In 2139 Earth experienced first contact. A race of aliens bent on controlling other races to protect themselves determined that Earth was a risk. When they arrived, Earth had virtually no defenses. There had been no need for militaries for a hundred years, there were no longer any wars or conflicts. Crime was exclusively white collar and even then, quite rare. Earth wasn’t prepared; however, it rose and used its technology to defeat the Tranchee race that attacked them. And in doing so, indirectly freed dozens of other races that had been controlled by them. Earth had been fortunate, and very lucky, but now it found itself in an informal leadership position encompassing dozens of civilizations spread across hundreds of light years. Many of those races were appreciative of Earth, but a minority of them were not.

During the years preceding the war, humanity had achieved technological advancements that were far beyond even the wildest expectations of its past generations. These achievements were the direct result of the integration of artificial intelligence with the human brain. It had been expected that the growth of technology over the previous one hundred years would result in 100 years of continued progress at same exponential rates as those being experienced. But that wasn’t the case. Technological growth exceeded that projected pace at an even greater scale, at over 5,000 years of relative progress. This resulted in measured technological improvements in areas such as chip speed and design, energy efficiency, energy generation, control over disease, space technologies, biological integration with technology and aging to be improved at scales approaching exponential growth in exponential growth.

During that time there were very real concerns that machine intelligence would completely surpass and potentially replace human intelligence. This concern was only alleviated when that same machine intelligence was used to biologically supplement human intelligence. Biologically integrated computer intelligence was provided to every person alive. Every individual human now controlled combined human and computer intelligence greater than that of any supercomputer on Earth prior to the implementation of the new technology. Without this monumental change in mankind’s ability to literally integrate itself with technology, the technological change could have been so rapid and so profound that it would have very likely resulted in the simple obsolescence of humanity. The implications were enormous.

The merger of biological and non-biological intelligence, controlled directly by humans, also resulted in ultra-high levels of intelligence. And, that intelligence continued to be completely in human control. And even then, there was so much more to discover. The secrets of the Universe were extensive.

So, humanity had changed in ways that had never been anticipated. However, humans were still human. That part was exactly the same.

Now, Earth was challenged in ways it had never expected as it attempted to protect itself from the many dangers of the galaxy it had never known to exist. And now there was a new race. It was referred to as the