XXXX-XXXX- The golden age of baseline humanity; following the industrial revolution commonly viewed as the start of human civilization, humanity develops digital infrastructure and expands into the star system, colonizing other worlds and constructing orbital habitats which could in turn construct more on their own. While the individual peoples and nations of this time are lost to myth, it is known that while it was considered a time of great prosperity, it was built on a shaky and uneven foundation. The distribution of power was lopsided and fractured, with the unity of the species a tentative, fragile thing forged in the years before successive catastrophes would once more split it apart.

XXXX-XXXX- Due to issues like climate change, proxy wars, fuel depletion, financial depressions, and water shortages, the world went through a period of extreme political unrest and imbalance that led to the collapse of many nation states. The wealthiest individuals of the era pooled their resources into securing networked city-states that, through a monopoly on advanced technology, computer parts, and health-enhancing gene therapies, grew to dominate much of the world. When it consolidated into a proper political entity, it set about subduing or annexing the rest of the planet, forming the core of what would become the Solar Empire.

XXXX-XXXX- The homeworld returns to the stars, re-contacting the now-independent colonies and orbital habitats of the solar system and bringing them under the sway of the Solar Empire, which it now declares itself to be. When the last holdouts fall, the empire rolls out mandatory gene therapy for certain social classes, forming the basis of the genetic caste system. Those deemed to fall below a certain income line or simply considered undesirable are modified to have their bodies suited to particular environments to aid in colonization, while what remained of the middle class is tuned towards particular jobs and tasks. The ruling elites apply the best alterations to themselves, eventually becoming living works of art; the pinnacle of mundane human genetic science. These new humans are termed locaste, hicaste, and urcaste respectively. General AI research is heavily suppressed and regulated for fear of creating a competitor to their own authority, though lesser algorithmic systems are widely used in entertainment.

XXXX-XXXXX- The Solar Empire endures for millennia, a static society powered by inertia and the lack of any outside threat, the settlements beyond the capital kept in line by a mix of propaganda, terror tactics, and reliance on the homeworld for many high-end technologies and certain other imports. Though local black markets exist, they are not enough for long-term independence. Old cultures are erased and homogenized as the Solar Empire slowly and meticulously weeds out any modes of thought which are not itself.

XXXXX-XXXXX- Dissidents on the edge of the system discover/invent/are infested by N-Matter, a self-replicating, highly complex form of nanomachine, and so gained the ability to effortlessly integrate with and produce internal cybernetics without a complex supply chain. These cybernetics were heritable, resulting in populations of increasingly inhuman cyborgs proliferating across the underbelly of the empire. Upon discovery, the inexplicable nature of the phenomena prompts campaigns of capture and extermination, with entire cities and orbital habitats being wiped out as the situation escalates. At the same time, those which avoid such programs are selected for increasingly brutal and survival-oriented psychologies and upgrades, becoming increasingly capable of holding their own against the imperial death squads and becoming the first generation of what would later become "deviant" posthumans. For the first time since its origins, the empire faces something which can challenge it.

XXXXX-XXXXX- The population of N-matter humans reaches a critical mass as they discover ways to transplant N-matter into others and create living weapons slaved to the will of their creators. At the same time, the Solar Empire discovers enough of the nature of N-matter to incorporate it into their own military. However, the edge in both skill and sheer quantity of N-matter remains with the deviant faction, which for the first time rises up and incites open revolt against the Solar Empire.

XXXXX-XXXXX- Facing an outside-context problem and poorly equipped to deal with it, the Solar Empire struggles to adapt even with all the resources at its disposal. With third parties forming between the inhuman deviant hordes and the imperial castes, the empire fragments and shrinks, the conflict culminating in a decisive blow which exterminates the urcaste, leaving the hicaste bureaucratic apparatus, a system designed to orbit around the imperial core, leaderless and fragmented.

XXXXX-XXXXX- Following this, deviant victory is snatched from their grasp by unexpected evolutionary developments in their lineages. Being the earliest adopters of N-matter, many were unprepared for the degree of mental fortitude required to sustain their egos in a constantly changing and evolving body, and their discarding of their human psychology only exacerbated the conditions leading to their devolution. Many of their number experience ego death, revert to feral, instinctual behavior, and proliferate throughout the Solar System, leaving the survivors to grapple with how to preserve their psyches after collectively drawing so close to the edge of oblivion.

XXXXX-XXXXX- With both sides collapsed, the locaste seizes power for itself, undergoing a renaissance of AI, cybernetics, and transhuman augmentation without the stifling imperial regulations preventing them from innovating, while the hicaste follow them in what holdouts they can maintain. While many fail to crack the proprietary genelines making up their clade, suffering genetic degeneration and developing countless hereditary diseases and disorders kept at bay by cybernetics and replacement cloned organs, others manage to marry the best aspects of biological and cybernetic augments, becoming beings to rival the urcaste but without the psychological and evolutionary baggage (or sophistication) of deviant life. Others dispense with the human form entirely, wearing shells of metal with their remaining organs contained in mechanical sarcophagi within. This era was termed the Transitional Era, where biomechanical organisms dominated and the first of the arcology-factories came to be.

XXXXX-XXXXX- While N-matter proliferated during the late imperial era, used for logistics and development to rapidly construct military bases and expand industrial zones, the Transitional Era saw exponential growth of N-matter replication and usage, with many humans clustering into titanic autarkic megacities that themselves expanded rapidly as various factions raced to control wild deposits of N-matter, grown from the massed dead of the prior great war. indeed, many abandoned imperial fortresses and urban districts created through N-matter grew feral in this time period, becoming saturated with unclaimed N-matter and thus becoming valuable resources and points of conflict.

XXXXX-XXXXX- As a result of the immense amounts of N-matter being harvested and processed, along with the conflicts over high saturation areas, some of the largest-scale conflicts in human history so far would be waged. Biomechanical drone swarms, slave-weapons, and elite transhuman war bodies would fight viciously in conflicts decided beforehand by the cold arithmetic of logistics and mass strategy over individual heroism and tactics. Though that has been the rule through all of human history, it has never been more true than this era.

XXXXX-XXXXX- As these conflicts continued, the growth of both feral megastructures and tamed arcologies proliferated, until there was no distinguishing between one or the other. The solar system's online infrastructure, once a heavily regulated and sectioned-off network of relays, is now a digital ecosystem of weaponized malware in which islands of safety and stability are tenuously connected. N-matter, a substance which had once been concentrated in the bodies of people, and later specific points in the Solar System, now saturated it entirely. As with the N-matter deviants beforehand, this buildup of energy would eventually reach critical mass.

XXXXX-XXXXXX- Though the specific details cannot be determined, the primary theory is that either humans accumulated sufficient quantities of N-matter to push their forms to a state beyond even the most developed N-matter organism, or that consciousnesses spontaneously emerged within the solar network, now called the datasphere, and did the same. It may have been both at once, or something else entirely. The result is the same. The arcologies split open like titanic chrysalises, and the beings known as the Myriad emerge. Unspeakably vast and powerful existences only made possible by the star system's high-energy state, the traumatic birthing of their forms simultaneously spelled their doom; the wounds inflicted on the megastructures would inevitably lead to the Fade, a transitioning of the megastructures to a low-energy state which could not support even one of their number. Seemingly unable to accept death, each would wage a war against all others and all beneath them.

XXXXXX-XXXXXX- The time of the Myriad, though brief, represented the end of humanity's dominance of the Solar System. The majority of thinking beings perished in this era, and the ones that did not struggled to retain knowledge of the past. Humanity regressed to ignorant tribalism in many cases, with what knowledge remained a fraction of what was, most of it either hoarded by what bastions of high culture survived or buried in the depths of the datasphere, retrievable only in fragmented, corrupted bits and pieces. The Myriad died of starvation, unable to harvest the energy needed to sustain themselves, and the Fade began in earnest. Excess clouds of processed matter suffuse the solar system in an impossible fog, and the light of the stars is lost, save on rare occasions where a glimpse of the greater cosmos can be seen. Humanity is alone.

XXXXXX-XXXXXX- Across the solar system, the megastructures began to grow dormant, the once-great flows of power, breathable air, and other vital resources becoming mere trickles. Though still enough to sustain humanity, they were locked behind considerable effort and could no longer be freely accessed. Places like earth, with a still-functioning atmosphere and the ability to natively support life, became precious beyond compare as much of the rest of the solar system remained habitable only through careful rationing, management, and repair of what biomass and fuel they possessed. This was an era of ghosts; many sought to escape the tyranny of biology through copying their mind into a digital format, existing within the datasphere or a mechanical body. Though as the datasphere itself grew more hostile, many found themselves forced back out in a fragmented, half-lucid state if they returned at all. Rogue machines grow in number, the era of AIs as beings constrained to set behaviors and rigid programming ending in favor of inhuman minds just as versatile and adaptable as organic ones begins. Hardlight technology is also a child of this era, even today considered something outside the comprehension of most intelligences.

XXXXXX-??????- The megastructures reach a stable low-energy state. No longer constantly changing and expanding faster than humans can adapt to, their movements are slow enough that tribes become cities, and cities become states. A long, slow peace settles upon the land; though it is a peace of stagnation rather than true harmony. Just as it was during the age of stone, the night is suffused with low-level skirmishing between small bands of wanderers and civilizations, and the wilds teem with beasts which prey on men. But unlike the first age of humanity, the monsters are just as clever and dangerous as they are. Humanity's position is not above the ecosystem around it, but a part of it. Only those who master N-matter can be said to have control over their surroundings, and even that only extends so far. It is in this era that the N-matter core is developed, codifying the optimal method of taking in N-matter with minimal risk to one's ego, and the process of wholly developing an N-matter body, a transcendent body, is devised. Digital life ever seeks to breach into the physical world, and the remnants of the Myriad try in vain to reconstruct themselves into the gods they once were, all while the compacted layers of a million civilizations shift, stir, and collapse again.