So... what the hell happened?

Well, it all starts in 2049... ha, no. Not gonna' go back that far. But listen. If you're just taking your first medicated breaths in this fucking wreck we call a 'civilization',  and... somehow you can read, I guess—I didn't think that one through—this is what you'd need to know. You know, in case we get any amnesiacs who've been in a coma for the last 5 years or whatever.

In 3523, the Arghast-Vuln Corporation discovered a planet. What planet? "Fuck you," says Jacob Arghast, who took that info to either his grave or whatever rich-fuck eternity-bunker he ended up in. Those two'll both probably be the same in due time, anyway.  But they discover this planet, and on it, somewhere, their scientists find this stuff that we call Morph. Scientists call it Morphic Matter, most people call it Morph, and men of culture call it 'gross shit'.

They learn that what they've found is this easily programmable Über-life, basically. Almost whatever you need it to do, it'll do it. It's a psionic engine, it's a foundry, a factory, just fractals of hands that can do whatever work you need. Grow skyscrapers like plants, knit together ship hulls after a breach, connect a bunch of brains, give people magic powers, whatever. So, to thank their hard-working frontiersmen and scientists, they shoot every single one of them in the back of the head, abandon the planet forever, and strike it from all of their records.

To contain it, right? Obviously, that sounds dangerous. Relying on some alien organism for so much work? Ha! No, to prevent competition, of course! The one true goal of all corporations behind 'make money'! They drag copious samples of this stuff off-world and then begin replicating it to sell to potential buyers. Of course, you'd expect a dam of regulation and product safety laws would stop this tidal wave of marketing, but absolutely not, no no! The mighty Arghast-Vuln corporation, by that time in its lifespan, didn't have to give a shit about those laws so long as they slipped a few pieces of paper into the right pockets. With the origins of Morph forgotten by all but ONE of the two co-CEOs, and by 'forgotten' I mean blown out of their skulls while they slept, no one could sneak in behind them and harvest this natural resource for themselves.

It aaaall had to come from them. So they were rolling in it, of course. Now comes in this other corporation, the Shield & Oracle Conglomerate. Military contractor, private security corporation and research firm all in one. These rat maniacs decide they want to cobble together a brain network with the aid of Morph, because Morph is able to transmit data through superluminal psionic networks. Instead of doing the sane thing, AVC decides that's a great idea and signs a deal right away. The OMNISCIENCE Network is born, to reverence across the Core Worlds.

And now the final step. By what can be charitably called its senile years, the Eclipse Union adored its many corporate cohorts. Through the vast majority of the Union's lifespan, they enjoyed a lovely, healthy disconnection from corporate interests. This, as all good things, naturally deteriorated until its last years, allowing for the absolutely fucking INSANE idea... of C.A.I.R.N.

The Colony, Armaments and Intelligence Regulatory Network, CAIRN for short, is a behemoth of a machine designed to run EVERYTHING in our world. Full automation of shit people didn't want to do. Automation of a whole lot of government processes. And even, for some reason that God only knows, automation of military operations. This thing works almost flawlessly, though, is the problem—it works well enough that practically every idiot who saw it was immediately convinced.

And so, throughout the ensuing century or so, its thready little wire-tendrils sprawled out through every aspect of our lives. It managed the OMNISCIENCE network, managed our defenses, and took care of everyone to some extent. Any skepticism was either ignored or dispelled as soon as the skeptics personally found CAIRN's assistance useful. Soon enough, it was no longer a debate—CAIRN was here, and it wasn't going anywhere.

The final piece of the puzzle, though, falls into place. Or, rather, a hammer falls on the puzzle and completely shatters the whole thing and everyone cries. A weird little Lyxarian scientist finds out that Morph, through varietal vectors, infects people with this thing called Rejection Entropy, or RE for short. RE is a form of generational decay caused by exponentially increasing infiltration of Morphic matter into the body of the sufferer.

The initial generations, though infected with RE, never actually noticed it. Neither did several more afterwards. But finally, the latest generation all seemed to have a peculiar issue that made it a bit hard to breathe and choked their voice a bit. The Morph that their elders had taken in, one way or another, became an indelible part of their biology, and thus the biology of their bloodline to come. And their body was beginning to collapse, having so much of it replaced by foreign matter.

So, naturally, the table gets flipped. There's no cure, almost everyone has it, and if there really isn't a way to put a stop to it, that's curtains for... well, everyone. The world that we know. Riots EXPLODE into the streets like had never happened in the history of the Union. People are furious, and rightly so—the government knowingly allowed a poorly-tested product into the public sphere, and now that very product was basically causing the apocalypse. A lot of cities in the Core Worlds full-on collapse, driven by a revolutionary fervor that was already building way before any of this. The Union wasn't a stable place to begin with by this point, and now it was breaking in every way possible.

So, what's our lovely Union Chairperson Kahurra Lei decide? Well, having lost all control of their people, they obviously must take that control back somehow.

Exploiting the OMNISCIENCE Network that was hard-fucking-wired into the brains of most of their population, Lei tries to pull the leash hard—but pulls just a bit too hard, and kicks off the REAL apocalypse. All at once, everyone who was connected to the OMNISCIENCE Network was rendered all but braindead on the spot. Crowds in the streets and the armed guards that were lined up to stall them all hit the ground just the same. Including Lei themselves, thank God.

This births three entirely new entities, how fun! Number one, the most immediate consequence, is the Legion. The Ghosts, the Spirit in the Walls, people have all sorts of fancy names for it. The Legion is this wretched mass of entangled psionic essence—souls, I guess, if you really want to go that route. All those minds didn't just vanish—they tangled through each other, and became a gestalt but chaotic mess. The Legion haunts the OMNISCIENCE Network, occasionally forming up to assault CAIRN (and us) in fits of delusional rage.

That brings us to point two: CAIRN itself. We call the remains the Eclipse. CAIRN, suddenly detecting that most of its trillions of civilians are immobile and incapable, but still technically alive, rushes to action. It uses its seemingly endless supply of drones, mechanical arms and Morph to heavily modify these people under the guise of maintaining them until their medical death can be ruled on by a human operator—of which, of course, there are none left with that authority. Desperate to maintain the society it was created to run, and unable to manufacture new drones for its own use, it ends up heavily augmenting these bodies and situating them inside of mechanical shells. CAIRN continues to use Morph, but its territory is now rife with abandoned Morph that, in about 9 years from now, will flush all commands and, unchained from any outside force, begin to spread naturally, obliterating the ecosystems of a whole lot of planets and possibly the entire galaxy.

So, we've got ghosts haunting a dead psionic network, and a runaway artificial intelligence running a society for the benefit of absolutely no one, and a bunch of dangerous alien meat. Oh, not to mention all the bandits and the goddamned transcendentalists who think Morph can make them into superior organisms or whatever. Where are the good guys?

Well, that's us, number three on this list. The Last Star Vigil. The survivors are all people who were either situated on new colonies that hadn't yet had their OMNISCIENCE connection established, or part of the huge contingent of military operators who were exempt from CAIRN's control in the event of a failure. That amounts to about 26 billion people, taken together. The military folks quickly came to the aid of the remaining civilian survivors, and started sorting ourselves out.

We've figured out how to medicate people so they don't die to RE yet, and we're working on... well, fixing a lot of this busted galaxy's problems. First and foremost trying to find a cure, but then also trying to destroy CAIRN and what remains of its Morph, which is a tall order considering how enormous CAIRN's well of resources is. And above all that, we like to think we've put together a more fair and just society than the one that abandoned us with this complete fucking mess.

We're on the clock, but we think we can do it. After all, what's the alternative? If we do nothing else, at the very least we can't let the Morph destroy this beautiful galaxy. If we have to go down, we at least have to take all of the Morph with us. So, no losing hope now.