SWN

The year is 3200. Humanity is scattered like dust among the stars. The broken relics of a former day litter the sky and men and women struggle to rebuild the glory of humanity’s lost golden age.

For almost a thousand years humanity had expanded from its ancient cradle to fill the sky with its worlds. At first the expansion came by way of the enigmatic “spike drives” that granted humans the ability to skip between stars. Countless nations, faiths, and ideologies sent colonists to the darkness above to find new homes where they could live free from the oppressive rule of Terra’s calcified masters.

The spike drive touched on different worlds. It folded the tissue of space and time and pierced it to emerge at distant stars, but the space between touched in turn those who traveled it. Over the course of generations, this subtle influence shaped certain descendants of the starfarers. The condition that resulted was known as “Metadimensional Extroversion Syndrome”. Most simply knew its victims as “MESses”. Later, they were known as psychics.

MES inevitably killed or maddened its carriers when they began to use their powers. The surge of extradimensional energy either cooked their brains or burnt a pathway through their sanity. It was only through decades of research and the expenditure of countless lives that techniques were developed for harnessing this power safely.

The channeling of psionic energy began the second great expansion of humankind. Even though hardly more than one in ten thousand humans were touched by MES, it was still enough to reshape human civilization. Vast choirs of psychics were employed to develop new technology, advanced manufacturing capabilities, and huge jump gates that could teleport whole freighters across interstellar distances. Spike drives were relegated to the frontier, to the distant star systems that could not yet afford to train the psychics or buy the components necessary to build their own jump gates.

This reliance planted the seed of the golden age’s destruction. In 2665, a metadimensional pulse of unimaginable violence erupted from the Veil Nebula, washing over the whole of known space in seconds. Every psychic in human space was instantly killed or maddened by the surge, burnt out in what later became known as the Scream.

With the jump gates inoperable and all the psychic mentors insane or dead, the core worlds were suddenly cut off from the frontier. A few spike drive ships remaining in the core were able to make their way out, bringing tales of horror, starvation, and frantic warfare over shipyards and orbital factories. Most of the core worlds are thought to have perished, cut off from the worlds that supplied their enormous populations and fueled their vital technologies.

The centuries that followed were known as the Silence, as unnumbered human worlds fought to survive their sudden isolation. Some slid into barbarism or worse, their planets unable to support a starfaring civilization. Some worlds lacked metals, or fossil fuels, or any one of countless other vital ingredients for maintaining their industry. And all, of course, lacked the psionic mentors necessary to train a new generation of psychics.

Over the past six hundred years, humanity has slowly, painfully begun to heal the wounds of the Scream. Not all worlds were incapable of independent survival, and these hardy planets have become the linchpins of stellar nations and miniature empires. Trade routes have revived with time and the building of new spike drives. Expeditions are regularly mounted to the tomb worlds of the outer core to scavenge what can be reclaimed from the bones of the dead past.

Yet a pall hangs over these efforts. Great sacrifice has revived some of the old secrets of psychic training, but no world dares rely on psionic forces any longer. The nature of the Scream is still a mystery. For now, humanity strives to build a world that does not rely upon powers it cannot fully understand or completely control. Human space is a vast canvas of mystery to most. Ancient nav charts are long out of date. Alien races have since moved into many formerly human-held sectors, and there remain ruins of races that long predate mankind. Warlords and petty tyrants scheme to expand their stellar domains, and brave souls struggle to recover lost secrets.

Stars without number await you.

[b]In the Beginning[/b]
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 water, 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. 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 than experimenters had thought possible.

Through a delicate gravitic twisting of the universal substrate 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 anchorpoints 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 more than a few years, 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 was able to shift the ship’s mass just barely out of phase with the incoming lasers and particle beams, leaving them to pass harmlessly through the ascending vessel. Earthside tracking stations followed him out to the edge of the solar system, dutifully recording its 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-grade 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.

[b]The First Wave of Colonization[/b]
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 of Typhon. Their creators had vanished more than 40,000 years ago, but the scanty remains showed evidence of a technologically sophisticated culture and a humanoid anatomy not wholly unlike that of mankind.

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.

[b]Retrenchment and the Terran Mandate[/b]
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.

[b]MES and the Psychic Authority[/b]
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 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 Psychic 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.

[b]First Contacts[/b]
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 intercine 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.

[b]Pretech, Psitech, and the Jump Gates[/b]
Psychic 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 Psychic Authority was able to formulate new forms 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 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.

[b]The Second Wave and the Golden Age of Man[/b]
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. It's deathblow was yet to come.

[b]The Scream and the Silence[/b]
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 Psychic 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.

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.

[b]The Silence Ends[/b]
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.

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?