Faction Blog — Beyond the Spozak

History

At the closing of Era-1, religious fervor was at a fever pitch on the outskirts of the Planetary League. The League had grown corrupt, and contact had just been made with an ancient alien empire,(The Empire of 1,000,000 Suns), which many had heretofore considered to be a story traded among the aliens to frighten the humans. The time was ripe for a change.

General Potus Clark, commander of the garrison on Gabriel, in concert with the Church of God, was ready to supply it. Crowned Emperor of Mankind in GSC 12506 by the supreme leaders of the Church (the Ayatollah-Maximus, the Uberpope, and the Supreme Rabbi), General Clark set out to show the galaxy what real power was. Setting up a capitol on Gabriel, the Holy Empire of Man took form.

The Emperor, and the Church of God were also joined in their war, known as the Great Reckoning, by a number of military contractors. Even the megacorporations Gazillion, which had its own network of colonies and holdings, and Klon-Tek which supplied legions of cloned soldiers.

The Great Reckoning saw the Planetary League crumble, and the Holy Empire of Man rise to power. Dedicated to gaining and concentrating power as quickly as possible, the Empire was constantly at war with anyone unfortunate enough to be in the way. The Empire did form alliances of convenience for the purposes of defeating mutual enemies, but these were always short-lived. The Great Reckoning continued until the Planetary League was utterly crushed, and the Imperial Army reached Earth. Upon his victorious landing on Earth (in the city holiest to the three branches of the Church of God, Jerusalem), The Emperor was proclaimed to be the Messiah by the Supreme Rabbi, anointed as the Second Coming by the Uberpope, and hailed as the Mahdi by the Ayatollah-maximus.

As time marched on, the Emperor aged, and was gradually augmented with more and more technology, until one day he disappeared from public view, and went into the Imperial Hospital for an extended stay. The population prayed and cried as the surgeons worked. Then the Emperor Emerged in his new form, fully robotic, at least in appearance, (exact details were NOT forthcoming), and announced himself to have "Ascended from the Flesh". Blasphemous rumors abounded after this blessed event that the Emperor had died, and been replaced by a robot. (Those caught spreading such rumors were not heard from again.)

After a period of consolidating power, and numerous small wars, the Holy Empire of Man embarked on what was to be its greatest military campaign, the War of the Empires. This galaxy-spanning conflict was the culmination of the very reason the Emperor rose to power in the first place. It was a long, punishing war, but in the end, The Holy Empire of Man shattered and defeated the Empire of 1,000,000 Suns. At the end of this war, the supreme leaders of the Church of God proclaimed that the Emperor had ascended to Godhood, and the people of the Empire began worshiping him directly.

There was another long period of relative quiet, filled with all kinds of small conflicts after the War of the Empires. The Holy Empire of Man was in its prime when Troniac returned to the galaxy, and the War of the Gods began. Troniac was leading a substantial force, and Troniac's followers in the galaxy were staggeringly numerous. After a long, grinding war, the Holy Empire of Man emerged victorious, but its decline and collapse were now inevitable.

Further centuries of warfare continued. The Empire even had some non-trivial victories, but low-ranking nobles were carving out their own states, multiple local rebellions had ignited, and on the fringes of the galaxy, the Galactic Republic was gaining strength.

Due to the enormous size of the Holy Empire of Man, the eventual War of Galactic Unification that would establish the Galactic Republic was a long one. Even though the Galactic Republic had a huge technological edge and was very popular among the numerous enemies of the Empire, the sheer scale of the conflict was gargantuan. The War of Galactic Unification ended with a climactic battle in which the Emperor was personally defeated.

History

Long ago, before the dawn of human civilization, there existed a species with intelligence and technology beyond even what we have now. The Cielioids, (named for the planet human explorers mistakenly believed to be their home-world), set out to colonize space. The actual home-world of the Cielioid people is unknown at the present, no doubt one of the old core-worlds of the Empire, but the important thing is that they set out to conquer, and conquer they did.

The first Emperors of the E1MS were the winners of the long war that united the Cielioids under a single government. The original core worlds were colonized via generation ship, until the invention of the Spatial Compression device made more rapid expansion possible. Along the way many of the planets they found had biospheres, and some even had intelligent life. All the nascent civilizations they encountered were summarily conquered and brought into the Empire. The name “Empire of 1,000,000 Suns” dates back to early in the Empire’s history. The actual name means "Empire of 16,777,216 Suns", (which is 8 to the 8th power), since the Empire uses base 8 numbers, and this is considered a lucky number. Before this time it was known as the Cielioid Empire, and by the time Era-1 began, it contained around a billion stars.

After the Empire conquered a new planet, it brought in automated industries where most of the work was done by robots to form the base of the planet’s new economy. The native populations worked in agriculture, or service jobs, or the arts, but the industrial jobs were reserved for robots as much as possible. This had several advantages. Robots didn’t demand better working conditions, or higher wages, or rebel against the government. Native populations were generally happy to reap the benefits of an industrial economy without having to do the actual work, and when a planet did rebel against the Empire, the Emperor just shut off all the industry, wrecking the economy until the people fell in line.

There was a strict caste system in the Empire, with Cielioids being ranked by subspecies, and the other races being ranked by relative influence, but all below the Cielioids. Below all the castes were the robots and AIs, which belonged to none of the castes, and were treated as property.

The E1MS existed in the center of a star-rich region called the Spozak. Even before the 1,000 Years War, there was an imperial decree against exploring or colonizing beyond the bounds of the Spozak, because it was believed by the imperial court that outside influences would disrupt the balance of power. The Empire was also bordered by Ool-Tyr and Nalorgian pirates that threatened Imperial interests. The officially sanctioned state philosophies were set up to reinforce the balance of power, so staying inside the Spozak became a tradition within the Empire.

Kroah Dashan was an important figure during this portion of Imperial history, inventing and improving many technologies important to the Empire.

The 1,000 Years War changed many things within the E1MS. When the Computer-God Troniac showed up and started leading the robots in open rebellion against the Empire, most of the robotic, industrial workforce either stopped working, or took over their factories for the other side. The Empire responded by turning to organic labor. First, the conquered races were pressed into service, re-igniting the embers of resistance within them. Toward the end of the war, and in its aftermath, several populations split from the Empire to form the bulk of the breakaway states. Later, Cielioids themselves had to start working in war production, and the “Centaur” subspecies was the result. In order to win the war, the Empire constructed a special robot to lead elite troops against Troniac. General Zarlok (also known as “Zarlok the Betrayer”) was the first robot to be awarded the Imperial Star, the Empire’s highest military honor, for banishing Troniac to a distant part of the Universe.

After the war, the Empire could no longer continue as it had, because of the massive disruptions of its economy and society caused by the robot rebellion. Planets continued to break away. Robots demanded, and got rights. The government was reformed as a constitutional monarchy, with the Emperor reduced to being a figurehead. General Zarlok, the war hero,(considered a traitor by the remaining followers of Troniac), ended up betraying even the empire it had fought to defend, killing millions of innocent civilians in a horrific attack on Artanis 4. After being convicted, Troniac’s body was deactivated, and its program was removed from its memory banks, and beamed out of an old radio navigation beacon, toward a (presumably) uninhabited part of the galaxy, as a symbolic form of exile.

Eventually, things settled into a new routine. There were occasional border skirmishes with the breakaway states, and elections at regular intervals. Things loosened up a bit from the strict old ways, and society got a bit more egalitarian, even for the lower classes. Even during these times, the Empire continued to expand slowly. The constitutional monarchy lasted throughout Era-1, and well into Era-2, when the threat of war with the Holy Empire of Man caused the senate to return full executive authority to the emperor.

During Era-2, the E1MS experienced a renewed surge of strength, and rapidly expanded its borders. After the figurehead Emperor was returned to power, many small wars of expansion took place, (including several conflicts aimed at recapturing the breakaway states). There was also a general crackdown on dissent, and viewpoints opposing the official imperial doctrines were widely censored. There was constant conflict with the Holy Empire of Man, leading up to the War of the Empires.

The War of the Empires was the final conflict for the E1MS, as the superior military might of the Holy Empire of Man gradually crushed the E1MS, and the remnant fled to the edge of the galaxy, where they joined the beginnings of the Galactic Republic.