Peelsaga

First Man invented tools and fire. These led to new creations, metal and powder, plastics and computers, the unlocked atom, nanomachines and megaengineering, exotic matter and particle control, total stellar utilisation. When his power grew so great he could touch the sky, he reached out and brushed it, and felt the footprints of those who had gone before him.

That was thousands of years ago.

The Netsphere

The void of space is not empty and flat. Humanity has known that since the primitive days. Just what it was filled with they did not anticipate.

The Netsphere is the largest computing system that has ever been created and will ever be created. It fills the entire universe, written into and able to change its very fabric. Despite the magnificent heights of modern 'conventional' technology, all the greatest wonders can only be achieved by invoking its power.

Key Technologies

Netsphere System Emulation

One of the early and most common uses of the Netsphere was to perform sophisticated computational tasks without needing a large physical computer. With a short amount of time to set itself up within a given area, a System Emulator can use local memory and processing capacity to run a virtual machine. Such systems can be very powerful in a much smaller space than conventional computers, but have the disadvantage that they are impossible to truly isolate from anyone with a Netsphere interface.

Net Transmission

Once the basics of Netsphere interface and control were discovered, it was fairly simple to use it to to transmit data. The challenging part was organising this into the current Pan-Stellar Network.

Virtual Space Transfer

A more advanced Netsphere application was uploading of physical objects into the quantum substrate. This is still a sharply limited application, but an extraordinarily important one as it allows for (among other things) true superluminal travel. The object to be transferred is uploaded into the Netsphere, stored in a Virtual Space that emulates reality and transmitted to the destination, where it is downloaded back into physicality. The main limitations are the requirement for the target space to be vacuum, and the need for a correct NP address for the target location.

Spaceless Transfer

The cutting-edge of Netsphere technology is Spaceless Transfer, which can upload, transmit and download at target a physical object without needing to store it in a Virtual Space. It is faster than VS Transfer as it requires less bandwidth to transmit a static object than a full simulation, and it is more able to transfer into occupied space. However, it is limited by distance and cannot transmit 'active' objects - only inanimate matter. Attempts to transmit living creatures or running computers output a dead human or crashed computer at the target location.

Legacy Code

Most of the Netsphere is empty or filled with garbage data, but not all. Some coherent programs and applications and code fragments remain from the era of the Architects. As human knowledge of Netsphere code and architecture is still very incomplete, these programs are of paramount power and value.

Downloaded Artefacts

Some legacy code is designed to be 'downloadable' to form a physical object. These artefacts are believed to be examples of Architect technology.

The Pan-Stellar Union

The Exodus

When Man gained access to the power of the Netsphere, it did not escape him that it could be used to enslave his fellows. Those that opposed the exploding social and temporal power of the Authority were forced to flee. All failed, save for the group that would later form the Pan-Stellar Union. With the use of a powerful segment of legacy code, codenamed 'Noah', they departed the Milky Way entirely, burning the path behind them and isolating themselves in their new home.

Paradigm

Augmentation

The men and women of the Union are not the flawed creatures that emerged from the cradle of Earth so long ago. Every Stellan is stronger, healthier and more intelligent than 'Original' Homo Sapiens, without genetic diseases and with greatly extended lifespan. Dozens of tiny implants, thousands of optical fibres and billions of circulatory nanomachines monitor, manage and repair bodily functions with far greater finesse and intelligence than the crude hormonal systems of yesteryear. Conventional illness is all but eradicated, and death by injury is a rarity. The most prevalent killer of men and women is (somewhat perversely) failure or malfunction of the nonbiological systems, followed by 'peaceful suicide'.

More radical alteration ('exhumanism') using cybernetics or dramatic genetic alteration is not unheard of, but is rare due to the physiological and psychological roadblocks and tradeoffs involved.

Power

Energy is generated in the Union in a variety of ways, ranging from solar cells to fusion power to orbital taps to cutting-edge matter converters. By contrast storage is almost uniformly done using a photon matrix, a crystal that stores energy by 'freezing' photons. Photon matrices require no power to keep the energy stored, and have only a slow decay rate with a half-life of thousands or even millions of years. High-capacity photon matrices can store so much energy that their weight noticeably increases when fully-charged. A typical photon matrix is a long, thin translucent tablet that can glow visibly if the decay rate and stored energy are high enough.

Damaged photon matrices will bleed energy at a faster rate, but it is difficult to force a matrix to undergo a runaway energy dump. The methods to do so form the basis of the photon bomb, the 'clean' WMD of the current age.