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History

A brief history of the galaxy

Billions of standard years ago, the Universe happened. Priests of various faiths will disagree about the details, and so will scientists, but it's fairly undeniable that we're there. The theory most in favor at the moment speculates a Big Bang following up the Big Crunch of an older universe.

About 10 million years later, the background temperature of the universe was between 32 and 212 degrees, compatible with liquid water and common biological chemical reactions. This situation lasted for 7 million years, during which primitive life appeared in the primordial soup as it cooled. As the universe expanded, these seeds of life froze, and at least some of them must have eventually ended up on habitable plants after an eon's travel as space dust or aback an asteroid.

This is the best explanation for why the vast majority of life shares enough of a common matrix that things will usually try to eat each other regardless of what world they came from, and why KI applies to almost all forms of life.

What happened in the intervening time, we may never know; several worlds have a plausible claim to being the first to develop interstellar travel, and on each of those, the schoolchildren learn of that claim as fact. Interestingly, the people of the remarkably tiny Kerbol system make a big deal of having discovered inter-planetary- travel before everyone else.

Historians know that there have been at least two galaxy-spanning civilizations before the Empire, but traces of them are scarce due to a particularly unenlightened period in Imperial history where such traces were systematically removed in order to promulgate the notion that the Empire's foundation was the true beginning of history. This policy, known as the Damnatio Memoriae, was instantiated by emperor Loris VI, of whom appropriately enough nothing else is known as his reign ended in an interfamily coup.

The current Empire was founded by Frankenn I, of the Kamble dynasty; stories about this person give any portrait oe cares to imagine, from a dashing hero to a cunning villainess, but the impact of their legacy is undeniable.

Well-known emperors of various dynasties shaped galactic policy to the best and sometimes worst of their wits; schoolchildren are expected to remember the most important, such as Aburanis (who systematized a standard galactic law code the bases of which are still in use), Manowell the Bloody (who is, arguably, the reason why humanoids constitute a majority of the galactic population - ironically, he was a hexapod), Cleon I, who fought against the Scoure Lord previous to the last one and ushered in the previous Interregnum, and Ammenetic the Great, who returned the empire to stability after the Pirate Wars. Due to the relative slow speed of communication compared to migration and commerce, the few attempts in history to make the Empire centralized doomed themselves to failure in less than a generation.

The most recent historical figure of galactic note is, of course, the last Scourge Lord, an unnamed usurper (Supposedly, her birth name was Annie) with an almost unparalleled mastery of KI who installed herself as vizier to the weak Agis XIV and instituted a brutal rule by proxy by cranking out a cadre of clone generals with her own quintessentially superimposed mind patterns as their guiding light.

As most evil rulers in the galaxy go, she was defeated by a motley crew of unlikely heroes; given the size of her master plan, this involved lot of people, and nowadays every planet in the galaxy will claim to have sent one of their children to the assassination mission. The mission's success wiped out the Scourge Lord, all the conspirators, and enough of the hyperindustrial Imperial capital that most Earthicans - including the imperial court - ended up relocating elsewhere. Despite the elevated background radiance values, farmers and scrappers still live there.

In just a few years, the Scourge Lord duplicates, possessing all the authoritarianism of the original but almost none of the brilliance or savvy (let alone KI abilities), managed to make a complete mess of the sectors under their control and be overthrowed with varying degrees of messiness.

Today, Padisha Robertus Ibn Fuad al-Seyefa, the current Spiral Emperor, rules uncontested over the galaxy from his throne on Neotrantor, far more competently (but noticeably more long-windedly) than his predecessor Dagobert II. Very few people would argue this point in front of his elite corps of Photon Knights, or even his space navy regulars; however, this is largely due to their lack of sense of humor about political orthodoxy more than due to historical or galactographic accuracy.

Following the actions of the Scourge Lord, the Empire only has political control of the galaxy's core, with its economic influence spreading to maybe half the habitable worlds out there; the Imperial Navy is too busy keeping up an appearance of strength to make any actual concentrated move that would leave sections of the Imperial remnant undefended. In a symbolic exception of note, General Bel Riose has recently been able to recapture the old capitol world, now called Hame, for Robertus.

The rest of the galaxy has splintered into planet-states, loose confederations, despotic systemwide rulerships, and all sort of other modes of governance or non-governance; one of the few stable presences in that sense has been Dark Lord Stra-Khul, a Scourge Lord duplicant who turned out to be a capable administrator once the personality imprint wore off.