The first human trials of Doctor Rose Scarlet’s serum for clinical immortality were plagued with failure. They took place in a small South-American town in the foothills of the Andes. At least one Russian spy was captured and subjected to the experiments while attempting to procure the serum for her technocrat father. Any other spies that were captured died before their allegiance could be revealed.

The two survivors of those early trials were the aforementioned Russian spy and a young pilot from the Midwestern United States. The Russian got through on grit. The pilot got through on luck. She was so lucky she earned the nickname “Fate”, which quickly replaced her actual name in all conversation and subsequent paperwork. Lorian Fate was then assigned to join the first manned expedition to mars, given her resistance to radiation poisoning. The Russian, whose alias of choice was Sophie, cut all ties with her family when Russia invaded Ukraine in the early 2020s.

Lorian’s first round trip to Mars took place aboard a starship built by SpaceX. She was the only member of the crew not to eventually die of radiation-related illnesses. Future manned expeditions away from earth packed significantly more radiation-blocking armor, and incorporated magnetic deflector arrays.

Lorian’s second trip out to Mars was for the inaugural test of the Hyperdrive, a device designed to shift a volume of space along a fifth axis of spacetime. The test was successful, paving the way for the construction of FTL starships.

The advent of affordable space travel and FTL had only just dawned when world war III kicked off in earnest. It had grown out of the war in Ukraine, with the expansion of China into Taiwan and other pacific Island nations bringing the US into open conflict with the So-called Communist allies. Sophie assured Lorian that the Russian people were definitely capitalists, but the war had little to do with ideology and everything to do with money and power. Several tech moguls fled the planet, buying passage for their support staff and sponsoring colonies.

And thus the Technocrats formed the first interplanetary corporations. Apple migrated into orbit, as did Microsoft, though Mr. Gates joined Mr. Jobs six feet under the surface of the earth. Mr. Musk was buried on Mars after succumbing to a confluence of failing health and supply chain problems.

Doctor Rose’s serum had been refined to be less of a gamble, but doing so had reduced its potency. By the time the technocrats got a hold of it, it was only good for an extra five or six centuries of life, unlike the theoretical limitless extension it had given Lorian and Sophie. Doctor Rose had never taken the serum herself, and died in a vehicle crash on earth.

After the return of the first successful mission to the Proxima Centauri star system, Lorian joined a colony ship bound for the Epsilon Eridani star system. The colony was geared toward resource extraction with an eye for future starship construction. There was, unfortunately, no planet suitably earthlike to be worth terraforming. They made a base on Epsilon Eridani C anyway, and Lorian settled in well enough, living out of a manor maintained by androids.

The next major development was the mind-machine interface. Cyborgs were a thing now. Medical implants of various types, including prostheses, were already fairly common, but now it was possible to directly stimulate the optic nerve, auditory nerve, and spinal column to simulate full-dive virtual reality, and teach the motor cortex to drive entirely new phantom limbs. The Technocrats capitalized on the atrocious healthcare system they’d dragged with them and incorporated all sorts of proprietary tech and service agreements into their use. Soon cyborgs found themselves in a perpetual cycle of paying off the corps to keep from being repossessed. Lorian managed to avoid that fate by regenerating damaged body parts and maintaining legacy interfaces like a packrat.

In Ross 128, human rights were abolished by the governing corporations, reclassing all chassis hosting sentience as company assets. They then slaughtered each other in a fierce competition when one corp created a self-replicating clone army. The others chewed through the population of forced conscripts, eventually running out when the clones had only a single survivor. Of course, as a self-replicating army, that one survivor proceeded to harvest the detritus of the battle and build a FTL capable corvette. Jane and her sisters then made their way to DX Cancri, where they encountered Lorian.

The fact that hyperspace travel attracted higher-dimensional predators was largely unknown until they emerged in Solar orbit and made for the Jovian shipyards. The clones were glad to have something morally acceptable to shoot after having been introduced to morality by Lorian.

The nations of Sol and those surrounding it were less pleased by the existence of such a large company of mercenaries with training in both large scale and guerrilla tactics. There were a dozen or more attempts by various nations to secure control of the Ross128 army, all of which failed through a mix of competence and luck. To avoid another instance of the debt-slavery that resulted in their creation, the nations signed a treaty outlawing the use of networked bio-mechanical implants, and a restriction on nerve-interface devices to limb prostheses movement. Genetic engineering and cloning was also further restricted, with a ban on neural tissue replication.

Of course all the governments kept their black sites where they attempted to replicate the Ross128 clones, to varying degrees of success.

Some time later, after the human colonies had spread to a thousand star systems and a hundred terraformed worlds, Lorian encountered the wayward heiress of a planetary monarchy. The girl, Lucy Clark, had stowed away on her father’s starship, and enlisted in a black-ops division of the local star marshals. Lorian kept an eye on Lucy, and when the black-ops outfit was inevitably dissolved and disavowed, she hired Lucy to work for her courier business.

Lorian had established a packet delivery service way back when she first moved to Eridani C, And employed a number of Ross128 clones that had ‘retired’ from their navy to take up observation roles. The remaining Ross128 clones who had not perished in glorious battle against the higher-dimensional predators or the capture teams dispatched by various nations had withdrawn to Ross128 and stripped the star system of everything they could, then abandoned all but a single refueling depot (with a well stocked bar, garden, and distillery) and scattered to the uninhabited systems. Whenever a colony ship arrived, they would flee the system, leaving behind terraforming systems booby-trapped to dissolve anyone and anything that breached their security perimeter, as well as the technology contained within.

The clones became known as the Fae, for their inhuman beauty, depth of cunning, and habit of vanishing into thin air. As their origin became shrouded in myth, it became common knowledge that the Fae were responsible for seeding life throughout the galaxy when industrialization drove them from their homes. The fact they were once slaves to human constructs was forgotten, and their tendency to break any and everyone out of lockup was chalked up to a penchant for mischief.

Sophia eventually evolved into a dragon after undergoing numerous biomechanical augmentations as a corporate spy.

Sophia dragged Lorian, Lucy and several Fae into a medieval war on a terraformed planet about twenty parsecs from earth. (65.2ly) The planet had regressed in technology level because of a disruptor device in orbit that prevented hyperdrive operation within a dozen Aus (over an hour and a half of light-speed travel)

Use of firearms was limited to stationary emplacements due to the survival of textile printers that could manufacture spacesuits. The recoil of weapons capable of firing the hypervelocity rounds necessary to penetrate the suits would shatter the soldier that fired them since there was no functional power armor on the planet. And rocketry had to be entirely reinvented with only a few emergency flares as a basis. Swords were thus common, extraordinarily sharp, and occasionally augmented by an oscillator. Handheld Crossbows and compressed air weapons were used to deliver explosive or toxic payloads.

The primary limiting factor was a lack of battery and circuitry replication tech. A monarchy and nobility sprang up around the technological relics that survived the crash of the ships. Eventually Lorian was able to build and launch a chemically powered missile to disable the disruptor device using a nuclear warhead. It took a few centuries.

Credit:

ESO/R.-D.Scholz et al. (AIP)