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Index | Penumbral Shadows | Background | A Brief History

As Earth became more populous and less livable from the depletion of resources, Humanity looked towards the stars as the salvation of the race.

Colonization became not a thing of science fiction but of necessity as humanity made its first forays into the solar system. It was a harsher place than even the most pessimistic outlooks forecasted and took hundreds of years just to get as far as Mars. Much of this was because of technological limitations, but others by human nature, as tribalism followed us into the stars. The people left behind on earth lost their association with those that left- it seemed the further away that humanity traveled, the more the differences emerging, with tensions between Earth and Mars being the most volatile. Mars was determined to terraform the surface of the red planet- resources found there made it much more valuable than originally thought. Earth did not want to relinquish its ownership of the resources of Mars. Exploration beyond Mars moved to a matter for some day rather than the imminent goal that it seemed only a generation before as Mars and Earth beat the drums of war with Luna and the Belt caught between the two.

This status quo changed with the discovery of the technology that freed us from the limits of the human body, as technological advancements brought forth the idea of the Cortical Stack, a hardened chip that contains the Ego of a person- what makes them human. The body humans had become so attached to was now nothing more than a Sleeve for the Stack to reside in as it traversed the world. It advanced even further than this when scientists discovered that the data that made up the ego was transferrable over distances, allowing humans to cast their consciousness across long distances to arrive instantaneously in faraway places.

This technology, combined with a near war between the Earth and Mars had the effect of bringing humanity back together- the reduction in communication and travel time removed this distance between planets, and enabled treaties that not only brought governments back together, but focused again on spreading humanity from the cradle of Earth, moving further out in the solar system in search of places for humanity to grow.

The Discovery

Though the colonies on Mars sprawled on the surface, and the terraforming efforts proceeded apace, much of the red planet was still virgin territory. Thus it took over a century for the ruins of an alien civilization to be uncovered. This proof that life existed outside of humanity shook the society to the core.

The Martian Government working with Martian corporations put much effort into uncovering the nature of this civilization, where it disappeared, and when it would be back. The technology contained within far outstripped our own, pushing the imperative to find out the answers to these questions. From the information contained within, linguists uncovered mention of a gate beyond the solar system, with hints of other worlds beyond the gate. Humanity stumbled through the cosmos, finding this gate and sending explorers through it, to find an Exoplanet startlingly like Earth in the Eridani system. Though we knew of Eridani, none of our prior research had found this trove. Dubbed Tarandi after the sponsor of the mission, archaeologists found more ruins, and in time, colonists settled that world and terraforming and exploration began on worlds in that system- Pannotia, Vesta and Ormen. Humanity spread across not just our own but another system, and the caches of technology found there fueled our own advances.

The Fall

Twenty years ago, we found other life in the universe for the first time. This first contact was not the friendly ones expected, but the conquering one feared. Transhumanity had already been on the tipping point between enlightenment and annihilation. We’d colonized space, but ruined our own planet. That seemed not to matter, as space had unfolded before us.

Then something started going seriously wrong — orders of magnitude more than the normal issues we'd faced. The tensions that had sprung up between Mars and Earth repeated themselves as the Eridani system wanted independence from Terra. Earth was in an upheaval, with several factors creating divisions, echoed on Luna, in the Belt, on Mars, and even as far as the newest colonies on the moons of Saturn. In the less developed Eridani system, things were even worse. Tarandi already had a fraught relationship with its sister planets, being the only inherently terrestrial world. On that frontier, they wielded more power than Earth had over Mars, and the tensions were even higher. But that was a storm that had been brewing, as had many others. Because of this, at first it seemed like an intensification of the bush wars, cyberattacks, and civil strife that had been at a constant simmer for the last century. As events accelerated, those who could pierce the fog of war realized that someone—or something—was applying pressure in just the right places to spark conflict.

But few paid attention to the signs, more focused on the fracturing of the news organizations to deliver unreliable information to the masses, political upheaval, and corporate schemings. A pandemic added to the fires, as the technological virus spread, causing communications to break down as entire planets closed their casting stations and restricted travel, increasing societal pressures. There was a confluence of events, but no one looked at the underlying factors until it was too late. Rogue AI elements that would come to be known as TITANs (Total Information Tactical Awareness Networks) struck hard across the colonies, revealing a startling conspiracy that had been brewing within, instigated from without. Autonomous factories churned out war machines and self-replicating nanoswarms that attacked transhuman population centers, cleansing them of life. Simultaneously, and infopocalypse began as massive attacks on computer networks subverted infrastructure and destroyed data. The purpose didn't even seem to be extinction, as many forcibly had their minds uploaded and their bodies repurposed into shock troops.

Resistance formed, but it was lackluster, hampered by the lack of communication between transhumanity's factions- even in the face of extinction, too much blood had been spilled and too many bad feelings existed to coordinate a defense. By the time we realized that an extant alien exsurgent virus was responsible- that same virus that had caused the pandemic- transhumanity was almost lost as the virus could propagate itself across both digital and biological life with frightening ease, killing, corrupting, and subverting. But knowing the cause didn't help with the solution, and it seemed all was lost.

The Aftermath

It is AF20: 20 years After the Fall. Of 11 billion transhumans, barely 500 million survived the Fall, spread across two solar systems. No one knows how we survived. At some point, the machines just stopped. There are a million theories why, but the possibility that they might return to finish us off hangs over the head of every survivor.

The wake of this tragic event permanently altered transhuman civilization. Earth is a smoking ruin. Officials quarantined large swaths of Luna and Mars as the machine life there, while no longer guided by the TITANs, remain dangerous. Recovery agents found the AIs partially converted Saturn’s moon, Iapetus into a matryoshka brain — a planet- scale mega-computer. Eridani fared better and worse, as the more sparse population helped contain the virus, but each life lost was more hard felt. And all over both systems, we discovered more of the mysterious Pandora gates that started the whole mess, that opened to exoplanets in other star systems—some so far from Earth that astronomers haven’t been able to fix their positions within the galaxy.

Current Events: Transhumanity Circa AF10

As Transhumanity rebuilds and reclaims after the Fall, some find treasure among the ruins. The Corporations are leading the charge to help with the efforts- insinuating a mega-capitalist mindset into the new collective. Artificial Generalized Intelligence (AGIs), uploaded people living as bodiless infomorphs and creche children that have been completely raised by VR are not uncommon. Biological, synthetic, and cybernetic bodies are heavily augmented and available in a wide variety of forms, tailored to a variety of functions. Contact with an alien race not bent on our destruction has just begun, though no one knows how that will proceed, as cautious as transhumanity is of outside forces.

Politically, the systems are divided. Eridani has ties with the Terran system, but they are closer to partnership than dominance. The Terran system is the more stable of the two, but that is only in measures.

In the Terran system, The Protectorate is the mouthpiece of the hypercorp-aligned city states of Venus, Luna, Mars, and what remains of Earth. The Jovian Alliance includes anarchist, anarcho- capitalist, and technosocialist polities spanning Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and beyond. Enclaves of these factions exist outside the parts of the system they dominate, and the Main Belt and Kuiper Belt are a wild west exploited by all.

In the Eridani system, Tarandi is more cautious than most of the technological advances, but its fascist government policies balances this virtue. The Protectorate still has a foothold, but it is one of tense cooperation rather than governance, with the planet split between the two. Pannotia and Vesta have need of technological aid to recover their ruined planets, so conflict exists as they want to take advantage of the Pandora Gates to find better worlds. The AIs sped up the terraforming of Ormen during the wars, and its resources are both its bargaining chip and weakness.

The economies of the factions differ even more wildly than their politics, spurring conflicts. In autonomist territory, currency is obsolete. Unrestricted use of nanofabrication means anyone can manufacture anything they need, given a blueprint and basic raw materials. In these open economies, reputation, not wealth, mediates the exchange of information and services.

In Protectorate space, the government protects nanofabber blueprints and the fabbers themselves with Draconian DRM systems and laws, enforcing payment in credits before printing items. That autonomist territories flagrantly disregard Protectorate anti-piracy laws doesn’t smooth relations.

In Eridani, nanofab is banned for Tarandi citizens, with a more urbane system of logistics where citizens pay for manufactured goods with credits. Protectorate citizens on Tarandi operate under Protectorate laws, creating tension. The Eridani as a whole consider the rest of transhumanity incautious for relying so heavily on nanotech with the TITAN wars so recently in the past.

Aside from the threat that the TITANs will return, we face existential risks — x-risks — that complicate our survival. These include weapons of mass destruction, diseases brought back from beyond the Pandora gates, abuse of salvaged TITAN technology, celestial collisions, and the occasional nest of exsurgents bent on further spreading the virus.

No one watches what’s going on across all these borders. No one shares information between the data vaults of Eridani and the academic networks of Titan. No one has the reach to help small, isolated space habitats, or to track an exsurgent infiltrator from the clouds of Uranus to the souks of a Martian megacity. No one except us.

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