Solar Storms Timeline

What follows is a compilation of events beginning with the most important of the 21st century, roughly corresponding to cycle 24 of the Helios calendar. While it is a much briefer overview than the raw timeline, it serves as the primary template for the 'official' version of events.

Before the Purge

The discovery of the soul was the first major shock that there was yet more to be learned about the world within ourselves. That it occurred within a sapient computer was even more surprising, and in fact it would be several decades before it was conclusively found in humans at all. Some more fundamentalist versions of major religions found this difficult to reconcile, considering the entire finding regarding machines and eventually some animals to be a hoax. These were a rather vocal minority amongst their kin, however some of them did turn violent, and saw the rise of the luddoterrorist movement.

Finding 'souls' inside computers was a mere drop in the bucket compared to the development of anagathic medicine, and its results. As science slowly began unlocking the secrets of immortality, unrest began to grow as certain treatments were shown to be effective. Medical procedural treatments and genetic alteration were not so cheap, however, and the world was nearly thrown to the brink of a 'great class war' - the obscenely rich versus nearly everyone else. In order to avert a crisis, and in a reversion from the typical libertarian movement of the time, the Prometheus Accords were drafted and signed.

On the opposite end of the scale, advanced chemical synthesis technology was quickly finding its way into the hands of consumers, and the fight over who owned the Fountain of Youth became a key factor in the development of the new economy to come. Printers eventually would come to synthesize circuit boards, tools, many other common goods, eventually changing the meaning of the word to something those of the 20th century would call a replicator. This was the beginning of the end of corporations on Earth. Their death was slow and prolonged, eventually replaced by the smaller, closer-knit groups called gerens.

The first human landing on Mars was an international event that dwarfed the Moon landing in fervor. As a colony was established and terraforming begun, a sort of informal agreement, called the Martian Compact, was formed. A kind of preemptive declaration of independence, it did so in more ways than certain controlling parties on Earth cared to accept. In the middle of the 22nd century, the Martian Conflict broke out, and Arean forces decimated the Terran fleet sent to 'enforce order' upon them. Counterattacking, they forced the governments of Earth to submit to a new order, forming the Solar Consortium.

Many great projects were enacted - Venus underwent the first stages of terraforming, and Clarke rings were erected around Earth and Mars alike - massive structures that would facilitate humanity's dominance of the Solar System. The coil arrays, while not exactly a single structure per se, vastly improved travel times to nearby star systems.

After the Consortium took control, it loosely governed the expansion of mankind to the stars. Alpha Centauri was first, of course, beginning with the Centaurus Mission, and discovered the first known alien artifact - the Centaurus Relic. Other missions explored and colonized to other star systems, the first wave of potential colonists went to six other nearby stars, eventually constructing the stargates between them and Sol in the early 23rd century. A second wave would reach and establish stargates in a further eleven star systems, bringing the total inhabited systems to nineteen including Sol and Alpha Centauri. Of these, the Delta Pavonis expedition found evidence of sapient life, though by now long since extinct. The third wave would not arrive at their destination systems until after the Purge.

Of all the events of this era, however, the discovery of the mobius patterns is perhaps the most significant. With the ability to reverse entropy on local scales, they permitted critical machinery to approach - and sometimes even reach - perfect efficiency. That was not all, however, for mankind had unwittingly welded itself to the nearby rein structure, and in doing so, set off a chain of events that would shake the very foundations of the Universe.

The first, signs of this were the striatvari, followed closely by the pyrrhans and angels. Collectively called triates among humans, they are melds formed by humans and sapient entities from another rein, giving them an exotic array of powerful abilities. The Consortium, not approving of these 'abomination's as they called them, attempted to hunt down and exterminate this threat to their power. In response, the triates, their friends and followers grabbed a large Kuiper belt object, parked it at Uranus's L1 Lagrange point, and built the superstation, Ouranos Prime out of it.

The enforcement fleet sent to deal with this rogue power was annihilated in an event known as the Jovian Massacre, by a feat of technological prowess termed the 'tachyon cannon'. This device forced a sort of cold war between the Consortium and the rogue government for nearly a decade, before the Consortium launched a pair of massive attacks against the station, known as the Battle of Saturn and the Battle of Ouranos Prime. Years of preparation and days of maneuvering were over in minutes of conflict, with Ouranos Prime surviving heavy damage. The energies released in this conflict opened the first of the skearns, one cohabitating Saturn's rings and the other surrounding the superstation itself.

While portals to new realities are exceptionally interesting, it also demonstrated the zealotry and recklessness of the Consortium to many more level-headed types, and the Solar Council found itself uprooted, replaced by a more level-headed ruling body. Among the first, and most relevant bodies of legislation passed was the Anti-Homogenization Act. This single act has formed the highest law for all future human societies, and those of the Concord - it describes the single scenario in which mankind would unanimously initiate a preemptive war.

Another key event early in the 23rd century was the destruction of Kennedy Station. Inadvertently discovering the Klein tap, researchers aboard the station were only aware of their mistake for milliseconds before it went out of control, erupting in a massive burst of energy - and tachyons, felt around much of the Galaxy. This event alerted the Three Empires to the presence of humanity, of which the Dyrajt were closest. In possession of a First artifact that would let them forge a single hyperspace route, their fleet emerged in the vicinity of Sirius, and commenced their assault immediately. Reinforcements from Alpha Centauri and Sol decimated the invaders, and the hyperspace route remained open, enabling humans to travel to and experience a much vaster swath of the Milky Way, even if constantly plagued by hostilities.

The Dyrajt made no more coordinated assaults on their own. For the next several years, only isolated, minor conflicts and dire warnings of 'the destroyers' hinted at what was to come.

And so man and machine prepared for war.