Posthuman Spiral
Premise
Introduction
Millennium ago, the Posthuman Spiral was settled by a great exodus of people fleeing the oppression of the Sol Imperium. Formed of disparate transgenes, cyborgs and bioroid menial workers pushed to the edges of the society for centuries, the denizens of the Spiral set it as their goal to overcome all inequality and advance the human condition to a perfected posthuman state.
The society that the exodus left behind was actually rather idyllic and utopian, with ubiquitous network technology, advanced medical science and increasing industrial automation that was slowly erasing poverty and misery. Humanity held dominion over thousands of planets and three times as many stars, connected by a vast network of space folding gates that made travel easy and instantaneous. It was this automation and utopian push, however, that created the underclass that made up most of the Spiral colonists.
New advances in gene therapy made the newer generation of transgenics increasingly more adept at all aspects of life than the human baseline, obsoleting those who could not afford the treatments, while increasing automation of industry displaced those who were forced into menial duties into increasingly dangerous or undesirable careers. In order to keep up and retain a place in society, much of the working class was forced to specialize and budget whatever template upgrades they could afford, filling the gaps in their abilities with cybernetics and taking on the most dangerous trades where they could not be replaced by machines. As time went on, these things ceased to be stopgap measures to climb out of poverty, and became facts of life for the whole of the working class in the Sol Imperium.
Reacting only to the increasing misery without properly addressing the causes or attempting to elevate the worker to their ranks, the elites of the Imperium resolved to abolish the working class entirely. Their initial solution to make use of artificial humans such a bioroids only swelled their numbers and worsened conditions by reducing the availability of labor in other sectors such as the traditionally baseline service industry. Eventually, the problem was entirely rectified by the development of true AI, which allowed for widespread automation of all industrial sectors.
By the time of these innovations however, the working masses of the Imperium had suffered many centuries of social stasis and economic decay. Community leaders of hundreds and even thousands used the Netsphere to connect, plan and coordinate a permanent departure from Sol's sphere of influence. This Secessio plebis was recorded in Imperial history in great infamy was the December Exodus, a sudden revolution where a trillion people of a thousand nationalities and backgrounds left the Imperium and scattered themselves to the space surrounding.
Billions lost their lives in the ensuing chaos, as the Imperial Navy blockaded major ports to prevent fleeing seperatists and some worlds were accidentally starved in the ensuing quarantines. Those wounds like, those of many generations, were cauterized by historical revisionism and the passing of hundreds of generations.
The Imperium resolved to prevent this tragedy from ever occurring again, and finalized the automation plan and became humanity's first truly post-scarcity economic system. Those disgruntled few who were stranded or could not flee were accorded special rights and elevated to the level of lowest of the elites in order to secure their loyalty.
Still, there remained the issue of dozens, if not over a hundred fledgling nations sprouting up around the periphery. But the Imperim was economically and socially ravaged by the revolution, and unable to stage an all-out war so shortly after what was an effective economic collapse. Unwilling to risk incident and planning for the far future, it waited, intending to return those breakaways into the prosperous and unified human sphere... some day.
The Posthuman Spiral
With that goal in mind, the technology of the Spiral advanced at a rate never before seen in humanity history, accelerated by the creation of Strong AI and cognitive enhancements once considered taboo in the core of human civilization.