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"History is the shockwave of the Eschaton."
- Terrence McKenna
It is the dawn of the fifth millennium. The descendants of man have ascended to the stars. Most humans have uploaded themselves to become conscious software known as Immortals, who live in the myriad virtual realities of the polises, massive computer networks. In the polis metaverses relative time flows differently than in the physical universe, often faster, and the equivalent of millions of years of evolution has taken place in less than two millenia of realtime. The resulting super-intelligences, called Minds, are the descendants of countless generations of artificial intelligences redesigning themselves. They would be gods.
Centuries have passed since the Diaspora when the original founding probes and colony polises established footholds in hundreds of star systems. Many of these seedling outposts flourished, producing further waves of colonization that have expanded the technosphere -- the region of space directly visited by man's machines -- out to a radius of hundreds of light-years, encompassing thousands of star systems. With time the vastness of the void itself divided this would-be interstellar civilization. The great light-years between the stars effectively isolated each stellar colony, forcing them to diverge and evolve apart. Biological humans persist; carried in zygote form by the original colonizers of the Diaspora, they have adapted to live symbiotically with their machine kin in a wide variety of habitats, ranging from alien worlds to the harsh, cold vacuum itself.
During the age of expansion, would-be settlers exploring the frontier of known space made a remarkable discovery near an otherwise unremarkable and remote star. In the Gudhali system they found a mysterious artifact, undeniable evidence of a previous technological civilization. The creators of this artifact, known simply as the Builders, are long since gone. The function of the Gudhali artifact is still hotly debated, the fate of its creators unknown, and its implications have reverberated throughout the technosphere. For it was in this same system that several Minds from the Denasti polis, while probing the structure of the Builder artifact, inadvertently made a breakthrough discovery that made instantaneous communication possible across almost limitless distance. Within the following century a string of consequential discoveries led to the development of practical wormhole manipulation, leading to the first faster-than light interstellar jumps. This marked the beginning of a new era.
The communications breakthrough catalyzed the formation of an interstellar network connecting the once-isolated polises and habitats into a single massive web. The majority of the nations in the local stellar region joined together to form the Valtavech Republic, centered around the planet Valtave in the Alpha Centauri system. From this locus the Valtavech continued to expand their hyperspace network outward, retracing the steps of the original Diaspora. Along the way they were reunited with some of their distant relatives, the descendants of the colonization waves of centuries past. Some, such as the Alephians (an advanced and highly organized machine race), are amicable and have become important allies to the growing Republic. Others, such as the Ixtek, have diverged too much in the centuries of isolation and have proven to be elusive and indifferent - if not downright hostile - toward the Republic's goals. Although the Ixtek are believed to share a common origin with the rest of mankind's descendant races, they show no trace of their humanity now and are quite alien in both thought and form. As the Ixtek advance their front, occupying systems and worlds approaching Valtavech space, the Republic grows restless and war seems immanent.
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