Today\'s update is all about the Isorian Shard and how they came to be:
THE ISORIAN SHARD
In ages past the world of Isori stood at the forefront of human civilisation, renowned throughout all of Antarean space for its pioneering dimensional research, its vast fleets and its unrivalled prosperity. According to Isorian legend, the planet was amongst the first of Earth’s settlements, the first to be fully terraformed, and the first to establish its own colonies independently of Earth itself. Isori was hailed as a paradise where want and strife had been dispelled by the power of advanced science and rational government. Of the three great human civilisations of the Sixth Age the Isorian Senatex was the largest and most powerful, ever expanding its beneficent influence over the millions of human and alien worlds of Antarean space.
A prolonged series of inter-dimensional tremors wrought havoc with the wormhole nexus and brought the Sixth Age to a cataclysmic end. The gates that held human civilisation together collapsed and the soaring trans-dimensional towers of Antares toppled into the star’s photosphere. Following this unparalleled disruption to the fabric of space-time, none of the connecting wormholes survived intact, although some were to prove more heavily damaged than others. The Builders had foreseen such events, however, as they foresaw so much of what future ages would bring. Their great trans-dimensional machine slowly set about the work of rebuilding itself. Over the following centuries many wormholes were reconstructed and reconnected by the internal processes of Antares. Like a wounded creature the nexus slowly healed and the ancient gateways began to open once more. Those lying at the periphery of the quake were recovered relatively quickly. Some wormholes were re-routed so that distances between worlds were now significantly longer than before. However, not all the worlds of the Spill were recovered; many of the most densely populated worlds remain lost to this day, their gateways yet to emerge from the photosphere of Antares.
During this long period of isolation many human colonies failed altogether. Thousands of advanced civilisations declined to barbarism. Only in a very few places was the light of knowledge carried onwards. One such place was Isori, with the ample resources of the Isorian system behind it. The time of isolation cut Isori from all the other worlds of Antarean space, but it did not prove devastating to Isorian civilisation as it did to so many other worlds, human and alien alike. The Isorians merely pondered the universe as they now perceived it, and predicted a future where even the vast resources of Isori would be exhausted. None then knew whether the wormholes would ever reopen or when. The Isorians cast their eyes upon the galaxy about them and upon the nearest stars.
Several other solar systems lay within twenty-five light years of Isori’s sun Isor, though none were part of Antarean space. Only spacecraft travelling at near-light speeds could journey to these remote stars. Isorian exploratory drones had already investigated the closest two, revealing possible sources of raw materials and at least one rocky world that might one day be terraformed and settled. Because it took a spacecraft at least ten years to reach even the closest of these new worlds, and five years for any information to come back, no manned missions had ever been attempted. With the coming of isolation all that would change.
Applying their vast technical skills the Isorians began to improve space drives and discovered ways to increase the endurance of spacecraft and their crews. The flexible nature of space-fabric had long been understood, and the Isorian’s used their knowledge to build ships capable of reaching para-light speeds previously thought to be practically impossible. This reduced the time taken to reach the stars by almost half, and within a few decades the first colonies had been established within the Oblon and Tsates systems. Although these advances made it possible to travel to new planets, the Isorian colonies were still separated by a communications link of five years in the case of Oblon and nearly eight for Tsates. Only a constant armada of drone craft could hope to maintain either colony. Over hundreds of years these first Isorian colony worlds became established, though never fully independent, and the Isorians prepared to expand to even more distant stars in local space.
By the time the Isorians have settled five solar systems they had built up a network of far-flung colonies separated by years of travel and communication time, but serviced by drone fleets moving constantly between then, connecting the Isorian worlds to each other and to Isori itself. It was only after almost a thousand years of real-space expansion in this way, that contact was re-established with Antares and the Isorians were able to reconnect with the wider universe of Antarean space. As more wormholes became functional, Isori found itself once more the leading light of a new human renaissance. The Isorians revisited many of the most populous and technically advanced worlds of the Sixth Age and found them abandoned or fallen to barbarism. Having carried the torch of human knowledge during the long darkness, the Isorians were able to rekindle the spark of civilisation wherever they found human survivors. The new civilisation spread rapidly thanks to the development of integrated machine intelligence –IMTel - by the Isori Senatexis as a means of conveying technology to the new Isorian colonies of local space. Other worlds that had preserved and even developed new knowledge were absorbed into the new civilisation, feeding the IMTel and further promoting the spread of technologies. As more and more worlds emerged into Antarean space, they were joined with the new Isorian led civilisation. The civilisation became known as the Concord of Humanity a union of independent IMTel Shards bound together by shared machine intelligence. And so the Seventh Age began, and the Concord spread throughout the worlds of the great Spill, until it encompassed half the human worlds of Antarean space.
Meanwhile back upon Isori a strange thing had happened. A drone ship exploring a new star system some twenty five light years from Isor had gone missing. Of course, it took nearly twenty five years for that information to be known, and by the time the Isorians knew what was happening their most distant colonies had been attacked and wiped out. The Isorians mobilised their fleets and so began the centuries long struggle between the Isori Senatex and the strange alien race of Tsan Kiri. Of the Tsan Kiri the Isorians knew nothing at first, except that the Tsan Kiri were a race at least as technically advanced as the Concord and in many ways more so. The two races strove for mastery not only in battle, but also in the technologies vital to both. Analytic probes released clouds of nanobots onto Tsan Kiri worlds to infiltrate alien machinery. Alien spore fields infected Isorian planets and gnawed their way into the IMTel data bases. Of course, those data bases were protected – incompatible data was rejected – just as the Tsan Kiri technology armed itself to repel the attempts of Isorian probes to subvert it. Battles ranged over the Isorian colonies, and as the fighting neared Isori itself the balance of power swung in favour of the defenders. The sheer distances of interstellar space meant that the Isorians were able to bring their forces to bear upon an enemy whose own lines of communication were stretched across more than twenty light years of space.
When the Isorians went over to the offensive the two civilisations had been at war for nearly two hundred years. In that time the Isorians had met their foes upon the battlefield innumerable times, had fought them in the depths of space, and had contested asteroids and the very stars themselves. They came to know their enemy very well. Unusually, the Tsan Kiri were a silicon-based life form, in appearance almost spider-like, though possessed of great intelligence and uncompromising ferocity. They had destroyed several near-neighbouring races before encountering the human colonies of Isori. Using near-light speed drives they had built an empire of a dozen or so star systems. Their homeworld lay almost forty light years from Isori – a huge distance over which to wage an interstellar war.
As the Isorians gained ascendancy upon the battlefield so to they began to overcome the resistance of the Tsan Kiri technology. Much of this alien technology was based upon a biomechanical principle that was inherently incompatible with human technology just as it was resistant to it. Ironically, it was the Tsan Kiri themselves who provided the Isorians with the means to infiltrate their technical base. The aliens had devised a silicon-carbon interface spore as a means of attacking the Isorian IMTel at source. At first this was successful and the machine intelligence of the Tsatean Shard was corrupted giving the Tsan Kiri access to all the knowledge of the IMTel. What the Tsan Kiri hadn’t appreciated was that IMTel, deprived of its layers of defence by the interface spore, rather than rejecting the influence of the Tsan Kiri technology very quickly merged with it. Unaware of what had happened spacecraft carried the modified IMTel from Tsate to Isori. Soon the new hybrid IMTel had spread into Antarean space itself and to the worlds of the Concord. This half-human half-alien IMTel brought many new wonders to the worlds it reached, and many other strange things beside, for the IMTel was as much a reflection of the living creatures who formed a part of it as it was machine.
It took some hundred of years more for the Isorians to overcome the Tsan Kiri, whose homeworld they found incinerated and lifeless – abandoned by the last of the aliens as they fled from Isori’s resurgent armies. But by now the Isorians carried new technologies that combined the best of both civilisations. Isorian troops were protected by phase armour and their bodies encased in bio-silicon interface suits. If the Isorians presented something of an alien appearance that was not perhaps surprising – for the nanobot clouds of the hybrid IMTel filled the air, flowed in the water, and pulsed through the living tissue of Isorians and all the worlds touched by the new IMTel.
As the new hybrid IMTel spread wider it encountered other planetary IMTel increasingly remote from the original source of Isori. These distant worlds of the Concord had evolved sufficient differences to the Isorians that their IMTel proved incompatible. It wasn’t that this created any antipathy, simply that the two vast integrated intelligences no longer recognised each other – they were no longer integrated. They had become incompatible. The Isorian IMTel and Concord now formed two separate civilisations that shared a common ancestry, but which were unable to interface. Their populations, driven and moulded by integrated machine societies, neither recognised this as a problem nor considered it a problem they could address. They simply divided. They had become, through no human will or intent, incompatible. The worlds that were host to the Isorian IMTel now formed a part of a new and separate entity: the Isorian Shard.
So now you know!
