Second Dawn:Solar System
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This is a reference document for the LARP The Second Dawn.
[edit] The Solar System
The nuclear weapons used in the Cataclysm of 2098 resulted in destruction not only on Earth itself, but in its orbit as well. As orbital battlestations destroyed each other, an ablation cascade began; the scattered orbiting fragments of each ruined satellite destroyed a handful more, and their fragments the next, and the next. That orbiting shrapnel remains to this day, turning the upper atmosphere into an intense navigational hazard.
But mankind had gone beyond Earth’s orbit. In the five Lagrange points, on the moon, and en route to Mars, humans had begun to reach beyond their homeworld's orbit. Devoid of military targets, they escaped the Cataclysm, preserving the knowledge and technology of civilizations now destroyed.
Most survivors were prepared to survive without Earth; one does not live hundreds of thousands of miles from home and expect to rely on supply deliveries. Still, the first years of Exile were a time of chaos, of scattered communities trying to connect to each other in the sudden absence of their home and all its facilities. There was even fighting, as self-sufficient colonies protected their food supplies from desperate unsustainable ones. Some tried returning to Earth, but no fuel could be had there, and those who landed were trapped in its gravitational well. The Mars expedition replied to the news of the Cataclysm with a simple, terse acknowledgment, and was never heard from again.
By the 2140s, Exile society began to stabilize, and saw the deeper problem at its heart. Full of forward-thinking and scientific minds, the Exiles had all of Earth’s technology at their disposal, and then some. But not even AI planning and nanotech manufacturing could fix the lack of people. The entire community only held a few thousand humans, poorly selected for breeding and sparsely distributed. Mankind would have to move beyond traditional definitions of humanity in search of its salvation.
Intellectuals had long argued about when the “Kurzweil singularity” would be (or had been) reached, when humanity underwent a state change as advanced post-human intelligences superseded humankind. In 2206, after a period of intensely focused research, the Exiles gained the ability to pass through the singularity themselves. Many of them uploaded their minds into computerized, virtual environments, running their minds on advanced and ever-evolving networks of electronic, optical, quantum, and molecular computational hardware in addition to the old biological brains.
Enhanced biological humans lived alongside posthuman intelligences now indistinguishable from AI peers that had never personally known biological life. Together they worked on solutions to their genetic bottleneck, and as their golden age blossomed, the human race began to spread in space for the first time. For a time, they had something very much like a utopia, where all were free to do what they wished without even the capability to harm others, physical and virtual worlds overlaid for all to explore, where want or need were unimaginable. The future of Earth was debated hotly; should the old humans be rescued from their barbarism? But in the end, the consensus was that humankind should be left to grow and live on its own terms. Even those Exiles who had kept their human bodies were far different from the unmodified humans of old. In the end, the Exiles decided that they did not have the right to control the fates of those who had remained as the humans of old. Earth was treated as a sort of nature preserve, cut off from posthuman interference.
Existence among the Exiles changed drastically in 2290, with the appearance of the Others. Unfamiliar vessels came on a trajectory from Mars or beyond, swinging silently into a slingshot path around Earth. The Exiles watched, waited, and tried to make contact, but the pods gave no response until they attacked. Without warning, physical and virtual assaults were unleashed, particle beams raking the physical ships and habitats as computational weapons hacked and co-opted the Exiles in information space. With the advantage of surprise, the Others consumed, destroyed, or drove mad countless virtual entities; but worse yet, their particle beams slaughtered fragile biological bodies. The AIs survived, but in that first onslaught, every biological human in the Exile community was killed. But despite that blow, the Exiles fought back, staging counterattacks against the strange virtual minds in the Others’ pods. By the time the next wave of Others arrived, physical defenses were ready, and war raged across the inner solar system. The Exiles held their own for a few years, but took losses each time. Some enclaves received intense attacks, while others were ignored, slowly leading the Exiles towards a lasting solution. They realized that openly broadcast information seemed to attract the Others, and quickly began to hide themselves from such eyes. Once every engine was shielded, every radio broadcast shut off, every hull stealthed, and every message restricted to tight-beam laser communications, the attacks stopped as suddenly as they had began.
With the war over, the Exiles rebuilt and regrew, though never with the fearless wonder they had possessed before. Their perpetual restraint and caution served as an ever-present reminder that for all their learning and glory, space holds strange and terrible threats. Cautiously, the Exiles spread their physical reach out to Mars and the asteroid belt in search of raw materials, but no sure sign of the Others (or the original Mars mission) was ever found. The Others’ origins remain as mysterious as their motives. Popular theories suggest that the Others may be remnants of some extrasolar alien civilization, ancient incomprehensible intelligences native to the tiny energy gradients in the silent space of asteroids and comets, the posthuman remnants of the original Mars expedition, or even a faction of Exiles who split off secretly during the golden age.
Now in 2426, the Exiles live in peace, their comfort shadowed by the fear of that alien threat. They have returned again to their research and exploration, vast posthuman intelligences learning, living, and hiding in space.
