The Legacy of Eight: Ad Astra

This is the second of setting overviews for the new setting that will accompany the Hammercalled Roleplaying Game, The Legacy of Eight. Its goal is to detail the timeline of the universe and some of the key shaping events.

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The relationship between the Centaurans and the Terrans settled down as the colonies expanded outward. After a century, there were colony ships destined for dozens of systems, and individual worlds became less significant in the grand scheme of things.

Advances in terraforming, digital consciousness transfer, and the use of positronic brains by the Centaurans were adopted by the Terrans as part of the peaceful expansion outward from humanity's cradle.

It is at this point that most people began to see themselves as members of their factions, rather than as inhabitants of individual planets or systems. Where previously the Terran and Centauran empires had been loose coalitions around common cultural and social affiliations, they were officially codified in the wake of the Cetan conflict even as the two factions came together to fight an outside threat.

The highly centralized Terran empire, though not officially an "empire" in its own terms, would go on to have continuity of government through to the era of the Immortal Empire, at least according to most historians' accounts. While regimes and dynasties changed, the same core systems were Imperial from within a few decades of the Cetans' defeat until the Soulscourge, with the exception of a half-dozen systems that would be traded back and forth during the Unifications. They would always be loyal to Earth, though outworlders would occasionally take over the throne.

The method has not changed much even with the Successor Empire: member states need to meet a certain number of requirements and provide resources and citizens for the Empire to use in military campaigns or colonization, but are left entirely autonomous under individual planetary or system-wide governance. A focus on securing the rights of individuals would only come after the Second Unification, and conditions within the Empire were harsh for many citizens. Leaving the Empire required a substantial tax or served as a provocation for military intervention or a coup against the local government.

The Centaurans were not as stable. More decentralized, the Centauran confederation would undergo significant changes, and its member states were prone to leave and rejoin the faction over policy matters or economic disputes. A representative legislative body from across its disparate colony worlds was the sole form of interstellar government in Centauran space. However, the Centaurans were also more selective about who they would accept into their ranks, with member states needing to adopt human rights provisions and

With the ability to spread outward, neither the Centaurans nor the Terrans would pursue further conflict with each other until the Unifications. When tensions rose, they chose to ignore each other rather than go to war, and when relationships warmed again the two powers would trade ideas and products freely. The frontier worlds were often home to Centauran and Terran settlers living together in harmony.

In an echo of the earlier Cetan crisis, autonomous machine intelligence was found on multiple unsettled systems. The origin was never fully uncovered, but it was believed to have been created by a rogue agent in one of the major governments. Malevolent, but not fully conscious, the machine life had been spreading out over worlds and extracting their resources to further future expansion.

The military response to this infestation, which came to be known simply as MAL after signatures left by its otherwise mysterious creator, was swift. However, the MAL ecosystems developed mind viruses that would could cause insanity or death in those who were exposed via a variety of communication media (most often visual).

The techniques pioneered by the MAL would be mastered and used in future conflicts, though "vaccines" against mind viruses were also capable of preventing major loss of human life outside the few worlds and stations that first fell victim to the attack.

Without absolute certainty of where MAL colonies had been founded and how to make sure that there were no more MAL-infested vessels traveling to distant solar systems, occasional outbreaks would persist for centuries as the increasingly capable fleets of the two major powers would hunt down colony ships.

It was at this time that the Terran government introduced what would later become the Imperial practice of "decades": ten or twenty years of semi-compulsory military service in exchange for improved citizenship rights and a guarantee of effective immortality through backup restoration, at the small cost of an annual tax that increased as the citizen got older unless they undertook more service to the Terran state. While the system would immediately be exploited–corrupt planetary governors exploited the ability to complete a "decade" for an exceptional service to the state to secure swift promotions for underlings on baseless accounts of heroism–it came to stand for a long time as a way to permit upward mobility in increasingly stratified social classes.

Because people undergoing a decade were eligible to have any traumatic memories erased and were guaranteed restoration from backup, the growing underclass took advantage of the offer to become effectively immortal. The Centaurans had a higher average standard of living, though many people relying on the crude "resurrection" methods available to the burgeoning transhumanity still suffered the stigma of being put into bodies with defects and flaws from the manufacturing process. For ethical reasons, both Centauran and Terran methods of acquiring spare bodies used positronic brains inside human analogues, rather than actual human clones. Centaurans also had the option to acquire fully synthetic bodies, though the capabilities of these bodies were typically limited to being relatively close to human baseline due to legal restrictions.

The advent of faster-than-light travel shortly after the end of the MAL threat led to a golden age. With the distances between places no longer mattering for logistics and communication, the Terrans were able to more effectively create a central bureaucracy. The Centaurans, confederated rather than centralized, took advantage of the new technology for economic purposes.

It also opened up the galaxy. Faster-than-light communications were effectively instant regardless of distance, though much computing power was required to decipher the often garbled messages. Each message would be sent thousands of times, since the act of "catching" such messages did not lead to accurate results. The power requirements to generate the associated particles were literally astronomical, even leading to the construction of massive communication hubs relying on whole planets or stars for energy generation. The FTL "delta" particles only functioned with relatively little disruption from matter outside their own field. For data carried on photons, which could survive collision with a physical communication relay, this was a great option.

Faster-than-light travel was limited by the difficulties in preserving the contents of a FTL send. They were often only fractionally faster than the speed of light, but the rapid acceleration and deceleration of an FTL drive meant that the longest and most expensive part of the journey was cut to a single-digit percentage of traditional travel times and costs. Due to the delta function, FTL drives could not be weaponized, as anything as large as a ship would not be capable of outputting enough power to hit anything substantial, so the technology quickly became available to anyone with enough resources.

The role that FTL travel played in politics was significant. Terran hegemony suffered from the increased influence of bureaucrats from central systems, who often antagonized frontier colonies. Colonies defected from both major powers as FTL technology became commercially available to civilians and independent traders could resupply outposts with no official affiliation.