Jump 113: Stellaris

(Original version below the redux.)

Jump 113: Stellaris (Redux)

Identity: Leader/Ruler
Drawbacks: [+1100] From The Storied Past To The Stellar Future, Extended Stay: 1,000 years, A Hostile Galaxy, Expired Insurance, Total War
Crisis Drawbacks: [+2400] Dimensional Breach, Subspace Echoes, Ghost Signal

[100/3500]  Home Planet: Tomb World

Species: Humanoid (Human)
[100/4700]  Species Stipend (+200)
[300/4700]  Intelligent
[400/4700]  Enduring
[700/4700]  Venerable
[700/4900]  Slow Breeders (+200)
[800/4900]  Quick Learners
[800/5000]  Decadent (+100)
[Free]      Ethic: Militarist
[Free]      Ethic: Egalitarian
[Free]      Ethic: Spiritualist
[800/5800]  Empire Perk Stipend (+800)
[1000/5800] Mastercraft
[1600/5800] Engineered Evolution
[2000/5800] World Shaper
[2100/5800] Mechanist
[2500/5800] Technological Ascendency
[3100/5800] Enigmatic Engineering
[Free]      Exalted Priesthood
[3400/5800] Mind Over Matter
[4000/5800] Master Builders of Galactic Wonders
[Free]      Nationalistic Zeal
[4200/5800] Galactic Force Projection
[Free]      Idealistic Foundations
[4400/5800] Meritocracy
[4700/5800] Utopian Abundance
[Free]      Psionic
[4900/5800] Chosen One
[5500/5800] Endless Improvement
[Free]      Automatic Sector Management
[5600/5800] Situation Log
[Free]      President For Life
[5800/5800] Star Map
[Free]      Flag
[Free]      Clothes Fit For A King

The Earth in 2200 CE was not the world that most would have recognized if they saw it from what one might consider an outside perspective.

No one on the planet remembered the self-destructive orgy of atomic fire that washed over the Earth in 1946, when the Allied nations came to blows with the Sino-Soviet Pact in the immediate wake of a global war. The end result: atomic fire consuming over a billion human lives - nearly half of the Earth's population at the time - and the collapse of the majority of the world's governments in an orgy of mutually destructive violence, dragging much of the ecosystem down with it as collateral damage.

The order that arose after the fact came from a confederation of nations that were neutral during the prior global war, that successfully stopped the majority of craft intruding on their territory during what went down in history as the Thirteen Hour War, if only because they were secondary targets rather than primary. But over the next four painful and hunger-filled years, humanity was dragged back from the brink of destruction under the leadership of a single man, a man allegedly older than recorded history.

Considering human history had consistently recorded his presence as the unaging leader of a nation for over a thousand years, one whose sides bordered Turkey, Egypt, Afghanistan, and India where it didn't border the seas, whose leader showed himself capable of esoteric psychic powers... it's not much of a surprise that cults sprung up to worship him. Truly, the concern was when their prayers were answered by him, even if he were telling them that he is not a god.

The next two and a half centuries involved much of humanity reevaluating what was important in life. Whether certain societal structures were worth keeping or throwing away. Trying to successfully eke out an existence beyond the destruction. The problems came with a mixed blessing, vast sums invested in medical fields. Over the forthcoming years, lifespans were extended greatly, now two centuries on average. Scientific fields were created nearly from whole cloth, and humanity found itself able to break the bonds of gravity through space elevators, putting the solar system at its fingertips and clawing its way out of the tomb that Earth had been turned into.

As the decades turned to centuries, a psychic awakening was seen as well - while humanity was hardly going to speak mind-to-mind on a daily basis, the sight of humans becoming sensitive to emotions, to sense immediate dangers, quickly became commonplace. Quickly following that... the disclosure that an afterlife existed, as did a reincarnation cycle, as individuals remembered past lives - if perhaps vaguely, usually.

At the close of the 22nd century of the common era, faster-than-light travel was discovered. Abruptly the galaxy was at humanity's fingertips. This, of course, was where everything began to go wrong. The learned men of the world had presumed that they would find either angels or apes rather than contemporaries, but instead found all of the above. A galaxy full of hostile powers, hostile empires. They often were unfriendly with each other, but with the newest player joining the galactic stage, it was found that they hated any potential unknowns disrupting the fragile peace between them all. Oh, they did not declare war on humanity immediately... but it did not take them too many years to begin finding excuses.

Humanity did not sit idle on its laurels, however. While they did not advance FTL technologies very rapidly, they did invest in other important fields. Material science, energy storage and distribution, structural engineering... humanity remained confined to the solar system as far as permanent settlements, but in addition to a crash-terraforming project for Venus and Mars, they began constructing entire habitats for humanity to enjoy. The growth had been slow, but two and a half centuries had seen the Earth's population stabilize well above ten billion people.

When an alliance of three stellar nations overcame their mutual hatred to wage a xenophobic war against humanity, they found the Solar Confederation more than ready to meet them. Certainly, humanity's weapons were not as powerful. Their hulls and shields weaker, their ships slower. But the Necrontyr Star Forge that was stationary above the northern pole of the sun had helped ensure the defenders' numbers were high, and they fought on their home ground in ships that were heavily automated - only a handful of individuals aboard each. They fought to a standstill around the Jovian orbitals before they forced a withdrawal; the cost of victory was too high to be easily absorbed. Humanity went from an eyesore to a pest.

The next invasion was larger, but the defenders were that much more accomplished, and humanity went from 'pest' to 'problem' - but this time they launched counterattacks to force an armistice. And, for a time, humanity laid claim to the surrounding systems... largely uninhabited, and in the few cases that weren't, inhabited with pre-spaceflight races. They even saw a lack of further attacks from the stellar nations that had been fighting them.

They found out, two decades later, that there was a good reason for this. A race known as the Prikki-Ti had been trapped in a time loop, but it ended and they were aiming at destroying everything around them. Unfortunately, they were close enough that this included stellar nations that bordered Confederation space, and they were blindly lashing out. The primitive populations of the worlds between Sol and the Prikki-Ti nation were wiped out by the latter, though they ran into the militarized Sol system that some pundits had taken to calling Fortress Sol. They launched incursions regularly for years, and they were fought off. Sometimes, losses were minor or even negligible, but there were several occasions where the damage eliminated not only massive amounts of naval assets, but even innocent lives on habitats or colonized Jovian moons.

Eventually, an alliance of more distant stellar nations (that pointedly did not include humanity) was able to eliminate the mutual threat to everyone. That, of course, was only just in time for a massive galaxy-wide AI rebellion. Humanity tended to rely heavily on automation, which made for a great deal of growing pains. Ships and defenses were designed with humans necessarily being in the loop, and automatons weren't made to the point of outright androids, so the rebellion damaged the economy... but there was no notable loss of lives. And as the Confederation was far from the only affected nation, other stellar nations ended up having to fight their own rebellions, some less successfully than having to retool their industrial base. Of course, it was quite impossible to fool humans with psychically null infiltrators, so attempts in that regard hit a dead end rapidly and humanity was better prepared for what followed.

The Contingency rose, and the galaxy responded, if haphazardly. A few new alliances rose among the stellar nations, but they would have to in order to prevent the extinction of all life - not to mention this opening the door to potential expansion once the crisis was over. The Confederacy practiced hit-and-run attacks on Contingency sterilization hubs, but never had a decisive victory; usually others would come in and clean up the aftermath, then claim the systems for themselves. The Cybrex took the final stronghold, before they themselves left the galaxy altogether.

To the Confederacy, this was all fine. They were quietly expanding their network of fortresses beyond Sol's borders, several jumps out from the homeworld, as those systems were all cold and dead now. And massive ships, planet crackers, were sending back huge amounts of raw material to Sol for the most ambitious project in human history.

The next major hurdle that the galaxy found was twofold; to the galactic 'north', a force of biological invaders. To the 'south', an up and coming galactic power dabbled where they ought not - a psychically active race with highly advanced jump drives was cored by an extradimensional invasion force.

Nearly three hundred years after the last invasion Sol had seen, the Prethoryn Scourge came into Sol... and found the system was anything but typical. The outer Jovian planets and colonial moons? Gone. The habitats? Missing. The rocky planets and asteroid belts? Surely they, too, had been swallowed up... by a dyson shell, one 1.5 AU in diameter. That is, slightly wider than the orbit of Mars. Humanity had stripped hundreds of dead worlds down to their molten core, and indeed had taken those too, to construct it; had the Scourge made their way inside, they would have found a megastructural engineering marvel. Enough potential living space for over a billion Earths, all largely empty of course... in fact, the majority of it was barely skeletal frames.

The Scourge found themselves eradicated to the last from their invasion, and it was at this point that humanity collectively decided it was time to stop playing 'nice' and no longer be isolationists. The Contingency was nearly a century in the past, and humanity's ships were crewed by but a handful of sapients that had enough firepower at their disposal to eradicate worlds, given enough time. And so the Scourge was met, and soundly beaten back, system by system. And in the fleets' wake, the planet crackers came, shattering worlds, hauling them off wholesale to be incorporated into the dyson shell to bring it closer to completion. The only force with as much success was the Sentinel Order, and by unspoken agreement they and humanity never crossed paths.

After this, though, and the eventual vanquishing of the extragalactic invaders... attention shifted. Oh, certainly, other issues arose, but the worst remained the Unbidden. But not only them - other factions from the same source had also appeared. The Aberrent, the Vehement, they were as hostile to the Unbidden as they were to everything else in the galaxy. They, too, had humanity's now advanced fleets descend upon them and slowly but surely beat them back, even though it took better than a century of effort and fighting around distant stars. They, too, had the dead worlds stripped and added to the dyson shell around Sol, now fully completed.

When the dust settled, however... the galaxy was largely dead, save for a pair of advanced empires fighting each other from opposite sides of the galaxy, and their vassals that were dragged along into the conflict.

Humanity washed their hands of the entire accursed galaxy at this point, and when the inevitable of course happened, the massive fleets that had been prepared for this eventuality obliterated both the fallen empires. Their vassals blamed humanity, but perhaps wisely elected to not continue any sort of conflict... they themselves had been wounded badly enough in the fighting, though it was inevitable that they would eventually grow into conflict with each other once more.

A thousand years after humanity's ascent onto the galactic stage, however, they disappeared. None realized this for decades as humanity had been rather insular by this point, if not outright xenophobic for arguably good reason. Scouts found mankind simply... gone. The defense posts in the systems surrounding it. The shell around their home star. Even the star itself - all disappeared mysteriously. Myths would come about later, positing that they were finally punished for what some considered hubris. Others thought they were victims of their own success, or perhaps they left the galaxy, the shell propelled on some outward trajectory.

The truth was much stranger.

Their emperor's ancient flagship had the ability to shift dimensions... much as he did... though its shifting was via technological means rather than esoteric. Humanity's greatest minds set to the task of studying it, and succeeded beyond their expectations. The dyson shell was revamped in many places, new systems installed, to take it to new horizons to follow their emperor.

This galaxy was not to their liking.

Perhaps, in time, they would find one that was..

Until then, they could find new worlds, new galaxies. New universes.

-----

(Original version below.)

Jump 113: Stellaris

Identity: Wanderer/Leader
Race: Human
Drawbacks: [+2200] Extended Stay, Civilization From Jumps Past, Planet Limit, Leviathans: Dimensional Horror, Fallen Empire, The Swarm
Traits: [-100] Psionic, Adaptive, Natural Engineers
Home Planet: Continental (Earth)
Ethics: Militarist, Spiritualist, Individualist

[Free]      Free Rule
[100/3100]  Upon One's Shoulders
[300/3100]  Trustworthy Emperor
[600/3100]  God Emperor
[1000/3100] Reverse Engineering
[1600/3100] The Ever Expanding Tree
[Free]      Alcohol
[2000/3100] Tree of Life
[2800/3100] Fallen Blueprints
[2800/4100] Ethic Technology Stipend (+1000)
[2900/4100] Improved Labs
[3200/4100] Genetic Manipulation
[3350/4100] Psionic Soldiers
[3850/4100] A Station That Sees All
[3850/5100] Ethic Perk Stipend (+1000)
[3900/5100] In The Name Of Our God
[4200/5100] Peaceful Military
[4500/5100] Galactic Force Projection
[5100/5100] Master Builders

So, as I said before, there was to be no further holding back. Granted, uplifting is a thing that has to be done gradually, but I wasn't going to pretend I lacked any abilities.

(This may have resulted in some cults that worshipped their God-Emperor.)

(It probably didn't help that I actually could and actively did answer peoples' prayers, even if it could be as simple as 'look, dude, no means no, it does not mean convince me'.)

In any event however, mankind made it to the stars... and not only that, found life among them. The Aeonic Forge was parked above the northern pole of the home world's star, which subsequently formed the backbone of Sol's military economy as it built the necessary ships for intrepid explorers to see what the galaxy had to offer.

Some of the more valuable finds included some curious things... like an empty world with a wealth of data on a precursor race that seems to have at least vacated the area. Another was the Tree of Life, which was... a hell of an unexpected thing, to say the least... and it turned out that the thing bore an uncanny resemblance to a giant spacefaring version of the Tree of Life that I'd acquired from The Fountain. Aside from the fact that it apparently ended up in Earth orbit and, eventually, was planted planetside where it took root. Its sap had some rather useful life-extending properties, as well.

More exploration took place, but less of value was found, and more of other species instead who had carved out their own places throughout the stars. In fact, more of frustration, as explorers began to come across hostile interstellar fauna. QV Telescopii has an interesting black hole, for example, but seeing some sort of truly massive insectile entity poke its head out and try to shred a pair of research ships was more than a little terrifying. More terrifying was when it disappeared and reappeared in Sol itself. Fortunately, unleashing the firepower of the weapons mounted upon the Aeonic Forge was more than sufficient to deal with it in a permanent sense.

Rather curious that reports of psykers in my empire spiked after that happened, but on the plus side, having Jedi as special forces is a rather handy thing. Almost as handy as following in the Emperor's footsteps and creating something very much like Astartes to act as humanity's sword and shield.

After that course of events, though, we put resources into a massive sensor array based on blueprints acquired from the precursor race's abandoned world. It was quite more effective than we had thought, and eventually it was parked on the opposite side of Sol from the star forge, giving us a sudden insight into the galaxy as a whole.

Somehow, however, this got the ire of one of the few Fallen Empires in the galaxy. Who proceeded to show up to the Sol system with a fleet. Fortunately, unleashing the firepower of the weapons mounted upon the Aeonic Forge was more than sufficient to deal with it in a permanent sense. Which... was much less than effective in dissuading them, if anything it caused larger fleets to come instead of the small one they'd sent in for what they literally described as pest control. By then, however, the Forge had done its job - rapidly printing mile-long vessels that could operate with minimal staff, scarabs skittering around aboard them to ensure they could repair any damage they suffered. So handfuls of crew sailed upon the most advanced vessels that could be created with Necron technology, waging war upon the empire that decided humanity should be crushed under its heel. We did not destroy their empire, but we did destroy their ability to wage war before they sued for peace and said they would leave us alone, so at least there is that.

And of course, not even a decade after that experience came the Prethoryn scourge, but those ships still existed - and as we knew precisely where the scourge was, had the firepower to deal with it, and had Necron reactionless drive that allowed us to speed to them instead of using the traditional hyperspace network... well, humanity ended the threat in its earliest stages, as it was otherwise going to be an existential threat, without anyone short of the fallen empires being the wiser.

Later studies of the Shroud concluded that these events were so incredibly unlikely to happen as they did, when they did, that coupled with the temporal manipulations of Earth's past, it seemed an enemy had been manipulating the Shroud for nearly the last thousand years in an attempt to strangle humanity in its cradle. An unsuccessful one, luckily.

After that, we turned our attention back inward.

In the decades to come, other species made curious observations. Systems that may have had derelicts found them missing, at times. At first smaller derelicts, and later derelicts on the scale of battleships or the occasional juggernaut when they could be found. And then a shattered ringworld went missing. And then an intact, but abandoned, ringworld also disappeared. Then a damaged dyson shell. After that, explorers who passed through the systems within a certain radius of Sol reported that the systems seemed to outright be missing their planets.

By the time anyone figured out exactly what was going on, Sol had already completed the megastructure around its star and merely stationed fortresses in the systems adjacent to the star - it had sacrificed its planets for the raw material. And other systems' planets. And the ringworlds, and the damaged dyson shell. The end result, a technological marvel none here could match without millennia of engineering research; a fully habitable dyson shell, far bigger than the ones that existed elsewhere in the galaxy, its radius equal to that of the former home world's orbit. A habitat with more than five hundred million times the surface area of the former homeworld. With the Tree of Life planted at the site of the new capitol on the shell itself, the Aeonic Forge over Sol's north pole, and the sensor array over its south pole.

(In fact, let's just call it the star forge from now on, instead of dressing it up with Necron-like names. We all know what it is, anyway.)

In the ten thousand years to come before its abrupt disappearance, humanity certainly ventured among the stars, but they were staunchly neutral in interstellar conflicts except for extreme events - as the years progressed there were a handful of jokes made about the smallest fallen empire, but when poked hard enough... they responded with absolutely hilariously overwhelming force. Not that any outside species saw what Sol looked like but from a distance, as the shell around its star extended far enough to encompass what would have been the orbit of all four of the inner planets.

Granted, there were more than a handful of crazy things that happened. Extradimensional (possibly ascended?) invaders. A civilization going rogue and deciding that they were going to forcibly ascend their people by way of detonating every star in the galaxy. The assembly of the galactic council as a response to that, and humanity's involvement as an aloof race, akin to the fallen empires but not nearly as ancient. A different civilization cutting a deal with Shroud entities which, naturally, obliterated their entire race. Another abusing a time loop which promptly twisted their race into a horrific parody of itself.

That last race, as it turns out, was the one who attempted to abuse the Shroud to destroy humanity - their twisted remains of a race rebuilt itself into machine bodies and attempted to obliterate the galaxy. Humanity marched forth in their numbers, in space in sleek ships that utilized advanced weaponry, on the ground with would-be shroud-wielding warriors and genetic soldiers, and turned that race into nothing but a memory.

And then one day, humanity disappeared - but not just the people themselves, but also every military outpost in Sol's surrounding systems, the shell around their star... even the star itself. How this was possible was a mystery, to be certain, but not one that would ever be solved by the remaining races in this galaxy.