Reboot

It is the year 5130 Standard Reckoning, almost a millenia since the end of the Overculture. Ending not in fire nor in ice, but unclear circumstances, the Overculture left a known space void of the endless chatter of civilization. Humanity had left its great works behind, retreating to - or departing for - realms beyond the physical, beyond the comprehensible.

Mostly.

At the foot of server-towers still flickering with the soft golden light of activity, a tiny fraction of humanity remained. For centuries they warmed themselves with the waste heat of the Overculture's monoliths, for centuries more they assembled themselves into nation-states. They styled themselves kings and lords as they rediscovered the games of state, playing it in the long shadow of their increasingly enigmatic ancestors.

And then the world changed. In 5000 Standard Reckoning, ancient - or perhaps recently constructed - vaults opened and from them came the Revenants. They spoke of an ineffable dreamlike existence, the 'Dreamtime' in the server stacks and virtualities.

Timeline

• 2100s: Counter-gravity technology and Quantum Translocation engines introduced. First transferrence of human mind to machine substrate. 'Silicon Age of Posthumanity'.
• 2200s: Wormhole generation mastered. Interstellar expansion, colonization and commerce now possible.
• 2300s: The Great Greening begins. Posthuman-led human government(s) begin various long-term megaprojects. 'Diamond Age of Posthumanity' under the Overculture.
• 2800-????: Progressive retreat into virtuality and insularity. Great Forgetting. 'Dark Age of Posthumanity'. Hider culture flourishes.
• 4000s (estimated): Multiple locations begin downloading individuals into (near-)baseline bodies on various habitable worlds; The Reboot. These people become known as Revenants.
• 1 Return Era (RE): New calender instituted as interstellar travel between 'rebooted' worlds becomes common as the wormhole web is returned to regular use.
• 12 RE: Population movement to Earth becomes a political issue with the passing of the Blue Earth Policy by Mars which bars most returners.
• 25 RE: Slide into cold war between Blue Earth guardians and various webworlds that see this as an unjustified barrier.
• 36 RE: Cold war goes hot as hostilities erupt between Martian interdiction craft and returners. This two year conflict becomes known as the Refusal War; the Refusal War is longer but much less intense than the Solar War of thirty years later. Pro-returner forces adopt the term Advent for their disparate group. It doesn't help their collective action problems any.
• 38 RE: Gaia Coalition signed between Terran and Martian states, Jovian nexus-cities and several closely-connected stars as the Refusal War comes to an end. The Gaia Coalition becomes the de facto superpower of the wormhole web.
• 43 RE: Algendi Intervention. Gaia Fleet officially formed from the merger of pre-Coalition national fleets.
• 44 RE: Loosening of the Blue Earth Policy allowing for great Earthward migration.
• 48 RE: First Exhuman freedom/terror cyberattacks on Gaia Coalition infrastructure. Gaian Regulatory Fleet created to police the outweb. Gaia Coalition now extends over more than two dozen major and minor star systems, including several former Advent worlds.
• 63 RE: Solar War. Disputes between Martians and Jovians finally spill over into a proclamation of succession by the Jovians who are joined by several (former) Advent states, both inside and outside the Gaia Coalition.
• 64 RE: Experimental Martian black hole device 'Tannhäuser' sabotaged, quantum black hole falls into Earth-penetrating orbit. Earth evacuated in panic even as final siege of Jove begins. Jovian Free State surrenders but Gaia Coalition collapses into pre-existing states by 70 RE, leaving Mars and the rest of Sol as the Gaia Federation with most former Gaia Coalition polities now charting new political courses.
• 66 RE: Solidification of various mutual defense alliances among outweb worlds as security bulwark against a militarized and fractious Web. Mop-up operations in several Jovian-aligned worlds to root out holdouts. Adoption of 'imperial' policy by the Gaia Federation.
• 90 RE: Current Day. Estimated CE date range 4180 CE to 4220 CE. Tectonic damage to Earth remains minimal, work on Tannhäuser capture device continues.

Milieus

Gaians

The former Gaian Coalition was the largest and most influential state since the Dark Age and like most Web worlds is populated by Revenants and their descendants. Gaia societies and governments range widely in composition, ranging from the retropolity of the Neo-Roman Republic to the quasi-imperialist managed democracy of the Martian Unity State to the unabashed cyber-demarchy of Tempest. Transhuman technology is quite common among the former Coalition worlds as well as their former Advent opponents, though it can vary widely on the ground. While technically incorrect, Gaian has entered the common lexicon for anyone in the near-Sol arena.

Fringers/Outwebbers

The outer reaches of the wormhole web were mostly rebooted later or slower than those near Sol and consequently these worlds by and large were irrelevant to the events near Sol such as the Refusal War. They and the similarly rebooted Outweb worlds instead often spent most of their energies in their localities, forming various short and long range trade pacts. Inconvenienced by several decades of paternalistic but mostly well-meaning policy by various Gaian polities, many found themselves dragged unwillingly into the Solar War. As both Fringers (those on the outer grid) and Outwebbers (those outside) are Revenants, many of the same notes on politics and society apply to them as the Gaians. Transhuman technology is also equally widespread though absent various overt or covert supersoldier programs and the like, it tends to have a much more distinctively social and artistic style.
Outweb militaries tend to use a heavy degree of automation and semi-autonomous robots to make up for the generally unexceptional physical capabilities of their pilots and crews. The iconic Raptor is only the most famous of these, these skeletal mobile dolls mass-produced and used in swarm attacks to efficiently overwhelm the enemy under numbers and mechanical coordination.

Rangers

The Range is a set of seven terraformed worlds that have been inhabited for between 1,300 and 1,600 years. Connected not by orbiting wormholes but planet-to-planet ones they are a long-established, loose cluster. They had long given up interstellar space travel and even most in-system space travel since 'a thousand years ago' (a poorly verified date, though common to all seven worlds) they suffered a machine visitation that abducted many of their people along with the most intelligent machines. Over the intervening centuries they have become varying shades of techno-feudal; while they use the world gates to trade, talk and war on each other they became otherwise decisively insular until the Reboot became too much to ignore. Having had a deliberately static (or at least slowly evolving) culture, the events of the past century have threatened this and it is quite likely that the next century will see significant changes to the multitudes of Ranger states. Most people on the Range worlds are approximately baseline human, though all manner of genetic ills have long been banished and medico-priests work diligently to ensure the continued good health of all. Unlike the various Revenants, the states and people of the Range have very distinct identities that have evolved over the intervening time and draw no connection beyond the most tenuous with the Origin System.
Conflict in the Range is common, but various formalized and informalized rules of war have mostly maintained it as something more akin to an exceptionally dangerous sport than mass warfare. The pinnacle weapon of war in the Range is the Avatar, hulking humanoid war weapons sporting all manner of weapons. These in fact inspired the various forms of war mecha found in both Gaian and Outweb militaries and despite their apparent inferiority, the states of the Range still produce Avatars that are entirely competitive.

Hiders/Exhumans

The last and by far most disparate group of humans, these are the descendants of those who hid among the cracks of the techno-political edifice that was Posthumanity, living a technomad life for two millenia. Some are the far-flung descendants of rejectionist groups that have eked out a living without succumbing to the siren's call of body- and mind-modifying technologies. Others are the exact opposite, techno-scavengers that have gone far beyond humanity in strange and sometimes dark directions. There is little that can be said about them collectively as they can be so varied, though until recently they were very much outside of any major power structure.