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| Expanse History
| | A long time ago a group of refugees left the oppressive, technologically stagnant earth and followed a trail of alien ruins across the galaxy. The pilgrims called these ancient beings Angels. Some said that the Angels where divine beings, and by finding out what they knew, by ultimately becoming them, humans could ascend as they had done. Wisdom, said the believers, would come from studying the ancient works of the Angels. These would become the Black Rose. |
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| =Beginnings=
| | Others believed that the Angels might not be divine but where instead simply a message from the universe: That technology did not need to stagnate. If enough augmentation was done to a human being, they too could reach the heights that the Angels had climbed. This group became the White Flame. |
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| As the Twentieth Century was marked by major wars, the twenty first was scarred by the impact of industrialization and technology. Increased automation and the failure to move onto a new economic system led to increasing economic depression and uncertainty. Climate change, resource shortages and ecological degradation where even worse. Both almost inevitably led to resource wars and brush fire conflicts in which what new technology was being developed was extensively and often disastrously deployed.
| | On the long trip the factions where separated. Both however managed to reach the promised land: a paradise filled with pleasant habitable planets, many far richer and easier to live on than earth. Few sapient races lived within the realm, and both sides settled down and began to build. The two philosophies did not adopt direct rule, and various countries and power groups developed within their territory. The two factions remained the strongest however. |
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| A major component of this technology was genetic and cybernetic augmentation. The use of (often untested) modified soldiers, biological weapons and ecological modification led to a backlash more severe than that against nuclear power. Face with green goo replicators, berserk cyborgs and conscripts suffering from a host of cancers due to their gene-therapy, it was only natural the world's horrified public would attempt to put the genie back in the bottle.
| | Problems where encountered. The White Flame's end of paradise had long been used as a fallow resting place by alien nomads, and abutted several powerful alien empires. Several of these alien powers objected to the presence of the humans in their aeons old land. Some of those where willing to use their power to expel them. Unwilling to be expelled, the pilgrims fought. |
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| The resource wars reached their crescendos in the twenty sixties, as limited nuclear wars took place in several parts of the world. These strikes included both attacks against enemy populations but also widespread use of nukes to prevent out of control green goo replication and destroy areas of out of control altered wildlife from spreading. The effect at least prevented further temperature rises but rendered the climate even more volatile, causing more disasters. | | The Black Rose had no problems with external invasion, but several internal ones. The decision to base most colonies around the major works of the Angels caused geographic rifts to develop. While the Black Rose's leadership sought to apply central control they found it increasingly difficult to keep leadership of their far flung enclaves. |
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| The widespread chaos caused by these events panicked many elites and in most major nations they threw their weight behind authoritarian movements who promised to restore order to society. These authoritarian groups general looked backwards for their ideologies, and sought "traditional", pre-industral solutions to solve the problems of the day. Some were religious, others nationalistic or fascistic ideologies. One of their chief targets was the imbedded egalitarianism of the late twentieth and early twenty first century, both at home and abroad. Most of those states which did not fall to revolution fell to invasion.
| | Further rifts developed over how best to pursue the goal of becoming the Angels. Even surrounded by their works information on precisely what the Angels had been and believed was maddeningly hard to understand. Some suggested that they should modify themselves extensively towards a form more like what little information could be gleaned, while others worried that this might take them further from the state of grace they sought. |
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| With the authoritarian revolutions, loss of gender rights was even more severe than the loss of general rights, with women exiled from the workplace in order to lower the number of people seeking jobs and prevent the pressure of automation from causing mass unemployment. The irony of this policy was apparently lost on those who enacted it.
| | Finally there was the issue of uplift. Many in the Black Rose believed that the help of alien beings, including some who had joined them during the trip would offer new insight into the Angels. Evidence that the Angels had also uplifted other races added theological impetus to this practices and states and factions began to make it their primary activity. Major disagreements developed over whether non-sapient creatures should be uplifted, or whether human DNA should be used in the uplift process began to develop however, resulting in more bad blood. |
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| By the twenty eighties technological development was beginning to slow down. Lack of resources and the increasing complexity of science prevented many new discoveries from behind made. However there was one last discovery of great significance: In twenty eighty six a research team at the University of Shanghai discovered a way to access another space time. Called Otherspace, traveling through this other realm allowed vast distances to be covered quickly and bypassed the usual Einsteinian restrictions of the speed of light.
| | In several cases these factional rifts developed into open conflict. |
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| Widely regarded as the final great achievement of science, Shanghai Engines gave humanity back some hope. With it, humankind could take the stars.
| | The White Flame was not without factional issues. The mainstream accepted the creation of AIs and major genetic modifications, including some sourced from other creatures, providing they kept the human mind. Factions developed who denied this doctrine, and they quickly gained the support of several powers that wished to escape the White Flame's central authority. For the first time humans warred with other humans in the White Flame area of the Expanse. |
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| Moving out from earth several garden worlds and worlds capable of being teraformed where discovered. Work begun on creating new colonies around them. The vast demands for labour on these colonies created had many social effects, one of which being the emergence of the new feminist movement, the umbrella term for various movements seeking to recapture and expand rights for women. While the movement did have some success it was subject to a fierce backlash on earth and by colonial governments and corporations. While many new feminist groups where closed down, that of the movement that was left was radicalized.
| | The battle might have been much worse if it hadn't been for another alien migration. An alien race called the Centipedes by humans, perhaps following the trail of the Angels much in the same way humans had arrived in the area in strength. While initially the White Flame welcomed their conflict with other alien powers who had long been their antagonists it seemed that the Centipedes would not be content unless the whole area was conquered. The new arrivals advanced technology allowed them to conquer many human worlds, and forced both White Flame factions to end their dispute and stand together against the threat. Over the next hundred years the White Flame checked the Centipedes advance and drove them back, retaking those worlds they'd taken and finally pushed them out of the Expanse, then mounting a series of expeditions which conquered the Centipedes bases beyond its borders. |
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| While initially expanding in all directions, human space was now mostly expanding anti-spinward along Orion's Spur, and through a series of garden worlds found there. In January of twenty one oh five AD, humans made first contact with an alien race. Inhabiting a cold, two gravity garden world the Limtis had advanced about to the level humans had in the late twentieth century. They had plateaued earlier than humanity, as their tech had not measurably changed in hundreds of years. First contact was made but communication proved difficult. It seemed the aliens had a cognition quite different to humanities.
| | It was here they encountered the Cacophony for the first time. These creatures, by far the most alien humans had ever encountered, seemed to have myriad forms and shapes, but produced a vast Cacophony of signals around their worlds. These signals had previously been detected but it was only now that humanity met them in the flesh. The Cacophony had apparently been engaged in fighting the Cicadas themselves, demonstrating an incredible but very strange technological mastery. Further they where perhaps the biggest alien empire yet encountered, fully equal to the size of the entire White Flame settled territories. Efforts to communicate proved fruitless, even basic mathematical concepts where subject to disagreement. |
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| First contact only re-affirmed many human's conviction they where the masters of the universe. The Limtis where more primitive than humans, and the two species would not compete with humans for planets, as they required different environments. Many religious and scientific groups claimed humans where most likely the most advanced race in the universe, with the limits of possible technology.
| | Worse the Cacophony's creation of Namari, a race of beings apparently identical to humans. The Cacophony settled them on their own planets and then left, leaving the Namari various devices and items including machines taken from the Expanse. Their motives, as ever where completely known. Worse, the appearance of the Namari threatened to reopen the factional split between the various White Flame factions. The Purists believing them to be an abomination and wanting nothing to do with them, while the White Flame's central organization believed the humanitarian consequences of isolating the Namari to be too severe. Even without the Namari the White Flame now had numerous planets of conquered aliens, and the question of how exactly to deal with them. |
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| It was in these conditions that the ''Noah's Dove'' made its flight. A small independent survey ship based on the colony of Mill's End at the coreward edge of human space, the ''Noah's Dove'' (Usually just called the ''Dove'' in Expanse records) had a two women crew: Pilot Susala Toshkhani and surveyor Jéssica Kalil. Susala, a widow, had inherited the ''Dove'' from her husband and with no other assets decided to put it to work, hiring Kalil to avoid being alone with a man for the length of time a survey ship needed to operate. For her part Kalil had found little work for a female surveyor, and her past as a student radical had black listed her from most employment.
| | As the White Flame was digesting its conquests and attempting to deal with their new citizens, the Black Rose had their own alien problems. Victims of an eons old calamity, the Sea Devils had hidden deep in vast survival bunkers in the crust of various planetary cores. Some would in fact emerge in the White Flame zone, but they proved more troublesome for the Black Rose. Ancient and proud beings the Sea Devils seemed unwilling to undergo the uplift practices the Black Rose usually deployed, and with their buried weapon caches, held the means to turn their resistance into violence. |
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| The two women were often unable to find well paying work, and where generally only able to perform the lowest paying and most boring jobs other survey crews didn't want. In this capacity they were sent coreward, towards a group of systems which telescopes had already shown had no viable planets. | | Apostasy was spreading as well. The discovery of a large set of megastructures built by beings other than the Angels catalyzed a new religious movement which saw the megastructure builders, not the Angels, as those to be emulated. While the Black Rose was quick to point out that the builders where far simpler than the Angels, the New Builders as they called themselves had the advantage of access to ancient builder technology and doctrine they could easily understand. |
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| During transit the ''Dove'' encountered a storm in FTL space and was forced to drop into normal space outside any solar system. It was here they found the object. The device was a disk some fifty meters wide made of unknown substance. The ''Dove'' approached and probing the device with radar somehow activated the ring. Instantly the stars around the survey system changed. Kalil and Toshkhani found themselves in a star system. Framed by a vast nebula the star system with a garden world and filled with a fleet of vast alien ships.
| | Finally, ten years ago, the two halves of the Expanse met. With communications established there was a rush to claim the planets in between the two, accelerating the merging. Different ideologies led to conflict. On both sides dissatisfied groups looked across the new border for possible allies. A new cold war of espionage and build up began along the interface, with some states finding their loyalties divided by waves of newly popular religion flowing from the other group. |
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| It soon became clear that the alien ships and the cities observed on the planet where abandoned. Many of the ships were essentially empty hulls. Kalil calculated their position and judged they were almost two decade's travel away from Earth by even the fastest human FTL drives.
| | Worse the Paradise sector is almost fully. The way coreward is blocked by the Cacophony, while Edgward the stars begin to thin out towards the edges of the galaxy. To both sides there's fewer habitable worlds, and many require extensive terraforming. |
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| After several days searching the ''Dove'' located another disk, this one linked to some kind of control centre. Boarding they found the control centre was quite different than the disk. It's technology was less advanced and its construction notably different. Both sets of technology where however far in advance of Earth.
| | It's not a bad time for everyone though. Traders and adventurers see great opportunity in the untapped resources of the other side. Projects that would never previously have gained resources are now see extensive investment if they offer prestige or new possibilities. Cultural trade across the line offers the possibilities of a new renaissance of art and technology. |
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| Toshkhani was initially excited by the find, believing this could make their fortune but Kalil believed otherwise. She reminded her Captain of the times the pair had been forced to go without payment before, and the many legal angles that corporations might take in order to prevent them from gaining what this priceless find was worth. Instead she suggested they keep it to themselves and alert only certain trustworthy parties of the find. By this she meant several of the activist groups she knew.
| | Some even suggest that it is time to expand beyond the promised land. To retrace the steps of the ancient Pilgrims and discover what befell the rest of the human race. |
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| Reluctantly Toshkhani agreed. The pair made their way back through the disk and completed their survey mission finding nothing else of consequence. When they returned to Mill's End, Kalil got in touch with several of her old friends and the group began to plan what to do with the system which Toshkhani had named Kadesh.
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| Setting up a system to secretly transfer personnel and equipment to Kadesh did not prove much of a problem. Few people cared about the Coreward boarder, much less the activities of a few women moving from colony to colony. The group where able to find machines that allowed them to construct much of what they needed on Kadesh, and while they would not sell the technology they found at Kadesh there where considerable natural resources available which could be anonymously sold. Similarly the group anonymously purchased various old ships to transport crews to Kadesh.
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| A much larger problem was finding enough recruits with the right skill set. Many of the group set about trying to train themselves in needed specialities with mixed results. It was decided that in order to reduce opportunity for the secret to slip, most recruits would stay on Kadesh once they got there, with few heading back to recruit more. This might well have spelled the colonies doom if it had not been for the discovery made beneath the planet's surface.
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| Months after the initial landing, a group exploring the surface found something extraordinary. Beneath vast building they believed to be a temple, the explorers found a series of tunnels down into the planet's crust. These tunnels led down to a point near the planet's core, where several more structures created of invincible black material where discovered.
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| It was the first time a human had laid eyes on the works of the precursors. The expedition's leader a young archaeologist called Chen Lijuan led the group inside the structure and found the map room. Drawn on a series of cloth scrolls, the maps showed the galaxy, along with a series of gateways that linked Kadesh and another area on the other side of the galaxy. Many of the gates had special activation codes, also shown on the map, though others, like the one to Kadesha were uncoded.
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| Chen journeyed back to the surface and described what she had found. Taken by inspiration she told the assembly that eventually their haven on Kadesh would be discovered. Instead she argued they should construct a fleet and leave, following the precursor map across the galaxy. The group's scientists already believed that they could derive drives far faster than those in use on earth from the principles and machines of Kadesh. With these and the precursor maps and codes they could cross the galaxy, going too far for the oppressive earth government to ever find them.
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| Chen spoke not just in temporal but religious terms. It had not just been luck that had bought them there she said, but fate. They were walking a path behind angelic beings. One day it would let them too become angels. It was Chen's speech, in many ways that laid the ground work for the modern religious life of the Expanse.
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| The investigation of the Precursors, combined with the discovery about the other species that had once called Kadesh their home created an ideological shift in the area. It appeared the Kadeshi had used cybernetics, AI and genetic engineering extensively. After a while two camps developed. The first, led by Chen, believed that humans should eventually become precursors in mind and body. The other, led by Kalil believed they should instead become as powerful, and moral as the precursors while remaining humans. While the specifics of both sides where vague, the basic ideologies where created.
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| Both camps where essentially transhuman but their methods and ideology where from the start quite different. Kalil's group believed that while the human mind could be augmented and even changed humanity's basic ethics and thought processes where more or less sound. Meantime Chen's camp believed the Precursors would have a very different and superior form of cognition which humans should eventually adopt. The split also had practical effects, even on Kadesh, with Chen's faction also believed most advancement would come from studying precursor ruins, while Kalil's preferred general science and investigation.
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| On Kadesh the two sides worked together with little disunity on the Pilgrimage across the galaxy to escape human space. However the ideological divide that would later begin in the Expanse was laid right from it's very start.
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| While events on Kadesh transpired the rest of human space was not quiet. Had things been different perhaps the Pilgrimage would have been detected earlier. Instead humanities governments where preoccupied with evolving threat of the Imoxi aliens.
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| Six limbed lizards with ten eyes each of different sizes, first contact with the Imoxi presented a huge spiritual and temporal challenge to humanity. It begun with first contact which was not on humanities terms. Instead an Imoxi explorer force of five ships entered the space around New Rio colony and after a short interval, initiated first contact by radio.
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| The Imoxi proved just as hard to understand as Limtis. However while the Limtis where low technology and limited to a single inhospitable world the Imoxi liked planets in much the same zone humans did. Further their technology was advanced, in some areas exceeding that of humans. They had plateaued, but never the less represented what most human governments thought of as a dire threat. Special attention was paid to territorial claims beyond Hunters Notch, an area of empty space that separated the two species spheres. Many human governments and corporations coveted the garden worlds beyond the Notch, and where determined that the Imoxi would not have sole claim.
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| With the Imoxi empire sitting astride the chain of garden worlds running down the Orion spur, most human governments efforts were occupied in attempting to find a reliable means to communicate with them, and preparing for possible military action. It is little wonder that activates of what where dismissed as a few new age cults where dismissed as unworthy of attention. A few stories ran in the press, but received little interest. Some rumours of Kadesh circulated, but they were generally treated as completely unbelievable by serious intelligence agencies. With the Imoxi threat looming and decades of intelligence gathering against one another the human sphere's intelligence agencies where neither structured nor concerned to chase wild rumours on the coreward fringes of human space. On the other hand Kalil and her associates ran a relatively advanced counter intelligence and information control operation to keep the rumours at only the level of rumours. The widespread social suppression of new feminism in earlier decades had instilled a wary streak and a concern about talking for fear of the consequences which ultimately crippled it's activism but proved an asset here.
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| In August 2154 relations with the Imoxi reached a new low. Imoxi ships landed on Darius, a world which had been claimed by the Greater Central Asian Bloc and began colonizing it. The human fleet sent to colonize the world was unmolested by the aliens but the GCAB government panicked. Unable to gain a satisfactory diplomatic solution, they called on its treaty arrangements to supply a military one. It proposed to send a fleet to the Imoxi boarder in a show of force, hoping to force them to abandon their colony and withdraw. Darius was far from earth and actually quite distant from any other colony, with the human fleet a minimum of a month's travel from the limits of the human empire, three months from home.
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| With little else for military force to do the majority of Earth's home fleet and colonial guard fleets where drawn into the venture, stripping Earth and most colony worlds almost bare of military forces. It was decided that now would be a good time to evacuate the remaining Pilgrims who where away from Kadesh, as Earth would be unable to do much to stop them even if things where found out.
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| Over the last five years on Kadesh the Pilgrims had reconditioned twenty four interstellar vessels. The two largest of these were equipped with experimental long jump drives and would fulfil duties of central colony ships. These where the ''Theia'' and the ''Nyx''. The other twenty two would act as evacuation transports and secondary vessels. The Pilgrims had also stockpiled a number of weapons and war machines, including antimatter powered parasite gunships and a large arsenal of nuclear weapons to defend the fleet on its long journey. With the fleet prepared the group reset the gate controls for a two hundred year diagnostic cycle, and removed remaining signs of their presence. Finally they destroyed the tunnels linking to the precursor structures, burying them deep in the planetary core.
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| After over a year of preparation, the last orbital structures where de-orbited and the Pilgrimage fleet docked with it's motherships. On May First 2156, the two vast ships spun up their engines and made their first long jump into the beyond.
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| =The Pilgrimage=
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| The atmosphere for the first two months after the long jump was celebratory. The jump, driving the vessels into another, higher level of otherspace had been highly successful, taking the two colony ships almost as far again as they'd come from Earth.
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| The celebration began to wane however when the first battle was detected in the near distance. A course change was made to avoid the combat zone, but not before several more skirmishes had been detected.
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| It quickly became clear that the fleet had stumbled into an alien warzone. The fleet deployed several scouts and began to seek to move out of it while gaining information on what was going on. The results were extremely surprising. Despite being almost a century from human space on normal drive, and travelling coreward, not anti-spinward, one of the hostile parties where the Imoxi. They were engaged with a second species, of centauriod creatures who called themselves the Dyme.
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| The fleet skirted the combat zone where it could, and negotiated where it could not. Due to their advanced technology neither species wished to confront the Pilgrims. Despite this the Pilgrimage faced many difficulties. Negotiating passage was difficult when faced with the alien minds of the Dyme and Imoxi. Four times the fleet was forced to fight. In otherspace a Dyme fleet attacked them, apparently thinking they were Imoxi. The Pilgrimage was able to flee in the confusion after the Dyme realized their mistake.
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| A second battle took place when the Imoxi attempted to hijack one of the colony ships during a real space stop. This time the Pilgrims where ready, and the auxiliaries blasted apart several Imoxi vessels. The third battle followed, as a Dyme fleet and Imoxi reinforcements caught the Pilgrimage in their battle. The Pilgrimage negotated passage through Imoxi space and began to head away from the war, but their trials were not done as a large Dyme fleet followed them. Deciding they could not risk the aliens presence the Pilgrimage retreated into a nebula and ambushed the aliens, forcing them to retreat before continuing.
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| Battles where not the only problems. Otherspace was often stirred up by the battles, and the fleet was occasionally attacked by strange, otherspace life forms.
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| Despite its trials, trip through the war zone did allow the Expanse to learn more of the Imoxi. Apparently several Imoxi tribes had fled some great disaster that had overwhelmed their homeworlds, using long jump technology much like the Pilgrims where now employing. The Imoxi traded technology for charts of the regions of space that they had crossed, including several dangerous areas of otherspace to be avoided.
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| With these charts in hand, the Pilgrimage moved on, making its second long jump and passing through another precursor gate, leaving the warzone behind. On the advice of the Imoxi charts, they began to skirt the galactic core and move spinward towards a slightly more distant precursor gate, planning to use it to bypass several otherspace shoals that would otherwise have blocked their passage.
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| Unfortunately they hit a snag. After two long jumps and significant street and battle damage in the warzone the ''Theia'' and ''Nyx'' had a number of increasingly serious problems with their drives. Unable to make it to the next gate, the Pilgrimage sought to find a safe port to make repairs. An alien civilization was detected nearby, and the decision was made to begin contact with them. This proved a fruitful decision, and a fateful one. It was here that the Pilgrimage would split.
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| The Aliens and the Pilgrims met in free space and began to communicate. Calling themselves the Cithinin, the aliens where peaceful, high technological traders. Too the Pilgrims surprise translation proved less of a problem here, as the Cithinin had much experience with it. Large beings made up a central body linked to several smaller sub bodies by sound waves, the Cithinin where highly advanced and had not experienced the technological plateau that had affected humans or Imoxi. They were quite willing to trade and shelter with the Pilgrim fleet, and a bargain was quickly struck. In return for certain technology and precursor data, the Cithinins would help the Pilgrims repair their drive and provide them with several other processes which would help them in the future, including advanced genetic engineering techniques. These where especially prized as it would bootstrap the Pilgrims own experiments into transhumanism.
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| In the end the Pilgrimage fleet stayed in Cithinin space for over two years, trading, repairing their ships and allowing those children born in space to experience planetary life for a while. This soft period, paradoxically, bought the differences in hopes and ideology to the surface.
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| As the time came when drive repairs began to end three factions began to emerge. The Chen and Kalil factions now openly disagreed about how the technology they'd gained should be used. A small minority of the Pilgrims favoured remaining with the Cithinin and the colony they'd founded.
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| Eventually after months of debate and negotiation a compromise was hammered out. Chen's faction would take the ''Nyx''. Kalil's would take the ''Theia''. Any who wanted to stay could stay, however they needed to agree to undergo a memory blocking procedure if they knew the Pilgrimage's course. While the Pilgrim's had gone far they still feared those they'd left behind.
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| In the end around twenty thousand stayed, with two of the secondary ships. The rest boarded their respective craft and returned to their journey. With their drives fixed the two ships journeyed onward towards the gates. They made long jump after long jump, passing three gates together. On the forth jump however they encountered something else.
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| A Leviathan passed by. It's wake was enough to spin the vast colony ships away like corks thrown by a passing whale. Those watching the sensors at that moment suffered from what they had seen, going mad from whatever had just passed them by.
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| The two ships were flung away through otherspace, finally crashing back into the real far off course and vastly separated from one another. Now widely separated, the two damaged colony vessels picked their own destinations. Both still sought to follow the precursor map, but finding where they were, and then finding the right gates had suddenly become vastly more difficult.
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| =The Expanse=
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| ==White Flame==
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| ==Dark Rose==
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| =Expanse Timeline=
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| ==Build Up==
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| 21st Century AD: Climate change, resource wars and wide spread economic failure leads to retrenchment. Gender and genetic rights suffer as women are increasingly pushed out of the work place by automation and overproduction.
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| AD 2086: Invention of the Shanghai Otherspace FTL Drive by a Chinese team.
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| AD 2086-2120: End of the age of technological development and the beginning of the technological plateau. The beginning of human space colonization.
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| 2105: First Contact with an Alien race, the Limtis. Communication proves a problem.
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| AD 2110: Beginning of the New Feminist movement in the colonies.
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| AD 2149: April first, discovery of the precursor passageway to Kadesh by the small explorer ''Dove''.
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| 2151: March Eighth, First contact with the Imoxi
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| AD 2150-55: The [i]Noah's Dove's[/i] crew and the various others recruited by them begin secret exploration and colonization of Kadesh. The plans for the pilgrimage are laid based on star maps found in the precursor vaults.
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| Relations with the Imoxi begin to break down.
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| AD 2155
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| August: Darius Incident. Imoxi fleet colonizes a human claimed world.
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| September: Earth's home fleet dispatched to the Imoxi boarder as a show of force together with most warships from the colonies.
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| AD 2155
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| :Late January/Early February: Pilgrimage fleet departs Kadesh
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| :February Eighteenth: the Pilgrimage fleet arrive at Earth. The evacuation of volunteers begins.
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| :February Twentieth: Pilgrimage fleet arrives at the last colonies
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| :April: The Pilgrimage fleet departs earth on April the first, other fleets rejoin and transit back to Kadesh to prepare for the next stage of the expedition. The passage is set into a two hundred year diagnostic cycle
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| AD 2156
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| May First: The Pilgrimage departs Kadesh.
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| The Pilgrimage
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| The Expanse
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A long time ago a group of refugees left the oppressive, technologically stagnant earth and followed a trail of alien ruins across the galaxy. The pilgrims called these ancient beings Angels. Some said that the Angels where divine beings, and by finding out what they knew, by ultimately becoming them, humans could ascend as they had done. Wisdom, said the believers, would come from studying the ancient works of the Angels. These would become the Black Rose.
Others believed that the Angels might not be divine but where instead simply a message from the universe: That technology did not need to stagnate. If enough augmentation was done to a human being, they too could reach the heights that the Angels had climbed. This group became the White Flame.
On the long trip the factions where separated. Both however managed to reach the promised land: a paradise filled with pleasant habitable planets, many far richer and easier to live on than earth. Few sapient races lived within the realm, and both sides settled down and began to build. The two philosophies did not adopt direct rule, and various countries and power groups developed within their territory. The two factions remained the strongest however.
Problems where encountered. The White Flame's end of paradise had long been used as a fallow resting place by alien nomads, and abutted several powerful alien empires. Several of these alien powers objected to the presence of the humans in their aeons old land. Some of those where willing to use their power to expel them. Unwilling to be expelled, the pilgrims fought.
The Black Rose had no problems with external invasion, but several internal ones. The decision to base most colonies around the major works of the Angels caused geographic rifts to develop. While the Black Rose's leadership sought to apply central control they found it increasingly difficult to keep leadership of their far flung enclaves.
Further rifts developed over how best to pursue the goal of becoming the Angels. Even surrounded by their works information on precisely what the Angels had been and believed was maddeningly hard to understand. Some suggested that they should modify themselves extensively towards a form more like what little information could be gleaned, while others worried that this might take them further from the state of grace they sought.
Finally there was the issue of uplift. Many in the Black Rose believed that the help of alien beings, including some who had joined them during the trip would offer new insight into the Angels. Evidence that the Angels had also uplifted other races added theological impetus to this practices and states and factions began to make it their primary activity. Major disagreements developed over whether non-sapient creatures should be uplifted, or whether human DNA should be used in the uplift process began to develop however, resulting in more bad blood.
In several cases these factional rifts developed into open conflict.
The White Flame was not without factional issues. The mainstream accepted the creation of AIs and major genetic modifications, including some sourced from other creatures, providing they kept the human mind. Factions developed who denied this doctrine, and they quickly gained the support of several powers that wished to escape the White Flame's central authority. For the first time humans warred with other humans in the White Flame area of the Expanse.
The battle might have been much worse if it hadn't been for another alien migration. An alien race called the Centipedes by humans, perhaps following the trail of the Angels much in the same way humans had arrived in the area in strength. While initially the White Flame welcomed their conflict with other alien powers who had long been their antagonists it seemed that the Centipedes would not be content unless the whole area was conquered. The new arrivals advanced technology allowed them to conquer many human worlds, and forced both White Flame factions to end their dispute and stand together against the threat. Over the next hundred years the White Flame checked the Centipedes advance and drove them back, retaking those worlds they'd taken and finally pushed them out of the Expanse, then mounting a series of expeditions which conquered the Centipedes bases beyond its borders.
It was here they encountered the Cacophony for the first time. These creatures, by far the most alien humans had ever encountered, seemed to have myriad forms and shapes, but produced a vast Cacophony of signals around their worlds. These signals had previously been detected but it was only now that humanity met them in the flesh. The Cacophony had apparently been engaged in fighting the Cicadas themselves, demonstrating an incredible but very strange technological mastery. Further they where perhaps the biggest alien empire yet encountered, fully equal to the size of the entire White Flame settled territories. Efforts to communicate proved fruitless, even basic mathematical concepts where subject to disagreement.
Worse the Cacophony's creation of Namari, a race of beings apparently identical to humans. The Cacophony settled them on their own planets and then left, leaving the Namari various devices and items including machines taken from the Expanse. Their motives, as ever where completely known. Worse, the appearance of the Namari threatened to reopen the factional split between the various White Flame factions. The Purists believing them to be an abomination and wanting nothing to do with them, while the White Flame's central organization believed the humanitarian consequences of isolating the Namari to be too severe. Even without the Namari the White Flame now had numerous planets of conquered aliens, and the question of how exactly to deal with them.
As the White Flame was digesting its conquests and attempting to deal with their new citizens, the Black Rose had their own alien problems. Victims of an eons old calamity, the Sea Devils had hidden deep in vast survival bunkers in the crust of various planetary cores. Some would in fact emerge in the White Flame zone, but they proved more troublesome for the Black Rose. Ancient and proud beings the Sea Devils seemed unwilling to undergo the uplift practices the Black Rose usually deployed, and with their buried weapon caches, held the means to turn their resistance into violence.
Apostasy was spreading as well. The discovery of a large set of megastructures built by beings other than the Angels catalyzed a new religious movement which saw the megastructure builders, not the Angels, as those to be emulated. While the Black Rose was quick to point out that the builders where far simpler than the Angels, the New Builders as they called themselves had the advantage of access to ancient builder technology and doctrine they could easily understand.
Finally, ten years ago, the two halves of the Expanse met. With communications established there was a rush to claim the planets in between the two, accelerating the merging. Different ideologies led to conflict. On both sides dissatisfied groups looked across the new border for possible allies. A new cold war of espionage and build up began along the interface, with some states finding their loyalties divided by waves of newly popular religion flowing from the other group.
Worse the Paradise sector is almost fully. The way coreward is blocked by the Cacophony, while Edgward the stars begin to thin out towards the edges of the galaxy. To both sides there's fewer habitable worlds, and many require extensive terraforming.
It's not a bad time for everyone though. Traders and adventurers see great opportunity in the untapped resources of the other side. Projects that would never previously have gained resources are now see extensive investment if they offer prestige or new possibilities. Cultural trade across the line offers the possibilities of a new renaissance of art and technology.
Some even suggest that it is time to expand beyond the promised land. To retrace the steps of the ancient Pilgrims and discover what befell the rest of the human race.