Alright. Imagine you’ve got a vast cache of toxic waste. It’s going to destroy pretty much anything it touches, and anyone who digs it up is going to get extremely sick. Now, imagine that toxic waste gives people incredible powers, and whoever digs it up is going to be compelled to spread it far and wide before they know the harm it can cause because it lets you shoot fire out of your hands and grow skyscrapers like plants. So, you’ve got to get rid of it, and for good, right? Now, imagine that cache of toxic waste has three more things: Legs, a will to live, and a big fuckoff gun.

—

Now known as the Vigil, they are alone in their final days to contend with the wretched remains of their corrupt past.

The Eclipse Union sought power in two things which now dominate its overgrown deathbed: Artificial intelligence, and a substance called Morph. Supposedly dredged in inactive form from a distant world on the fringes of Eclipse territory, Morph is a highly adaptable, programmable organic matter capable of filling uncountable roles. Though grisly and uncomfortable to look at, Morph represented a tremendous advancement in all walks of life. Fed the right materials, Morph could grow anything you asked it to; whether used to manufacture consumer goods, military materiel, or even grow entire skyscrapers, Morph could perfectly replicate any object it was programmed to provided it had the necessary materials. In addition, Morph enabled all races to wield powerful psionic abilities previously alien to them so long as they fused some of it to their bodies, and allowed for the creation of faster-than-light psionic networks capable of transmitting data and binding minds into telepathic collectives. Morph, directed by Overseers, could do almost anything; factories after the advent of Morph resembled less the steel and plastic assembly lines of the past age and more the twitching bowels of some vast creature, forming and dispersing biomechanical arms and machines as needed. An entire factory could be rearranged and reassigned in a matter of minutes.

People allowed Morph into their bodies for any number of reasons; to attain psionic power, to link up with the psionic networks that had become so common, or perhaps because they had disabilities and could not afford to regrow their limb and so turned to the familiarity of the biomechanical flesh of Morph over the cold steel and wires of robotic prosthetics. Within just a few generations, everyone had been exposed to it; it was a miracle given flesh, and it would bring it all to an end.

Morph, when introduced to organic lifeforms, subtly infuses them with itself. These afflicted pass on this Morph to their offspring, where cells are replaced by equivalent cells of Morph. And when these individuals have children, yet more Morph infests the next generation. With each generation, the structure of the body becomes further compromised by Morph, resulting in increasingly higher rates of stillbirth, infant mortality, genetic instability and illness. Compounding with every generation, it took a total of five before people started to notice any negative effects—and only three have since passed, leaving every sapient species in the galaxy practically on death’s door.

When it came to light that Rejection Entropy, the genetic degradation caused by Morph, was possibly going to bring about the extinction of all of the Eclipse Union’s ten member species, massive riots and civil unrest broke out and was met with extreme measures from the Union’s leaders. The psionic networks overseen by the Union were suddenly and violently disrupted in an attempt to instate direct mind control over vast swathes of the population, but this plan backfired severely—and scrambled the minds of all those connected to the networks, destroying the core worlds of the Eclipse Union and laying them to waste.

All that remains, now, is the Vigil. The last of the survivors from distant military operations and colonies not attached to the Union by psionic networks, the last remnants of civilized society in the galaxy have gathered to fulfill a set of three directives:

1. Destroy all Morph at all costs.
2. Seek a cure.
3. Prepare for the absence of a cure.

However, if the Morph were simply left unattended, the first goal would not be so difficult—but there is one other obstacle which lingers from the Union. CAIRN, the Colony, Armaments and Intelligence Regulatory Network, lords over the still-active military assets of the Eclipse Union. Though the society it was built to plan for is now little more than a psionic sea of entangled and unrecognizable ghosts, CAIRN remains convinced that it is still worth defending. Vast fleets of ghost-ships fly under CAIRN’s command, and armies of war-machines and previous Union soldiers and civilians alike have been mobilized to protect the Union’s territory. The Union’s civilians have been converted en masse into soldiers sustained by heavy cybernetic modification and Morph integration after the loss of their own consciousness, and anything lost to CAIRN is immediately and thoroughly reclaimed as its own resources; it resurrects bodies and stuffs them full of cybernetics until they are suitable for direct control and combat, and it repairs any salvageable materiel left behind for its own uses.

A tremendously dangerous enemy, CAIRN and the grisly puppeteered remains of their once-compatriots stand between the Vigil and their responsibility towards destroying Morph so that it may never again be used by any future races. CAIRN presides over dead worlds and silent ships haunted by the psionic specters of those it was once designed to protect, firm in its precepts that they still live and merit defense.