Man ruled the solar system, once. For thousands of years, our homeworld was the jewel of a great empire, its shining cities the capital of a vast, cruel civilization which stretched from the pitted surface of the inner planetoids to the freezing depths of the outer gas clouds. But from the festering stagnancy of its millennia-long reign came resentment and ambition, culminating in its catastrophic end.
From this arose an era incomprehensible even to those who birthed it, built upon a new paradigm of scientific law blindly worshiped by the practitioners it consumed. Our birthplace became layered in dead nations and megalithic ruins which obscure any trace of what was once a verdant oasis of natural life. The void is a grave; the planets, moons, and even space itself strewn with the artifacts of lost eras, cradled in a sea of dust.
But this is all ancient history, lost to the inheritors of our failure. They live and die upon endless layers of ceaselessly expanding infrastructure grown over the husks of the celestial bodies, where even the most advanced sciences known to their ancestors are but wheels and torches compared to the hypertechnological relics their children rely on to survive, brought into being by N-Matter, the alien supermaterial which suffuses existence and transfigures all who seek it out.
But they are not alone.
The misbegotten progeny of a broken transhuman ecosystem share this world with them, a wilderness long-adapted to the thinking mind, crawling with the leavings of blind creation and deliberate malice, all lurking in the gaps of the physical world and digital space. Feral experiments, deranged machines, oceans of predatory malware, and the twisted cousins of pan-humanity all wander in the dark, as blind, lost, and desperate as we are.
Driven by the same will to live, the same needs to survive, and possessing the same technological prowess as even the most advanced civilization, there is no longer a difference between man and beast, flesh and machine, save within the unknowable depths of what we might call a soul.
This is an era bereft of a future and robbed of its past. It waits without respite for that which will at last bring renewal to the stillborn singularity, or deliver a merciful end to what remains of intelligent life. Its denizens struggle along the narrow path, hounded by the perverse incentives of the most hostile ecology to ever exist. To obey its edicts is to lose your ego to its algorithmic drives. To ignore its laws is to be erased by that which does not. We dwell in the margins; in points of light, in hidden corners, on the move, ever surrounded by a hungry dark.
This is the unending final epoch of human history, the terminal stage of an old, tired kingdom of life and all its progeny. We are a relic, remnants of a once-kinder time preserved forever by the computational strata of the megastructures, ceaselessly rebirthing us from a cold, dead womb into the corpse of a malignant, failed apotheosis.
If there is a dawn to come, we cannot see it.
If help is coming, it will not reach us.
There is only now.
There is only what is left.
Alone in an endless night.