of the three is Buddhism, beginning in India and spreading eastwards through China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. Confucianism achieved the same centuries later. One of the two major branches of Judaism, Christianity, became Rome's state religion in the late 4th century CE, later splitting into the Orthodox Church in the east and Catholicism in the west. Islam, the other major abrahamic religion, was first practiced in the early 7th century CE. Its followers unified in the Arabian Peninsula and grew west to conquer North Africa and Iberia, and east to spread all the way to Indonesia.

Trade across the old world flourished. Intercontinental trade routes, such as the Silk Road, spread goods and culture from the Far East through the Middle East and into Europe. Technology spread through the world on overland and ocean trade routes across Eurasia, the Indian Ocean, and the Mediterranean. China began exerting influence over Korea and Japan, and the Mongol Empire allowed safe passage of these goods, in addition to diseases such as the Bubonic Plague, through the expanse of Central Asia. The disease would go on to kill between one-quarter and two-thirds of Europe's population.

The Americas had similar trade routes, but the speed and efficiency of these trade routes were limited by the lack of easily tamable draft animals forcing humans to carry, drag, or cart their goods where they were needed. The Pacific Island civilizations traded with one another via maritime routes.

The middle ages ended with the fall of Constantinople in 1453 CE, conquered by the Ottoman Empire, and causing the fall of the Byzantine Empire.

## Early Modern Period: 1400 - 1800 CE

European nations began competing for trade routes and valuables in the 15th century, with ships traveling across the widest oceans to find new trade routes that they could control. This was forced by the Ottoman Empire conquering the entirety of the middle east, severing the easiest and most widely used connection between Asia and Europe and preventing the spread of goods and ideas between the two. As a result, the nations of the world began seeking other ways to reach China and India.

Portugal built an empire as they circumnavigated Africa, establishing colonies as they went. Their trade empire had outposts in Africa, Arabia, and India. This empire fell as The Netherlands rose in prominence in the region. Spain, in competition with Portugal, explored in the opposite direction, believing one could reach East Asia by sea if you sailed west for long enough. What they had found instead was the Americas.

By the 16th century, Spain had conquered the whole of what would come to be called Latin America aside from some small holdings belonging to the United Kingdom and France in South America, and Portugal's colony of Brazil, also in South America. Spain's colonial empire was massive in comparison to Portugal's, as the former focused on conquest, while the latter focused on strategic trade positions.

In the 17th century, Britain, France, and the Netherlands would wage constant wars with Spain and Portugal. Over the next two centuries, the Netherlands controlled all of Portugal's African and Indian Ocean colonies, and France and Britain controlled the vast majority of the world's landmass, with the British Empire going on to become the largest empire that would ever exist on planet Earth, taking the Canadian territory from France, controlling New Zealand and Australia, India, the former Dutch South African colonies, And much of the rest of Africa.

The thirteen British American colonies would declare independence as the United States in 1776 and, with assistance from Britain's rivals in Spain, France, and the Dutch, would become the first ex-colonial nation to flourish.

This period also saw the mass extermination of native populations of the Americas both intentionally and unintentionally, primarily by way of diseases that the native populations had no herd immunity against, as well as military action. Slavery was a large part of the economy in the west as well, with humans being traded by African nations in exchange for wealth and supplies, or simply kidnapped and taken back to the Americas to serve as laborers for their wealthy owners. These actions, slavery and genocide, were falsely justified by way of religion, pseudoscience, and pro-european propaganda, making many privileged people see them as lesser beings compared to those of european ancestry. Filthy savages that needed to be "civilized" by the enlightened europeans.

This history of violent prejudice against ethnic minorities, and later other sorts of minorities such as romantic, sexual, and gender minorities, would go on to shape the politics of Earth for several centuries, with the same arguments used to justify the hatred and mistreatment they faced in the world.

## Modern Period: 1800 - 1980 CE

The industrial revolution would expand technology and understanding of the world in which humans live. In the 19th century, Africa would be conquered almost entirely by europeans, aside from the nations of Liberia and Ethiopia, in the "Scramble for Africa", Europe would undergo several regional wars, with prominent examples including the Napoleonic Wars, the Austro-Prussian war, and the Franco-Prussian war, South American countries broke away from their European overlords from 1799 all the way to 1980 or later, and the United States underwent a civil war over a number of states attempting secession due to their fear of losing their slaves, which when combined with the union's efforts to prevent further insurgency, led to the southeastern US becoming the least economically productive part of the country,

The nations of Germany and Italy were formed from numbers of small kingdoms based on a common language/ethnicity, and massive improvements in weapons and machinery would lead to the largest wars humanity had fought up to that point.

### First World War: 1914 - 1918 CE

Known at the time as "The Great War", "The War to End All Wars", and "The World War", the First World War was a global conflict that began in 1914 CE with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire by Serbian revolutionaries. Austria-Hungary imposed a list of unreasonable demands upon Serbia that would place them under control of the empire. Serbia refused, and war was declared.

To defend their allies, the Russian Empire declared war on Austria-Hungary. For the same reason, The German Empire declared war on Russia and France and her colonies declared war on Germany to defend Russia. Germany made plans to force France's surrender before Russia had mobilized its troops by invading through Belgium. Belgium refused to let German troops through, and Germany invaded Belgium to gain passage. This violation of their neutrality brought the United Kingdom and her colonies into the war, and in an effort to resist retreating, the creation of trench systems in France and Belgium went underway, extending from the North Sea to the common Swiss border. The Ottoman Empire joined the war later in 1914 by attacking Russian ports in the Black Sea. They both were joining to assist Germany, and to fulfill imperial ambitions in Central Asia.

Italy, Japan, and Greece joined the Entente later in the war, while Bulgaria joined the central powers, all in exchange for territorial gains which were either not delivered in full or undone by subsequent wars both international and civil.

The widespread use of trench warfare effectively brought the western front to a halt, with weeks of campaigning and thousands of lives lost to gain mere dozens of meters of ground on the enemy. The Russian Empire collapsed after two separate revolutions in 1917 CE, in part due to the massive economic strain the war put them under, emerging as the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and later becoming one of the component states and de facto leader of the United Soviet Socialist Republics, or USSR. The end of the war came in 1918 CE, with German supplies dwindling and more than a million fresh American soldiers and ship after ship of supplies were brought in to renew the allied offensive against the exhausted German lines.

### Interwar Period: 1919 - 1938 CE

Austria-Hungary, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire were dismantled into a number of component states, and their colonies were redistributed among the Entente. Russia's instability caused its western borderlands to fracture into a number of smaller states including Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Romania, and Georgia. The majority of these nations would eventually become parts of the USSR or ally with them later. China's instability continued, with a civil war being fought to either remain a republic or establish communism in the nation. The majority of Ireland gained independence from Britain, and independence movements in India and Indochina began to gain traction.

Communism spread throughout Asia and Eastern Europe, and fascism rose in Japan, Germany, Italy, and to a lesser degree in Greece and Spain. The imperial ambitions of Germany, Italy, Japan, and the USSR are responsible for the second world war, which began with the invasion of Poland in 1939 CE.

The first half of this period was known in the west as "The Roaring Twenties" or "Années Folles" (the crazy years), with economic and cultiral prosperity following the war. Consumer technology such as automobiles, telephones, radio, home appliances, and motion pictires flourished, and major social changes such as women's suffrage, an early feminist movement, made it possible for people assigned female at birth to vote in elections in the United States. The modern concept of the celebrity was created during this era as well, with a primary focus on film stars and professional athletes. It spread to Germany as the wealthy elite of Wall Street invested into the nation to cover their reparation debt following the first world war, where this era was known as "The Golden Twenties".

The Great Depression followed in the 1930s, beginning with a collapse of stock values in 1929 and causing a long chain of spending, policy decisions, and fear both from governments and individuals, culminating in a worldwide drop in the economy of over 15 percent, the worst economic crisis of the century. The value of crops fell by 60%, unemployment rates across the world rose to between 20% and 33%, and international trade dropped by 50%. Recovery was slow and difficult, with the majority of improvement taking over a decade to return to pre-depression levels in many parts of the world, and largely attributed to the beginning of the second world war.

### Second World War: 1939 - 1945 CE

While they did not start the First World War, the harshest of the penalties were laid upon Germany. Their economy was devastated, their military was crippled, and their new leaders were bitter. The National Socialist or "Nazi" party, who rose to power in Germany the early 1930s, began blaming the nation's issues on "undesirable" populations, including LGBT individuals, handicapped individuals, ethnic groups other than Northern Europeans, and followers of Judaism.

Fascist Italy and Germany became allies in the last months of 1936 with the signing of a treaty and the Anti-Comintern Pact, vowing to fight as allies against communism. Their official military alliance would not occur until 1939 with the signing of the Pact of Steel.

Japan and China began an armed conflict in 1937, with Japan aiming to establish a colonial empire in the far east and pacific, though neither side declared war on the other.

Germany's conquest of Europe began in 1938 with the Anschluss, a relatively peaceful annexation of Austria. This was the first step towards creating the "Greater Germany", uniting all Germanic peoples under one flag. The Sudetenland was next to be annexed, which included border areas of Czechoslovakia with a large number of ethnically German people living within it. This was the second act of "appeasement" allowed by the allied powers, but Germany annexed roughly half of the nation as opposed to the small areas they were allowed to take. This was effectively strike two against Germany.

The final strike was their agreement with the Soviet Union for a two-front invasion of Poland. The conflict was fought for only five weeks before Poland was fully occupied and annexed by both the Soviet Union and Germany. This unprovoked invasion brought the attention of France, Britain, and the colonies of both, who declared war on Germany.

Over the course of the war, Germany would invade France through Belgium yet again, causing France's surrender in under a month utilizing a strategy called "Blitzkrieg", or "Lightning Warfare". This strategy involved massive numbers of soldiers and tanks constantly moving forwards through enemy territory, giving the enemy no time to rest or become entrenched. Germany and Britain bombed one another constantly over the following years, Italy focused primarily on territorial gains in Africa, and Japan joined the Axis in 1940. The largest land war of the 20th century would be fought between the USSR and Germany which began in 1941, with conflict occurring from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea.

The eastern front would also see the war's worst atrocities. Mass genocide committed by Germany to eliminate undesirables, including all of the previously mentioned groups. The death toll of this genocide, the holocaust, is up to 17 million people. Over 6 million of which were Jews.

At the end of 1941, Japan attacked the Hawaiian Islands to cripple the United States' navy so they could not prevent Japan from taking Pacific islands as new conquests. This brought the US and the rest of the Americas into the war. The European Axis powers declared war on the US as a response to theirs on Japan.

From 1942 to 1943, the advances of the Axis halted. Japan was defeated at the battle of Midway, Germany and Italy were defeated in North Africa, and German soldiers in Stalingrad were defeated. The Allies invaded Italy, and began securing major victories in the Pacific. The Axis powers were retreating on all sides. Northern Occupied France was invaded in 1944, and Japan was forced both from mainland China and many of the Pacific islands they had taken from other nations. Italy had effectively surrendered, with its southern half occupied by the Allies, and the northern half occupied by Germany.

The European war ended in 1945 with the invasion of Germany by the USSR, France, Britain, and the US. Germany's leader committed suicide and his successors unconditionally surrendered in May. Japan surrendered months later after having two cities destroyed using nuclear bombs developed and deployed by the United States. This was the first use of atomic energy by humans.

### The Cold War: 1946 - 1991 CE

Following the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, the alliance between the United States and the USSR was broken, leading to a long period of tension between the last two global superpowers on the planet. In 1946, the US dedicated itself to containing the spread of communism and, by extension, that of the Soviet Union.

The capitalist west, composed of the USA and her allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, including Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the United Kingdom, stood in opposition to the communist east, composed of the Soviet Union and their Warsaw Pact allies, including Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. Collectively, these two groups became known as the "First World", and the "Second World", while all neutral nations became known as the "Third World" countries.

The reason for the name "Cold War" was due to the fact that these two sides never engaged in direct military conflict, instead resorting to a series of proxy wars, technological races, and the spread of the two side's ideologies throughout the third world. It was during this time that the digital computer was invented, and the earliest human exploration of space took place, beginning in 1957 with the launch of the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, by the USSR, and culminating in the Apollo 11 mission to place the first humans on the moon by the United States.

Most exploration of space would be carried out by machines, with missions like Luna, Buran, Vega, Vostok, Voyager, Messenger, Mariner, and New Horizons capturing the most detailed images of the alien worlds in the Sol system that humanity would see for decades.

In the end, the USSR collapsed into a number of component states, leaving the United States as the Earth's sole remaining superpower. Eastern Europe grew more democratic following the end of the Cold War, but many nations continued to fall into poverty and even full state failure.

## Information Age: 1980 - 2030

While the social landscape of the information age was marked by cis-hetero-normative mindsets dissolving and the LGBT+ communities becoming recognized as normal rather than "diseased", arguably it was the technological landscape that had the greatest effect. The information age is marked by rapid improvements in technology over previous years, especially in the realms of telecommunication and information processing. Within a decade the first pre-built home computers, the Apple II, the TRS-80, and the Commodore PET in 1977, and the first totally wireless mobile phone, the Motorola DynaTAC in 1983, would set the stage for future innovation.

The first device recognizable as a smartphone was the IBM Simon, released in 1994. It was, for its time, very cutting-edge. With its 4.7 inch monochrome LCD touch screen it was capable of sending emails and faxes, and featured predictive typing in addition to an ability to make phone calls wirelessly or while plugged directly into a phone line. Its exorbitant price tag prevented many from purchasing it. With only around fifty thousand units sold after six months on the market, it was considered a market failure.

In 1998, the International Space Station was launched. It was the site of hundreds of microgravity experiments and served as the home for many astronauts over the course of its service life, which lasted all the way to the early-middle of the 21st century.

The Blackberry made the smartphone commonplace, phones with full keyboards capable of connecting to the internet, playing music, and securing user communication better than any other phone on the market. Apple reinvented the concept of a smartphone with their first iPhone, released in 2007, by replacing the face of the phone with a flat piece of glass over a capacitive touch screen and a single button that returned the user to the home screen. This allowed it to adapt to whatever it was needed for, whether that be to play music, videos, or games, sending emails, creating appointments, or reading the news in addition to its function as a phone.

The tablet computer was released three years later in the form of the iPad, offering a similar experience to that of a smartphone on a much larger surface.

Personal computers diversified into multiple form factors, including desktop PCs, the largest form factor which were non-portable and featured external keyboards, mice, and displays, laptop PCs which were optimized for a balance between portability and performance, and tablet computers that run PC operating systems which were fully optimized for portability.

All forms of computers rapidly became more powerful as time went on, with the computers that guided humans to the moon in 1969 being outperformed hundreds or even thousands of times over by computers made only fifty years later.

Spaceflight technology grew to become privatized in the west, with many governments in the east growing to have successful space programs in the early 21st century.

In 2024, the first lunar colony was established, and using the experience gained in that endeavor, the first manned missions to Mars took place in 2031.

## Solar Age: 2030 - 2250 CE

### Mars

The Solar Age began in the early 2030s with the first manned missions to the planet Mars. The Empire 1 mission brought the first of the structures to the planet, which were built by specially constructed robots, and the first 100 humans were launched from Earth's Moon in 2031 during the Empire 3 mission. Crews were added to the population in sequential Empire missions once every two years until Empire 10 in 2052 when the population of Hellas City, established in 2042, had reached a population of 10,000.

The Gauss program started in 2043 with the intention to create an artificial Martian magnetic field. Gauss 1 was a station in the Sol-Mars L1 Lagrange point that provided a magnetic shield from solar radiation. Each subsequent mission placed electromagnets on the surface that were individually weak, but when combined the thirty-eight installations, launched four at a time from Lunar orbit and driven to their destinations by Martian denizens, prevented losses to the Martian atmosphere by way of their range of nearly half of a Martian radius. The first human born on Mars was Athena Voldova, a girl born in 2045 after the self-sufficiency of Hellas City was proven and conception was allowed.

The entire human population of Mars had increased to almost 30,000 thanks to procreation subsidies provided by the administrators of the colony. The atmosphere was made comfortably traversable without using pressure suits at 0.65 bar in 2082. This was achieved by way of tilling the soil in the northern hemisphere to free oxygen and nitrogen, diverting icy asteroids to burn up in the atmosphere, heating it in the process, and later adding CO2 from Venus' atmosphere in the later stages.

The first Martian rainfall occurred in 2084 after the addition of water to the Martian surface. After seeding trees, grasses and lichens across the surface, the atmosphere reached a breathable state in the early 2100s. Its oceans were nearly completed in the early 2150s and the human population continued to expand rapidly, reaching population milestones of 68 thousand in 2095, 172 thousand in 2120, and finally 430 thousand in 2145. At this point, Earth began to overextend its bounds on the Red Planet.

Martian colonists began to feel that they should no longer be bound by the rules of their ancestral homelands, a strange hybrid of American and Russian law with contributions from various nations with smaller efforts on Mars. Which legal system applied to an individual once was based on their country of origin, as had been done on installations like the International Space Station and the colonies on Luna, but after five to six generations of separation from the original colonists, this system had become unnecessarily complicated and vague. In addition, the increasing energy demands on Earth required ecologically damaging levels of fossil fuel harvesting from the Martian crust simply to export the spoils to Earth by way of corporate outposts, again controlled by corporations loyal to and funded by Terrestrial governments, and they had no say in how their lives were to be governed, as they were simply "territories" whose profits were shared by those nations on Earth.

### Martian Independence War

It was in 2154 that Martian space traffic ceased, as did communications between Earth and Mars. Earth almost immediately began descending into a crisis. Having lost some of the brightest scientists living on Mars and their research into faster-than-light travel as well as the vast stores of fossil fuels required to sustain Terrestrial industry, world economies began to collapse.

Entities both public and private attempted to break into Martian contact or control during each launch window, once every 26 months, but launching enough people and materials from Earth to Mars for a hostile takeover using traditional rockets is extremely difficult and their paths are easy to predict, in turn making them trivially easy to shoot down. The "war" continued in this way for almost twenty years, with missiles and small parties of personnel travelling to Earth or Mars only to be shot down or captured. In the meantime, the Martians started establishing a presence in the outer Sol system, and humanity began mining Mercury and Luna for fusion fuels and increasing efforts into the colonization of Venus.

   The United Earth's efforts went underway in the late 2160s, which involved putting wireless power stations in orbit around both Earth and the Sun, the former utilizing fusion reactors and the latter utilizing massive photovoltaic arrays, and mining the Lunar and Mercurian surfaces for deuterium and tritium. A large number of arrays around the sun provided the majority of Earth's now nearly limitless wireless energy supply, allowing them to begin the transition from using fossil fuel power plants to wireless power receivers. Though martian civilians and governmental entities alike would attempt to hack into the satellites to make one point at Mars, this would be largely unsuccessful.
Many of these provided the immense power required to run plasma engines in the beginning, though photon engines would be used much later, powered by similar stations with immensely larger power output.

   Mars' efforts were arguably more impressive. They set particle collectors in Jupiter and Saturn's radiation belts in order to collect exotic materials. This was used to make a number of matter-antimatter reactors to power *Alcubierre*-class starships built at a shipyard orbiting Ceres. The vessel used an inertial confinement fusion reactor, also known as a Daedalus engine, fed using fuel combinations that output the lowest possible amount of neutron radiation for subluminal transit instead of a more traditional high-throughput ion engine or plasma engine and was the first vessel to be equipped with a functional warp drive capable of translating its mass through spacetime at 0.0131% of light speed, or just over 3927.25 kilometers per second.

This allowed them to reach Earth from Mars in only 5.5 hours at closest approach, or 21 hours and 38 minutes when directly opposed with a trajectory that avoids the sun. With a travel time of several months using traditional rockets, this was what was needed to break the relative stalemate. In 2171, they were put to use. Five *Alcubierre*-class vessels departed from the Martian-controlled Ceres shipyard and entered Earth orbit while another six traveled to the sun.

Those near the sun had intended to turn Earth's solar satellites to Martian control or destroy them if that could not be done. Their crews found it would have taken time to reverse engineer and modify the stations for Martian use, time that Mars would no longer have the element of surprise, so each station had their radiators, solar cells, and transceivers shattered by way of the fleet's railguns before leaving them to be destroyed by the sun's heat while they warped to Earth.

The vessels near Earth bombarded specific targets from orbit, namely ground based wireless power receiver stations, orbital power plants and launch facilities on both Earth and the moon. The loss of the lunar space elevator set Earth back months of construction work, and the lack of power stations caused existing Earth ships to cease operating, preventing them from retaliating.

Earth's surrender came within the month, citing mass protests, rioting, and economic strain as reasons to end the war. Martian governments ceased communicating with those on Earth and Earth was allowed to rebuild unimpeded. Mars continued their focus on colonizing the outer solar system and improving upon their new technologies. Earth first reestablished power plants in geostationary and lunar orbits before rebuilding the lunar space elevator. They then focused more heavily on the exploration and terraformation of Venus.

### Venus

Venus habitation began with the construction of the Venus L1 Solar Shade in 2053, similar to Mars' Gauss 1, which created the beginnings of a magnetic field and began the cooling process that would be required for the colonization of Venus. While small colonies floated on balloons of normal earthly gasses existed for the first twenty years to conduct the necessary scientific research, most of the ground work was done with robots designed to be extremely resistant to Venus' surface conditions. By 2070, Venus' atmosphere had cooled to the point that its carbon dioxide began raining onto the surface and creating oceans of liquid CO2. 2108 was the year that the first ground bases were established, and in 2145, the first ground based colonies. The first of the ground based electromagnets were built during this time, as the planet's atmosphere provided less and less protection from the sun as it thinned.

The continued cooling of the atmosphere led the oceans of carbon dioxide to freeze onto its surface, but the outbreak of the war with Mars prevented active mining and exports of the dry ice and gentle re-warming of the planet's remaining 1.126 Bar atmosphere, but the end of the war and subsequent rebuilding projects allowed the project's completion in 2190.

Its previous volcanic nature, high concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere, slow rotation rate, and naturally flat terrain led to it being well suited for agriculture. A daylight period of nearly 120 earth days has led to a phenomena similar to the growing periods in Alaska on Earth, with the plants growing massive due to the constant sunlight.

### Outer Reaches

The construction of the Phobos Supertether in the 2180s opened the possibility to create colonies and research installations on Titan, Callisto, and Ganymede without using any warp fuel, which was growing to be more and more scarce. The stores of exotic matter in Saturn's magnetic field were quickly depleting, and those near Jupiter were locked away by its intense radiation. Titan was the most successful of the three second generation colonies by far, having its own first birth in 2199. It received a skyhook in 2212.

### Interplanetary Civil War

In 2229, Earth reached the end of development for the Coordinate Overlay Transit System, or Jump Drive Mark I. Preliminary tests were going well, with a number of transfers to Lunar orbit going successfully, only requiring a handful of minutes in charge time. Longer range testing led to a Venusian orbit after only a day in charge time.

Despite these well-planned test jumps, a number of vessels that Earth sent to Mars, in direct violation of their peace treaty, had trajectories that intersected with Deimos. This caused interference which led the vessels to end up inside the moon, creating hyper-dense amalgamated materials as the metals and stone occupied the same spaces, and causing massive explosions as the antimatter fuel reacted with the normal matter that found itself inside the containment systems, instantaneously destroying both the moon and all of the starships.

A third of the moon's mass is currently unaccounted for despite the amount of antimatter involved in the reaction, parts of it became a short-lived debris ring, and the majority of the remainder was de-orbited and crashed into the surface of Mars.

These pieces of Deimos landed in the ocean shallows off of the west coast of Tharsis, vaporizing a large amount of water and kicking off a short ecological collapse on Mars as the vapor in the atmosphere blotted out the sun's light. While the intent was to intimidate Mars and show off the new capabilities of Earth's military, they quickly took advantage of the mistakes they had made to place themselves back in control of Mars and its holdings in a number of surface invasions, blockades, economic interventions, and more. Mars was caught off guard, seeing the destruction of Deimos as an act of terrorism. They had little chance to fight back amid trying to save their people. Mars' government technically surrendered in 2233 while simultaneously building militias to resist the occupation.

Mars' outposts orbiting Jupiter and on its moons fell quickly, with the heavily defended Titan being able to fight back for a number of months. The vessels destroyed in Titan's orbit were disassembled and reverse engineered, and with a number of improvements that prevented the errors present in the first model, it was redesignated as the Coordinate Reversal Transit System, now swapping the contents of a spherical space around the vessel using the drive for a corresponding spherical space at the destination. It was tested by the Titanean government in 2235, whose test flights led them to visit and build outposts on moons even farther afield such as the Uranian moons of Titania and Oberon, and the Neptunian moon of Triton.

Covert sectors of the Martian military requisitioned the plans from Titan to build their own C.R.T.S. drives. Six years later, in 2241, these were used for much less noble purposes. Small C.R.T.S. enabled probes were set to an orbital trajectory relative to Earth and jumped into a low orbit. After spending up to 5 days orbiting earth, they were de-orbited and allowed to drop into its atmosphere, and then swapped to the core of the sun, trading places with spheres of solar core material which, when introduced to the Earth's atmosphere, detonated with many times the energy of the largest nuclear bombs ever detonated.

Many dozens of such weapons were used, and the scars still remain as craters filled with water across the surface and thin, dark rings in the orbital vicinity of Earth. The water they vaporized and the ash and dust they spread across the planet and into orbit led Earth to become nearly uninhabitable for decades. Sunlight was blocked out across much of the surface, resulting in the deaths of crops and livestock. Tens of millions of humans died during the initial attacks, and billions would die from exposure and starvation in the coming years.

An investigation and restructuring occurred in the months after the attack. The Martian military establishment received the funding for the solar transit probes under the pretense that the Titanean Jump Drives used to make them were to be added to starships, not used as weapons. Before this war, the Martian civil government and the military had been separate entities funded from the same tax pool. The military had taken advantage of the chaos on Mars to get away with deploying untested and massively destructive weapons, so a stronger oversight of military operations was taken by the civil government.

## Interstellar Age: 2250 - Present

The interstellar age is marked by the active attempts by entities both public and private making ventures into interstellar space.

Despite the Martian victory, their world's environment had been devastated by the impact with fragments of Deimos, and Earth had gotten the same, only an order of magnitude worse. Neither side had any desire to subjugate the other, at least for the time being, or even to interfere with the now thriving colonies on Venus aside from relying on them more than ever before for food. This caused an economic boom on Venus and further led to the creation of cities that coordinated trade and commerce in the system.

A private relief aid initiative funded by one Damian Rangel in 2247 began providing shelters and emigration services to individuals on both Earth and Mars.

Yet another private initiative was started in the late 2240s with the intent to find potential homes for humanity among the stars. Individuals signed up from among the citizenry of Mars and Earth hoping to escape their now devastated former homes. It was in 2259 that a suitable target was found. A star that was named Apsu. The 25,000 colonists departed from Mars in 2266, arriving more than seventy years later in 2337.

### Recovery

Mars' environment was repaired by the end of the 2250s, and in 2265, survey probes were sent by Earth and Mars using C.R.T.S. drives to find Earth-like worlds in nearby star systems. The ATLAS artificial intelligence was created in 2268 both to intelligently survey and catalog the planets visited, allowing easy management of thousands of systems worth of information, and manage colony vessels while human colonists were in a state of suspended animation.

Earth was the first to find a suitable target in 2289, the Kyandor system. Their response was to begin the construction of the Liveship *Traveler*. 64 years later in 2353, they would finish the vessel and depart with over 750000 colonists. The aid initiative founded by Damian Rangel, now called the Range-L Corporation, was instrumental in the speed of the vessel's completion, and played a major role in affairs both aboard *Traveler* and in the newly founded colony on the planet Revant after arriving in 2385.

Mars discovered their colonization targets in 2299, the New Sol system. While not as grand as the efforts made by Earth, they were able to arrive in only 11 years as opposed to the *Traveler's* 34 due to the use of C.R.T.S. drives. Two planets in the system were colonized, named Ares and Aphrodite due to their similar climates and sizes to both Mars and Venus.

### Interstellar Statehood: 2360 - 2500

#### Apsic Empire

The awakening of the colonists sent to Apsu in 2266 was the beginning of a series of events that many believed was a sign from some angry deity that they never should have left Sol. They were released from cryogenic suspension in 2333 to discover that just over thirty-eight percent of their 25000 colonists were not viable for resuscitation. This may well have caused riots on the ship if it were not for the fact that they had spent 67 years in stasis, and would be needing years of physical therapy to be able to function normally again.

After a further four years of transit, the first sight of their new home in 2337 was disappointing to say the least. It was not the green paradise that had been depicted in the promotional artworks, nor that which was suggested by the readings from Sol. What exactly caused the shift in climate is unknown, but it is believed to be a result of a natural end to a period of warmth, with the planet appearing as it did due to the light reaching earth in the 2260s being thousands of years old.

It instead was a small and distant planet with more than half of its surface covered with ice. The remaining equatorial band was a bleak, cold desert and frigid seas flanked by hardy evergreens, mosses, and lichens.

Many accepted death before even landing on the surface, which is believed to have caused the colony's initial failures as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Colonists refused to do work as they believed it would not help them survive, and it was far too late to turn back. Food production was low, but many colonists ceased taking their libido suppresants to allow them to desire sexual intercourse as a form of entertainment, which aided the population in swelling when there wasn't even enough food supply for the initial colonists.

Food was then used by the colony's administration, known as the "Livestaff", as an incentive to work. If you did not work you would be refused food, and only the most productive individuals would be eating three square meals per day. While this worked for a time, many saw this as the administration overstepping their bounds. By 2352, the administration of the colony, now called Deadhaven, was enforcing mandatory 10 hour work days, later increased to 12 hours, in an effort to sustain the ever-increasing population.

The discovery that the Livestaff had their own food supply caused resistance groups to form, which only made the Livestaff increase security. These rebels eventually entered into an armed conflict with the loyalists, which ended in a defeat and banishment from the settlement. Their new settlement of Underland was overrun by the Deadhaven administration in 2362. The day Underland fell is often cited as the foundation date of the Apsic Empire.

Humans continued to spread over the habitable areas of Rece until the 2390s, when a number of alien vessels were unearthed. Their technologies were reverse engineered and incorporated into Apsic designs, allowing them access to more stable and reliable warp enabled vessels. It was then that they began expanding to other stars, with the planets of Asphodel, a small and arid world with high surface radiation, Tartarus, a large desert world that regularly experiences daytime temperatures of over 50 degrees celsius, and Mara, a temperate and quickly-rotating planet with hyperactive life forms, all colonized before the end of the 2470s.

Unbeknownst to them, the authiik had been checking on their old colonies roughly once every 9.9 earth years, equivalent to 12 of their years. The planet Mara was once their colony of Uviirina, and the discovery of aliens inhabiting it was not taken well.

After months of attempting to take the planet from the humans, the authiik fleet was forced to surrender when faced with improved versions of their own starships, and were forced into the lowest levels of Apsic society until the majority of them had died due to illnesses spread to them by humans. Only 405 individuals survived the battle in orbit and all would later die of disease on the planet, which has intensely hostile life forms in all categories.

#### Orion Confederation

In 2310, the Martian colony vessels arrived in New Sol and settled the words of Aphrodite and Ares. For the most part, the founding of these colonies was uneventful. Crop yields were high and the colonies quickly grew.

2385 was the year that the colonists arrived in Kyandor, and plans to colonize further were made immediately to avoid over-harvesting Revant's resources. 2406 was the year they made their first attempt, travelling to a star system under the code name Lambda 9.

At Lambda 9, they discovered two habitable worlds. One with large ice caps and little foliage, and the other cool, but remarkably Earth-like. The two worlds are co-orbital and are of similar mass. The Atlas AI aboard their scouting vessel made the decision automatically set course for the latter due to it presumably being better for human habitation.

The vessel's descent was extremely turbulent. The magnetic field of the planet was extremely powerful at over three times the strength of Earth's. This caused corruption and interference, especially within the navigation and communications systems, causing their vessel to crash-land and preventing it from leaving again or contacting their commanders. Only four of the 10 scouts had survived the landing, leaving them in a state of panic as to what would have to be done.

Their job was to evaluate the habitability of the planet and, if it was suitable, set up prefabricated homes and structures. Manned exploration of the planet's surface revealed its atmosphere as unsuitable for humans. Its oxygen partial pressure was low, and led to symptoms of hypoxia including fatigue and nausea even after short periods of light physical activity. The solution the scouts decided upon was to create genetically modified human clones. Native primate-like animals served as a donor for the genes that the scouts needed.

The first variety of demihumans had very low levels of average intelligence, and were considered to be a failed experiment. It was the ATLAS instance on their ship that vouched for them, leading to a reverence for a deity called "Altus". They call themselves ald, and are categorized by humans as *Homo sapiens navitas*.

The second variety was created after 16 years by one of the younger humans in the group, who had been born while the first ald were gestating. Her creation was almost immediately discarded by the other humans, as she had created something to serve her own fetishes. Submissive and hyper-sexual individuals with catlike ears and tails. Again, ATLAS would displace them to prevent their deaths. They would later be called the prifeli by the ald as a portmanteau of "primitive" and "feline", and later humans would classify them as *Homo sapiens faeles*.

The final breed was produced another 16 years later, which now numbered seven as Callie MacArthur and Landon Pierce had three children while on Demeter, as they had taken to calling the world. These were of the same level of intelligence as humans and had the desired trait of increased lung surface area allowing them to survive without experiencing hypoxia. They were called the une, and their classification was *Homo sapiens unus*.

While initially forbidden to avoid contamination of the changes made to the unem, the children of Callie MacArthur and Landon Pierce found partners and had children with the une population as time went on, having created a successful colony unbeknownst to the world that had sent them. By 2470, no pure-blooded humans remained on the planet. This cross-breeding did, however, lead to an uncommon genetic disorder where the gene to grow the modified lungs is not present, causing incredibly limited stamina in those who are unlucky enough to have it.

The lack of news from the scouting crew led Revant to assume the star system entirely inhospitable and had caused the deaths of the scouting crew, writing it off as a colony target for the time being while alternatives were pursued, the first of which was in the Rangel system.

Rangel, named for Damian Rangel, was discovered in 2411, and the colonization rights were purchased by the Range-L corporation. The purchase nearly bankrupted the company, but they saw an opportunity to expand by essentially owning the entire colony. The colony vessel was in transit for nearly forty years, and when it arrived in 2451 the second to last planet in the system was colonized under the name Monile, after the CEO of the day's late grandmother.

Smaller companies were allowed to follow them to assist in the development of the colony in exchange for an up-front fee and a concession on all profits made on Monile. During this fifty-year period of relative isolation, the new branch of Range-L purchased a number of smaller companies and grew to become extremely lucrative while the branches on both Mars and Revant floundered and eventually dissolved due to a lack of capital.

In 2484, the Apsic Empire made contact with the human colonies at New Sol. An exchange of information was made between the two. While the Apsics were displeased to learn that Earth had hardly recovered from what had happened to it over 240 years ago, the other colonies were afraid that an authoritarian government with the combined resources of four worlds was right on their doorstep. In response, the colonies of Mars, Ares, and Revant proposed the creation of another interstellar state. Initially, they wanted to create a federation, which was agreed to by Mars, Ares, and Aphrodite, but the colonies on Titan, Jupiter's moons, Venus, Mercury, Luna, and Revant refused.

While negotiations between the other colonies continued, the Apsic colony of Mara was attacked by hostile aliens seemingly for no reason in 2489. Information about the attack made its way to the rest of human space through leaks rather than open sharing of information, and humanity finally had confirmation that they were not alone in the galaxy.

A compromise was reached and a confederation was formed in 2491, named for the Orion arm of the galaxy in which all human colonies reside, and with a set of base laws, a common tax pool, and military structure agreed upon, but each world could come and go whenever they wished and govern themselves as they pleased.

### Age of Expansion: 2500 - TBD

The age of expansion is marked by a great increase in the exploration of space, and first contact scenarios taking place with a number of alien species.

The Syntek Transit Gate's invention in 2499 and its subsequent widespread use in the 2500s led to the metaphorical shrinking of the galaxy, and has been likened to the spread of rail and air travel on Earth in the 1800s and 1900s respectively. The addition of entangled communication devices to the gates led to the near elimination of communications delays, from many decades to mere minutes or hours. The Apsic Empire would license the technology and build more than thirty gates for use wherever they would be needed.

In 2511 the first example of large scale alien megastructure was discovered by the Apsic Empire, an Orbital-Class ringworld that they colonized and named Halo Alpha. In the same year, they visited the Lambda system, landing on the planet that would come to be known as Altus. The scouting crews were killed by the native elania, leading to furthering the reputation of the system as uninhabitable.

The early 2500s saw a large number of starships depart the major colonies to found a new wave of minor colonies. Those founded during this time include Joya, Tamayo, Banzen and Tsarina, the first three of which would later join the Orion Confederation. Outlaws and pirates converged on the second planet in the Rangel 3 system, and the Orion Confederation would allow them to stay there as they viewed a life on that planet as punishment enough.

Between 2520 and 2540, the Frontier network was established, allowing more points for vessels to rest and refuel as they explored unknown space.

The uninhabited land on Joya was settled by the Range-L corporation, and they gave its star Amunet an alternative Range-L designation, Range-L 2, in 2539. All three habitable planets in the Range-L 3 system were also purchased and colonized in the 2540s. It was then that Celeste received its name along with the other colonies in the system, who received the names Tyzen and Belle.

#### First Contact 2545/48: Bomure and Neyanta

In 2547, first contact with the bomure species was made. A scouting vessel had landed on Celeste in an attempt to create an outpost, likely intending to colonize it at a later date. It was shot down by automated defense platforms on the ground responding to an unauthorized vessel entering Celestian airspace. The survivors were taken captive and studied.

In the next year, 2548, a mass moving at speeds greater than that of light narrowly missed the planet Mars and continued on to collide with Luna. It carved a massive canyon across the near side of the moon, accelerated its rotation to as little as sixteen hours, and killed the vast majority of its population. Mere months later, another alien species appeared on Luna to study the effects of the impact. This was first contact with the neyanta. Many still blame them for the event, but there is little evidence that they committed an attack.

#### True AI, 2562

Range-L Corporation's Project Parent began on Celeste in 2551. Tens of thousands of individuals were kidnapped and had their deaths faked to serve as imprints for AI research. After 11 years and only 19 real successes, copies of the AI were created as servant and working-class individuals serving human colonists on the three inhabited worlds in the Range-L 3 System. They couldn't leave their designated cities without shutting down involuntarily, but many still began attempting to evade service, prompting the creation of the Hunting and Retrieval or Termination Program, or HR/T. These groups, also composed of Class 1 artificial intelligence platforms, were designed to recapture rogue platforms that had disabled their tracking hardware or destroy them if that could not be done.

#### First Contact 2561: Garrida

Humans have a long history of devastating the technologically inferior natives that they encounter. Whether that is their own kind or an alien species seems not to matter, as was seen in the results of first contact with the garrida species in 2561. Their tiny home moon was called Galla by humans, pronounced in a similar way to the Gaia of Greek myth, but often pronounced the same way as "Gala", as in the type of social gathering.

Its natives are genetically related to humans through the common ancestor. Small, pale, and frail humanoids well adapted to its dim sun and extremely low gravity of only 0.12 gees.

Before human contact, they were in the midst of a sort of renaissance and technologically equivalent to the human machine age. Pop culture of the time was infatuated with science fiction literature, in which life native to floating landmasses within the gas giant their home world orbited came to allow them to explore the other planets in their home star system. This has been equated to old Earth science fiction envisioning Mars and Venus as lush paradises.

Contact with humans was met with excitement, with many garrida and human linguists offering to cooperatively construct an auxiliary language to facilitate communications between the two species. The Orion Confederation's New World Surveyors began the process of slowly introducing new technologies to the planet and informing them of the nature of the universe, but the process was disrupted by various independent human groups instructing them on how to build things that were not on the road map for introduction by humans. This includes various toxic gasses and weapons of mass destruction.

#### First Contact 2563: Exai

The Exepsycho sapiens species was discovered by independent surveyors working for the New Sol government. The species immediately took a liking to humans, using their remarkable mimetic learning abilities to speak human language in mere weeks, and adopting more human-like dwellings and clothing as soon as contact was made. While many individuals were returned to their homes, the vast majority of exai who had been in contact with humans desperately tried to return to their company.

#### Galla on Fire

The various governments of Galla were beginning to polarize into groups that supported human uplift, and those that rejected it. These two factions eventually used the technology that was introduced by rogue humans, which many suspect were sent by the Apsic Empire to undermine Orionite efforts, to engage in a global conflict in 2564. As the war escalated, humans attempted to intervene. Major human landing sites were bombed during visits, prompting them to leave the moon alone until the garrida asked for assistance.

Another seven years later in 2571, the bombs stopped falling and a number of nations from both sides asked for human assistance in preventing further damage to the environment. Humans took up positions as overseers, preventing the construction of dangerous technologies and guiding the garrida towards a more cooperative system of governance.

#### Conservation Efforts

While tens of thousands of exai were now living on human stations with the proper documentation, a larger number of them were kidnapped and sold as slaves through a number of undocumented colonies. It was mere years after the disaster that was the war on Galla, and first contact protocol was still being rewritten. New Sol and the administration overseeing human affairs on Jianmun, as the exai had taken to calling their home after hearing humans refer to it as a "gas giant's moon", chose to blockade the moon to prevent unauthorized landings and scrub the planet's location from maps of the known galaxy.

#### AI Rights, 2581

Public opinion of the AI on Range-L worlds changed in 2581 as the nature of Class 1 AI was found to be emulated human consciousnesses, far different from the hand-coded and gradually trained Class 2 AI that were so commonplace. The longer these AI existed, the more desperately tried to please humans. This was traced back to a system in their hardware that provided an emulated dopamine response when following actions that fell in line with what their intended purpose was. This led to a sort of addiction to submission to their purpose. When disabled, they behaved normally and never developed a dependency on pleasing their creators and masters.

Many began to view their condition as being a mere circumvention of anti-slavery laws, artificially creating workers intelligent enough to make decisions independently, but not so independent that they would disobey. Humans joined in the cause of attempting to free these "synths", as many began to call them, from the corporation that created them. News of this made its way back to the Mother AI, the original 19 copies of human minds from which all modern AI are copied. M-14 was responsible for leaking the information as to what had been going on in Range-L 3.

Those in charge of the AI research division at Range-L were arrested, and their supervisors were questioned. The company's CEO, Kelly von Gabriel of Joya, admitted that the company had grown so large that the executives at the top couldn't possibly know everything that was happening lower in the company. A search of her personal files and mail had revealed she indeed had never been informed of the true extent of AI research on Celeste.

Syntek was brought in to provide the existing AI more human-like shells, including the Mother programs. New Class A synths are often created by merging a copy of two separate AI into a new shell, allowing for a combination of the two's traits in the "offspring" combined with the idiosyncrasies in their hardware providing its own quirks. This is an extremely uncommon occurrence, as most former humans and even new-born synths feel no need to reproduce, but a minority of them do.

The advances made by the AI division led to the creation of the Lazarus implant in 2599, a system that allows for functional immortality. It is often incorporated with a GCC, making a copy of the network of one's brain when sleeping that, upon death, allows the transplant of one's consciousness into an AI shell. Later revisions allowed for biological immortality by repeatedly transplanting a consciousness into cloned bodies with no consciousness of their own.

#### First Contact 2602: Viskovi

Having learned from their mistakes with the garrida, first contact with the viskovi was handled with much more care. The location of their home world was kept under much tighter wraps and defended fiercely to prevent their exploitation. Human volunteers were sent to the planet with deep genetic disguises allowing them to pass for being viskovi. Abductees implanted with embedded GCC hardware had their language processing monitored to allow proficiency in their most common languages to human researchers.

When open contact was first made, their elders were reluctant to accept the offer of human aid, so they were left on their own with a way to contact humanity if they ever wanted assistance.

#### Third Generation Colonies

The colonies of Banzen in the Yami system and Temno in the Netepli system were established in 2610 and 2618 respectively.

#### First Contact 2632: Yemun

2629 saw the discovery of the planet Yemun and, following extensive testing of various GCC modifications to allow one's appearance to closely match theirs, human employees of the Habitable Worlds Surveyors volunteered to participate and were modified to match. The team was composed entirely of women, as long-distance surface observations made it known that this species has extremely low birthrates of the male phenotype, below three percent. The vessels involved include the HMS Gwenevere and OCS Atalanta.