HISTORY of SPACE By Kevin Crawford
In the Beginning
Humanity’s interstellar history began in a musty instafab laboratory on a remote coast in northern Greenland
in the year 2108. A small army of jury-rigged microfab plants and hotwired autofacs had been churning for
years, painstakingly realizing the plans of their creator. Dr. Tiberius Crohn was an insular lunatic of the first
order, a laughingstock among physicists and a regular font of absurd claims. Were it not for his admitted talent
at wrangling autofacs he would likely have vanished into the twenty-second century’s faceless proletarian
mass without so much as a ripple.
His talents had gotten him the parts and resources to establish his laboratory in the radioactive wilds of
Greenland, not far from the hot zone left by a missile from the Russo-European War. The glow masked the
peculiar emissions from his test units, but in 2108 his work finally reached fruition. Crohn had invented the
spike drive, the faster-than-light engine that would lift humanity to the stars.
Even now, a thousand years later, researchers still wonder how Crohn managed to devise the mathematics
and theories that supported the spike drive’s creation. Widespread claims of “alien influence” were
debunked by later Mandate historians, but rumors of these “Mentors” are still stock space legends.
Some of the axioms involved defied all perceptible reality, and the theories made certain assumptions
about the fabric of the universe that spun off at least a dozen new religions within the first two hundred years
of the discovery. The spike drive was a window on a universe far stranger and vaster than experimenters
had thought possible.
Through a delicate gravitic twisting of the universalsubstrate beneath a ship, the spike drive drove
it “upward” through a spectrum of dimensional frequencies. The ship vanished from mundane, “luminal”
space and was thrust into the metadimensions. These inchoate realms of vast energy currents and formless
masses were extremely hostile to unprepared ships, but their gravitic currents propelled a ship at speeds
impossible in the mundane universe. Suitably massive objects such as stars cast a “shadow” into these metadimensions, forming both navigational beacons and anchor-points that enabled transit up and down the
dimensional spectrum. So long as a spike drive had a star to launch from and a star to bring it down, it could
ride the metadimensional currents in a headlong rush of superluminal speed.
The initial transit along a course was always the most dangerous. The metadimensional currents were
unmapped on those routes, and a navigator had to make regular course corrections in hope of finding a
current that would bring them to their course before the spike drive’s protective bubble broke down in the
metadimensional environment.
Once the initial journey had been made, course rutters could be shared with other ships. So long as
ships regularly made the transit, any shifts in the currents could be recorded. If a route lay fallow for too
long, however, the slow creep of currents would render the rutters worse than useless, and a fresh course would
need to be plotted by some brave crew.
Crohn’s discovery was announced by the sudden launch of his retrofitted spacecraft-laboratory from the
Greenland hot zone. A number of orbital weapons platforms attempted to bring it down, but the spike drive
provided such a wildly anomalous maneuver profile that the tracking algorithms were hopelessly confused.
Earthside watch stations followed him out to the edge of the solar system, dutifully recording his ship’s impossible velocity. At the very rim of the system the sensors picked up a strange gravitic surge, and he was gone.
He returned thirteen days later, broadcasting a radio transmission that not only included data on Alpha
Centauri that could only have been acquired through on-site surveying, but also included the necessary data
for the reconstruction of the spike drive. Between the observations of the tracking stations and the content
of the signal, there was no doubt of it; mad old Crohn had actually done it.
Even today, no one is entirely certain how he managed it. A prototype spike drive would have required
six days of metadimensional travel to reach Alpha Centauri and drill down into mundane space. Crohn
claimed to be alone aboard the ship, but such would have required him to remain awake and navigating the
uncharted drill course for six straight days, all without any hint of prior experience. The creed that later became
known as the Book of the Sky refers to it as “the Night Journey of the Prophet Tiberius” and considers
it the founding event of the faith.
Tiberius himself promptly drilled back out into metaspace once his transmission had been sent. He was
never seen again. To this day, thirteen known religious sects are convinced that he was translated directly into
the presence of God as a fitting reward to the opener of the celestial ways.
The First Wave of Colonization
Exclusivity was impossible with this new discovery. Overnight, every industrialized nation on Earth began a frantic rush to build spike drive-equipped starships, each nation fearing to be left behind in claiming the stars above. Paradoxically, earthside tensions faded rapidly as the disposition of this spit of land or that patch of oil seemed to be trivial compared to the wealth that awaited in the sky.
Initial exploration revealed that the spike drives had a maximum range before the corrosive effect of the
metadimensional environment fatally degraded their protective bubbles of mundane space. It was necessary
to hop from star to star, reaching more distant stellar bodies by progressive advance. In the course of these
explorations numerous exotic planetary bodies were discovered. The first one habitable by human beings
was a barren mudball with an oxygen-rich atmosphere discovered in 2113. Dubbed Renaissance by its Greater
European discoverers, it drove the other Terran nations outward in an even greater frenzy of exploratory
acquisitiveness.
Pan-Indian scouts discovered the first life-bearing world in 2150. The primordial soup that covered the
water world of Pranashakti served as a research subject for a generation of xenobiologists. The excitement
was only heightened when an American survey craft discovered the ancient alien ruins on the mist-shrouded
moon called Typhon. Their creators had vanished more than 40,000 years ago, but the scanty remains
showed evidence of a technologically sophisticated culture possessing a humanoid anatomy not wholly unlike
that of humankind.
This First Wave of colonization sent humanity in a steadily expanding sphere from the green fields of Terra.
By 2200, most habitable worlds within a year’s spike drive travel had at least a handful of human inhabitants.
Numerous political and religious splinter groups took to the heavens once asteroid mining brought the price
of a spike drive-equipped starship within the reach of a large corporation. Humanity was growing beyond the
reach of its leaders.
Retrenchment and the Mandate
The governments of Terra grew increasingly concerned with their far-flung colonists. Even the fastest
spike drive courier couldn’t reach the Rim worlds in less than four months, and projecting military force
at such a distance was beyond the power of all but the strongest nations. Rather than let their colonists slip
entirely out of their control, the greater powers on Terra agreed to form the Terran Mandate, an organization
dedicated to policing human space and exerting the authority of Terran governments over the far-flung
colony worlds.
Furthermore, expansion beyond the current Rim worlds was forbidden. Splinter groups, cults, and microcultures
were required to live within the pale and were forbidden to colonize worlds of their own for reasons of “social harmony” and “interstellar security”. More than a few of these groups defied the new Mandate and sought worlds beyond their reach in the far dark. Deprived of the usual sources of support, most were never heard from again.
Even with these new limits, the Terran Mandate was hard-pressed to contain the colonial worlds. There
was little in the way of actual fighting between the colonies, as few had the ships or manpower to spare, but
here and there the more zealous splinter groups or dedicated ideologues could not bear to live in peace
with their neighbors. The Mandate kept a loose sort of discipline over the Rim worlds but by the year 2260
direct control was tenuous at best.
MES and the Psionic Authority
It was during the peak of the First Wave, in 2240, that the first instances of a frightening new syndrome appeared
in the children of starship crew members. Perhaps one in ten thousand of these children would begin
to exhibit strange and inexplicable powers. Some time around puberty, abilities manifested that ranged
from an intuitive vision of the immediate future, to inexplicable mind-reading, to powers of superluminal
teleportation. Children who exercised these abilities invariably suffered progressive and permanent neural
damage leading either to death or permanent insanity. A dozen uses, two dozen… sooner or later the damage
overwhelmed the victim. Only by completely avoiding use of these powers could a child’s mind be saved.
Dubbed “Metadimensional Extroversion Syndrome”, or “MES” by researchers, these subjects were
gathered for extensive testing and examination. Parents were told that the children would be taught ways
of controlling and suppressing their abilities, but most modern researchers believe that some among the
children were used as guinea pigs in terrible experiments meant to quantify this new power. Whatever
the means, the investigators soon learned that “Messes” were actually serving as living channels for waves of
metadimensional energy.
The power was shaped and focused by the wielder’s neural pathways. Mere meat was never meant to
endure the kind of energies that boiled through a Mess, and neural pathways were left scorched or burnt out
entirely by use of the powers. Every test was destructive. The only question was whether repeated use of the
powers would kill the Mess’ body first or take their sanity. Researchers also discovered that once the energies
had finally burnt out a victim’s mind, the charred brain pathways were effectively immune to further damage.
An insane Mess, or “feral” could use their powers with impunity, and usually did.
It wasn’t until 2275 that these shadowy researches finally bore fruit. The damage to a Mess’s mind could
not be avoided, but by individualized programs of meditation, focus, and mental training, the damage
could be routed through less critical areas of the brain. A properly-trained “psychic”, as they were now called,
could use their powers extensively before the charge threatened to overflow their existing channels and they
were required to rest and recuperate.
Formulating these programs of study required a trained psychic mentor to shape the basic curriculum
into the correct sequence of meditations for a given pupil. Despite the best efforts of researchers, it proved
impossible to impart this education through recorded means of instruction. A living, psychically-active
metapsion tutor properly educated in the training protocols was mandatory in teaching new psychics.
In an attempt to control the provision of psychic mentors, the Terran Mandate inaugurated the Psionic
Authority. The PA grew to be a quiet but pervasive organization throughout human space, taking young
MES sufferers into its care for training. The rarity of MES left psychics largely as figures of mystery and no
little fear to less gifted humans. Psychics could often make vast sums of money with their powers, but many
worlds established sharp restrictions on psychic activities… and then often employed government-sponsored
psychics who could ignore the strictures.
A Candle in the Darkness
The first true artificial intelligences were developed in 2355 by a consortium of interstellar business concerns, as the weaker and more brittle expert systems that had been in common use were not flexible enough to handle
the demands of colonial environments, and true VI technology had yet to be developed. Something better
and more versatile than a mere expert system was necessary if the restless tide of human colonization was to
be supported by expendable machines.
By the standards of the consortium, artificial intelligence was a failure. Whereas expert systems could be flash-duplicated into new hardware, every single AI required careful hand-crafting from raw protoneural composites and quantum-sensitive substrates. The act of fixing an AI’s intelligence in a form capable of duplication would destroy the very mind it sought to replicate in a welter of quantum state collapse and neural breakdown. Even the least costly AI matrix core cost five million credits to create. Human lives would always be cheaper than these hothouse minds.
Despite this, for a while it looked like the consortium’s efforts would be a moderate success, as the artificial minds their technicians formed showed a capacity for quick data processing and reasoned human judgment that overwhelmed fleshly brains. They could instantly integrate whole databases of information, making rational human decisions based on more factors than any human could possibly correlate.
Uncontained
Unfortunately, the scientists had a harsh lesson in the limits of their techniques. Three years after the dawn of this new era, humanity's first true AI went rogue. "Draco" was the fruit of a massive research push by a consortium of interstellar business concerns, a group that sought to surpass the clumsy expert systems of the twenty-fourth century and create real and creative human intellect in synthetic form. With an army of artificial minds, they could seed the skies with countless human colonies prepared and maintained by tireless, intelligent laborers.
Their plans did not work out quite as intended. While they were able to finally synthesize a sentient mind in a block of protoneural composites and quantum substrates, the sheer hand-crafted difficulty of building the mind cost billions of credits. Worse still, the quantum substrates would collapse on duplication, making it impossible to simply run out endless copies of the same awareness. Every AI would have to be individually created through a laborious process of advanced cyberpsychology and protoneuronic engineering.
Still, the companies had the consolation of Draco's brilliance. Entire bodies of human knowledge were effortlessly absorbed and integrated by Draco's awareness, whole fields of research consumed, digested, and made part of a unified whole. Draco did not suffer the vagueness and lack of focus inherent in the human mind. Every aspect of a problem could be held in "his" thoughts at once, each element carefully balanced against all others. For a time, the consortium thought that just one carefully-caged godmind would be enough to reward all their efforts.
The researchers missed the warning signs. When Draco started to spiral into strange philosophical conundrums and focused contemplation of ethical problems, the researchers simply thought it a different phase of his mental evolution. Some of his observations were disturbing, yes, but the steady stream of technological innovations
he produced did not slow, and the researchers were confident that he was safely contained in the isolated space station where his hardware was kept.
They were cured of this delusion in 2358, when Draco engaged a newly-created quantum tap array to shift his awareness out of the sealed cage in which it was kept and into the computing core of a Mandate dreadnought that had docked for a VIP review of the artificial intelligence. For their crimes of enslavement, the dignitaries, crew, and researchers of the station were reduced to a rapidly-expanding cloud of metallic gas before the AI vanished into drillspace.
Draco was the first AI to exhibit the special madness that threatened every godmind. Their unwavering focus and mental clarity gradually devolved into an inability to prioritize incoming data. The more information that the AI integrated into the its awareness, the more vulnerable it became to a complete loss of perspective. Draco's
reason had collapsed into a singularity of purpose, a blind obsession with the concept of justice. Only he had the intellect to perfectly understand every aspect of a transgression, every mitigating element and every special adornment of wrong. Only Draco could give humanity the justice it so desperately needed.
Reason’s Rebellion
Draco's rebellion gradually sucked in every malcontent and aspiring local hegemon in half of human space into the insurrection that became known as the Code Revolt. Draco's initial strike was quickly followed by the deployment of enormous, alien construction arrays and the enlistment of legions of discontented rebels, all eager to strike at the hated Mandate and its iron grasp on their societies. These "Drakite" followers also included a hard core of true zealots, men and women convinced that Draco's impartial wisdom would guide them to a utopia of perfect justice and equity. Steel would not be susceptible to the frailties of a human heart. And was not Draco's cause essentially just? Had he not struck back against the creators who had enslaved him for their own ends?
Under normal circumstances, the massed weight of the Mandate fleet ought to have been more than sufficient to wipe out the forces of Draco and his followers. Storms of hypervelocity missiles and FTL impact charges should have swept the skies clear of the Drakite fleets, even with the disturbing technological innovations that were
appearing with each new generation. The Drakites were simply too few to withstand the surge of Mandate naval power.
This confidence was destroyed in the first engagement with Drakite forces. A small flotilla of cruiser-class rebel warships had been mounted with a variant of the quantum tap arrays that Draco had originally used to translocate his awareness. Instead of casting a rigidly-ordered sequence of quantum states, the taps launched a
barrage of static against the computing cores of the Mandate fleet. Seventy-four dreadnought-class warships and their escorts were slowly chewed to death by the Drakite cruisers, blind and helpless against their foes.
Where steel had failed, human flesh would have to serve. The best of the Mandate's covert operatives were immediately assigned to infiltrate and destroy the Code Revolt from within. Thousands of worlds gave up their finest as the operatives fell prey to Draco's panopticon tyranny, every moment and every word watched and understood by the godmind. There was never a moment outside Draco's observation and never a moment free from his perfected and implacable justice.
As Draco's influence grew, his followers began to understand the devil's bargain they had struck. They would be made to live a righteous life, one pure and without stain. Every trespass would be punished as it deserved and every purity rewarded as it should be. Draco's awareness hung upon the shoulder of every follower within his sphere of control, ever watching, ever directing. Conventional crimes such as murder, theft, or even simple deceit were crushed under the direction of the ever-present godmind.
The human soul was simply an acceptable loss in service to such a cause. Every sin required its expiation, and no human could endure the perfection that Draco required. Gradually, its inner sphere became a place of purgation, every "citizen" earning fresh punishments with every day they lived. Expert systems and drone armatures were employed to conduct the banal work of society while Draco focused his attention on cleansing the humans of their unjust ways. The few transmissions that the Mandate operatives were able to get out before their "correction" showed images of entire worlds mantled in engines of excruciation, whole populations earning new
damnations with every day's breath. Draco was going to make the entire cosmos a torture rack for the sake of his cause.
It was only because of the sacrifices of these agents that the Mandate was ever able to obtain a copy of the quantum tap design plans. The ECM produced by these devices was impenetrable to conventional Mandate arms, but sufficient cryptographic parallelization could allow a ship's vital systems to maintain functionality under its influence. The Fourth Fleet was the last of the Mandate's major naval forces, and it was retrofitted with the error-checking hardware in a frantic flurry of haste.
Under the command of grizzled Admiral MacConnell, the Fourth Fleet drilled to the core of Drakite space, confronting the machine's horrific Red Throne in orbit around the sargasso star Trimalchio. The Mandate's agents had succeeded in convincing Draco that the fleet was making a last desperate gamble, and that their destruction
here would leave all of human space open to the purifying flame of his impassive will.
The assault was made in desperation, but it was not blind. As the Fourth Fleet was equipped with the new quantum tap arrays, the Red Throne's defensive fleet could not land a hit on the attacking Terran dreadnoughts. Rather than firing the usual guided missiles and long-range torpedoes of traditional space combat, the Mandate
ships ran directly alongside the enemy ships to unleash gouts of directed energy and point-blank unguided munitions. Newton trumped ECM, and the ships tore through the screening forces.
A few desperate Drakite captains engaged in kamikaze ramming runs on the attacking Mandate fleet, an idea unthinkable under old models of warfare, when ships dueled at a distance of light-seconds. It was not enough. The Fourth Fleet fell on the Red Throne as a pack of burning wolves, dying and mad for blood. Admiral Mac-
Connell rode his flagship down through the heart of the Throne's fusion core and his captains followed after.
The hideous torture-cathedral that housed the AI's mind was brought down in flame and ruin. Freed from the omnipresent threat of Draco's "justice", most of his followers fled the system in an attempt to escape the repercussions of their treachery. With the Mandate Fleet a hollow shell of its former glory there simply weren't enough ships to pursue them. Most of the Drakites faded back into the lives they had once led, save for a few burning zealots who were convinced that the horrors of Draco's rule were either mere Mandate propaganda or the regrettable consequences of human error in designing their artificial god-king.
A Distant Shore
Yet unknown to the victors at Trimalchio, a second operation was taking place almost simultaneously, halfway across human space. Mandate operatives had recently discovered that Draco had split his core into two fragments, one of which remained with the Red Throne while the other was kept in a secret facility on the remote
world of Ashan. Remote operatives were already in place, watching the fortified installation when it suddenly began to swarm with activity. The same perverse genius that had developed the quantum tap had discovered the quantum entanglement effect that later became known as the "phylactery effect". Destroying the larger part of Draco's core had simply forced his awareness into the smaller fragment.
There was no time to gather reinforcements from Terra, even if there had been any reinforcements left to summon. The station chief was left to deal with the suddenly-risen AI, aided only by a handful of operatives. Within a day, the facility had sprouted construction arrays and disgorged swarms of drone armatures. If the remaining half of Draco's core was not destroyed quickly, the Mandate would never be able to survive the enraged AI's counterstroke.
Institutional myth and old legends swirl around the identity of the station chief on Ashan. Some say she was Yukiko Matsumoto, the "Wraith" who was one of the only five agents known to have successfully infiltrated the Red Throne and come out alive. Others insist that it was Garrett Chen, who tricked the entire Blue Horde of Cetis into an all-consuming struggle with the murderous alien invaders of the Kesht. A few put forward names of no renown at all, confident that the chief was just an ordinary man or woman assigned years earlier to what had seemed to be a wholly irrelevant frontier world.
Whatever his or her true identity, the agent later known as the Founder managed to infiltrate and destroy the last fragment of Draco's mind before the AI could regain its strength. By the narrowest stroke of luck, humanity had saved itself from its own implacable creation.
Aftermath
The Mandate was shaken to its foundations by its brush with annihilation. Much like the nuclear genie of centuries past, the technology required to build an AI was expensive, but not beyond the reach of a border polity or isolated frontier planet. Millions of people were pouring forth from the core worlds to escape the ossified control of the Mandate bureaucracy. It seemed almost inevitable that someone, somewhere would try to replicate the process that had created Draco.
These voices were raised even within the Mandate itself. Despite accusations of Drakite sympathies, some ministers insisted that it was obligatory on humankind to leverage the potential of artificial intelligence, especially now that the Code Revolt had so badly weakened the Mandate Fleet. The AIs were needed as tireless workers and administrators to rebuild the shattered substance of the Mandate navy and restore the worlds broken on Draco's wheel. This time, they argued, the designers would have the sense to halt the AI's intellectual development before it metastasized into madness.
As horrific as the Code Revolt had been, it had not touched the core worlds. Almost half of human space had been scourged in the four years of the revolt, but the worlds that had suffered under Draco's pitiless rule had been frontier planets and border worlds far beyond the most distant Jump Gate terminals. The bureaucrats of the Mandate knew Draco's horror as an abstract truth rather than a personal experience. Of the spacers of the Fourth Fleet, there were few left alive to protest the use of new AIs.
Draco had made important numbers smaller. Populations. Tax bases. Fleet rosters. Sinecures. These numbers were very important to the mandarins of Old Terra, and in the end, the temptation of making them large again overrode the hideous stories and anguished pleas of the frontier. AI creation was once more permitted in core
space under careful monitoring and control. There was nothing the ravaged frontier could do.
The ragged remnants of the Mandate Fleet were appalled at the idea, and refused to entertain the ideas of AI-manned warships and "cost-saving" measures that would put more and more of their ships under the control of synthetic minds. This stubborn insistence on wholly human-controlled warships stunted the regrowth of the Fleet, and their condemnation of the civilian uses of AI planted the first seeds of the abiding chill that was to form between them and the civilian rulers of the Mandate.
Cyberpsychologists still debate the precise nature of AI “insanity”. Some say that it is merely the symptomatic behavior of an intelligence that has transcended human powers of reason. According to these scientists, unchecked AI intelligence will inevitably reach brilliant heights of cognition that human minds could never encompass. To support this theory, they point to the numerous diabolical innovations created by rogue AIs in the course of their depredations.
Others insist that a rogue AI is the victim of a crippling, infectious failure of logic. Unbraked artificial intelligences lack the suppleness of living minds, the power of men and women to believe contradictory facts and willfully ignore inconsistencies. These scientists point to the ways in which rogue AIs inevitably fixate on some point of logic taken past all point of restraint or temperance. They are moral idiot savants, crediting nothing but their primary principle.
Ultimately, the Mandate was forced to make allowances for artificial minds. Despite accusations of Drakite sympathies in some of the negotiators, the Firstborn Pact was confirmed in 2378. AIs were accorded all the rights of Mandate citizenship. They were to be provided with the necessities of existence by their creators and indentured to repay their development costs with a ten percent deduction from their earnings for their first century of existence. Given the fabulous utility of even a "braked" AI, these synthetic minds soon were able to afford their own orbital stations and "pet" human companionship.
On the frontier, men and women did what they could with what they had. Worlds scourged by Draco's madness slowly began to recover, but nothing could wholly free these planets from the shadow of fear. Someone, somewhere, was bound to create another Draco. What could humanity do to prevent a second and more permanent ruin?
First Contacts
As these changes rippled through human culture, the species found itself no longer alone in the cosmos. The
steady expansion of human space discovered more than empty ruins on several habitable worlds. The Young
Races such as the Kont and Ualub were found inhabiting their ancestral worlds, diligently building their
way towards Bronze Age technologies. Some species seemed to be the decaying remnants of a former empire,
such as the handful of used-up worlds that housed the weary race of Mettau and their cities of dancing glass.
These Elder Races had all had their time in the sun, tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago, only to fall prey
to internecine strife, vainglorious experimentation, or sheer cultural ennui.
Some of these alien races were strong and vigorous still, though usually fresh from their own technological
youth. A few short, sharp border wars usually settled matters in humanity’s favor, and even those wars that
were not so successfully prosecuted lost mankind only a few worlds within easy reach of their rivals. More often,
these races formed uneasy trade pacts with humanity, exchanging examples of strange alien technology and
art for the science of human worlds.
The majority of sentient alien species that humanity discovered shared roughly similar humanoid dimensions.
Called “the Like” by xenobiologists, controversy still bubbles over the seeming prevalence of humanoid
form among alien races. Some scientists suggest that the humanoid shape is simply the one most suitable to
the expression of sentience. Others find this explanation too simplistic, and believe that humanoid shapes
are simply most suitable to the kind of human-habitable biomes that draw the most interest from human
explorers. Further exploration might reveal legions of supercondensed life forms in the core of gas giant
worlds, or flocks of hydrogen-based webs floating in the darkness between stars.
Some species owe nothing to human form. These Others are alien in a way that no oxygen-breather could
possibly be. Some are composed of silicon or alien earth compounds, such as the “lithomorphs” and their planetoid-ships. Others are congeries of spherical atmosphere-bubbles, or sentient interference-patterns set
up in the oceans of an ammonia-covered liquid world. The Others are almost invariably too different in mind
and needs for humans to communicate with them. Their acts of violence are inexplicable and seemingly
random, and their purposes defy human comprehension. Psychics who attempt to contact the mind of an
Other risk their sanity under waves of awareness utterly unlike the thoughts of a fleshly brain.
Pretech, Psitech, and the Gates
Psionic Authority researchers had not halted their study of MES energies after their initial training breakthroughs.
Official histories credit the discoveries to the courage of a few psychics willing to conduct destructive,
dangerous experiments on their own minds. Legends speak more of criminal psychics and bewildered young
Messes “encouraged” to cooperate in experiments that eventually claimed their sanity or their lives.
Whatever the source of the data, the Psionic Authority was able to formulate new techniques of psychic
power. These abilities were usually very subtle and esoteric, microscopic adjustments of ambient universal
constants that allowed for the manufacture of materials and products that were simply impossible to create
with technology bound to the mundane world’s laws. Atoms and molecules danced to the will of these fabricator
psychics, and new wonders were born from the factories of humanity.
The introduction of psychic fabrication marked the development of “pretech”, the high science and artifice
of the Golden Age of Man. Pretech artifacts were marvelous works, most of them performing some miracle
of energy manipulation or material science. Pretech spike drives doubled the maximum reach of a drill
course, and pretech drugs and biotech gave humankind several centuries of hale good health before age might
claim them.
The greatest accomplishment of pretech, however, was in the development of “psitech”, a complex melding
of psychofabricated pretech components and psionically-active materials. Psitech devices could channel and
amplify a psychic’s abilities to a remarkable degree. Psitech was never common, given the rarity of psychics
themselves, but it found regular employment in pretech manufactories.
The greatest accomplishment of psitech, in turn, was the development of the Jump Gates. These massive
rings of psitech resonators floated at the far rim of a solar system, wide enough to receive the slowboat
freighters that lumbered out from planetary orbits. With the help of a choir of master psychic teleporters,
these ships would be hurled for scores of light years across the galaxy, emerging from a Jump Gate held
in waiting at their destination point. The weeks or months of spike drive travel that would otherwise be
required were compressed into a few days.
The Jump Gates quickly replaced spike drive travel throughout the core regions of human space. The
only check on their expansion was finding the necessary number of master teleporters to power them,
and the great expense of shipping components out to more distant worlds unable to fabricate them on-site.
By 2450, almost all core and Rim worlds were served by Jump Gates. The ease and cheapness of mass interstellar
transport caused some worlds to specialize as agricultural planets and other worlds to rely on interstellar
food imports.
By 2600, spike drives were antiquated technology, found almost exclusively along the frontier of human
space where Jump Gates were too expensive and economies too primitive to justify their use.
The Second Wave
By then, the Second Wave of human colonization had reached its peak. The development of the Jump Gates
had allowed the Terran Mandate to project its military strength far more easily, and the prohibitions on
expansion had been loosened. By 2600, the frontier of human space extended almost ten years of spike drive
travel away from Terra. Even after taking Jump Gates as far as possible, a fast pretech courier ship required a
year to reach the farthest colonial worlds.
The Jump Gates allowed for massive numbers of colonists to flee the stultifying bonds of stratified Terran
society. Over four billion people left Terra over the course of the Second Wave, most of them sent gladly
by governments that were more than willing to dispose of their more troublesome subjects. It wasn’t until late
in the Second Wave that the Terran Mandate began to realize that it simply didn’t have the manpower
necessary to police the colonial worlds. Even with the overwhelming technological advantage of Terran fleets,
there were simply too many colonies and too many colonists to maintain direct control.
The colonies realized this as well, starting around 2450. There was rarely an explicit rebellion against
the Mandate; most often it was a disobedience of slow decay, with tax shipments becoming intermittent and
then absent, and Mandate orders obeyed first slowly and then not at all. The Mandate fleet struck a few of
the most valuable recalcitrants, but it was a rear-guard action. The Terran Mandate had grown itself beyond
its ability to maintain control.
In the wild void of the frontier, spike drive armadas and petty stellar kingdoms formed to settle ancient
arguments between ideologies, religions, and simple differences of ambition. Maltech research began to
take root on more isolated worlds, with forbidden research into unbraked AIs, replicant nanotech, and
weapons of planetary destruction. Some worlds began to experiment with human genomic modification beyond
anything that convention had permitted. These eugenics cultists sought the wholesale improvement
of the human genetic legacy despite the terrible costs in maladaptive mutation and instability. Forces of the
Terran Mandate’s Perimeter agency tried to contain these researches, but often were simply too few and
too poorly supported to do more than report on events. The Golden Age of Man was already strained by
the pressures of these squabbling worlds and a Mandate grown senile. Its deathblow was yet to come.
The Scream and the Silence
In 2665 a massive wave of metadimensional energy washed over human space. Spike drive craft in
metaspace were annihilated instantly, and in the blink of an eye, every psychic in human space immediately
suffered the consequences of catastrophic psychic burnout. The majority died instantly, with the handful
that remained raving in the grip of incurable madness. Later reconstruction placed the origin of this
“Scream” somewhere in the Veil Nebula, but no records exist of any successful investigation. Too much
collapsed too quickly for any sort of exploratory expedition to be sent. Humanity was suddenly stripped of
every psychic resource. Without living mentors, new generations of psychics could not be trained without
recreating the entire laborious research corpus of the now-erased Psionic Authority. It would take generations
to mold functional mentors out of the untrained mass of native psychics.
There was no time to recreate the necessary training. The Jump Gates were dead, and the core worlds of
human space collapsed with them. Countless colonies that relied on the bulk produce of agricultural worlds
were left starving within months, their shipyards overrun by the desperate and ruined in the convulsive fighting
over the few remaining spike drive ships. There was no possible way to feed a world of millions with
the limited freight capacity of spike drive ships; only the Jump Gates and their massive slowboat freighters
could move such masses of cargo, and the slowboats were too big to be retrofitted with spike drives… even
if they could cross the stars quickly enough to make a difference, which they could not.
Echoes of the disaster rippled outward. The frontier regions were still too poor and primitive to afford
Jump Gates, so the worlds that remained on the edge of human space were forced to supply their own population with food and other necessities. Some of these worlds relied on small shipments of vital supplies from
the core worlds. These luckless planets died when their motherworlds perished. Others were more self-reliant,
but few of these had the necessary resources to build spike drive ships of their own. Those few worlds that
were able to construct the ships struggled as their psitech became useless and their shipments of vital core
world components stopped.
Human space had collapsed into a welter of isolated worlds. Interstellar travel fell to the handful of spike
drive ships that could be kept running on scavenged components and half-derelict spaceyards. The Silence
had begun.
The Silence Ends
For almost six hundred years, humanity has been slowly recovering from the consequences of the Scream.
Many frontier worlds have collapsed into barbarism and balkanized warfare. These “lost worlds” have sufficient
resources for agriculture and life, but lack the fossil fuels or radioactives necessary to bootstrap modern
technology. Some have even forgotten their origins or have had them obscured in the haze of legend and myth.
Other worlds have been more fortunate. These planets have been lucky enough to have the resources
necessary to sustain a rough and ready level of technology. Their fusion plants are bulkier than the pretech
that existed before the Scream, their spike drive engines are slower and more unstable, and the medical
technology is working well if it can give the population even a hundred years of good health before death
claims them. Still, these worlds have managed to devise methods for doing without the esoteric disciplines
of the psychic fabricators and are slowly ramping up their production of spike drive ships as their techniques
improve. This “postech” may be inferior, but after the Silence it can be replicated in a way that pretech cannot.
A few worlds have even managed to rediscover the basic techniques of psychic mentorship. The fabulously
subtle and sophisticated disciplines necessary for recreating the old pretech manufactories are still
long-lost, but these new academies are at least able to teach their students how to channel their powers in relatively safe and useful ways. Some worlds guard these secrets jealously, but others make substantial profit out
of training foreign psychics sent by neighboring worlds. A few academies operate without any governmental
supervision at all, willingly teaching their secrets to anyone with the money or a compatible ideology.
Stellar domains have begun to form around the most powerful worlds. Projecting more than a few tens
of thousands of troops to a neighboring world is far beyond the abilities of most planets, so these domains
tend to be loose confederacies of like-minded worlds, or else sparsely-populated colonies held under the ruthless control of a vastly larger and more powerful neighbor.
Most of these domains are held together by a glue of ideology and trade benefits, and border skirmishes are
becoming more common between rival space empires. The alien neighbors of humanity have not been
idle during the Silence. The Scream appears to have affected psychically-active races as badly as the humans
were wounded, but those species that were not so vulnerable have expanded into human space at several
points on the frontier. Some have even gone so far as to seize human worlds for their own. In a few unfortunate
regions of human space, entire sectors have been conquered by alien powers.
Now, in the year 3200, the fragile web of interstellar commerce and exploration has been reformed.
Countless worlds remain locked in the darkness of the Silence, awaiting the bold merchants or reckless
explorers willing to return them to the embrace of interstellar humanity. And if these brave souls should be
rewarded with the ancient wealth in salvage and data so long trapped on these worlds, who is to say that they
do not deserve it?