Selflessness, pacifism, giving back to the group, and driving out tyranny are all tenants of the old Freespacer ways. Their history is a tale of great desperation and strife, yet also a noble quest to tenaciously stick to their values no matter what the universe throws at them.

Compiled here is a detailed history of their founding, evolution and recent turbulent past up to YE 39, condensed for use by new and oldie players alike.

Like many humanoid races in the currently known galactic cluster, the Deoradh, more commonly known as Freespacers, were once under the rule of some ancient, barely remembered despotic race. The difference is that in having no possibility of victory and salvation, their ancestors instead chose to run away into the stars rather than fight. From that point onwards, it became their sole purpose to create a society so utterly nomadic, and so intrinsically fair for all involved, that they would never need feel such tyranny again.

Living with old and decrepit ships that could barely make faster than light speeds, the focus changed from finding a new homeworld, to not requiring a homeworld at all. They would exist and propagate purely within their isolated and ramshackle spaceships for all time, repairing the now hundreds of year old relics over and over again, beyond all recognition.

And, within the desperation of their circumstances, their flesh changed too. Industrial pollutants and radioactive material from their barely operational hulks forced a rapid evolution, embracing symbiotic plankton and lichens that grew in their water and food. Those who found their bodies incompatible with the microbes died off, but those that embraced them miraculously became immune to the poisons of their circumstance. Beings a modern spacer would refer to as the Type Ones, imperfect by many means, but setting the foundations for the prosperous society that would follow.

By the time they had reached the shores of the Great Lighthouse, the old revolutionary pamphlets of the nigh-forgotten war had become immortalised in The Art Of Never Again, their most sacred of texts. Entire echelons of the society were reformed upon ideas first examined there, seeking to create the perfect democracy by allowing every single crew member a vote in whatever endeavour the vessel chooses to tackle. Electronically linking all Freespacers, through newly developed cyborgisations called Mindware, made this process fluid and often instantaneous. Now impotent from being raised in increasingly toxic environments, mindware also ended up being the basis of their education system when newborn members of society were gestated upon specially constructed motherships.

This burgeoning entity became known as The Free State, a uniquely anarchistic, some would say itself pseudo-tyrannical, method of surviving the loneliness of infinite untamed space flight.

Machines with simple AI were also becoming a common sight, the most resource-efficient way of dealing with dangerous or laborious tasks. Even organic crew members became much more cyborgized, both to avoid wasting resources and to better communicate with such mechanized systems.

This is the basis of the Type Twos, people genetically altered and indoctrinated from birth to obsess over their specific given roles in society. Technically speaking they are just as free as any other member of the state, but the need for miners, technicians, and factory workers was so great that an intense scheme of brainwashing became necessary to instil an infinite childlike loyalty. Rather than term it as slavery, the designers simply saw it as telling them the truth, the basic fact that they were all just a single cog in a vast interconnected machine…

Integral to this, however, was the added secret was that the Type Ones were now dying out, finally reaching the end of their naturally evolved limits. By creating these new children, what they actually sought to create was people naturally better, purer than they ever were.

Type Threes were then created as scientists, doctors and programmers, without the brainwashing, but all of the genetic alterations, in order to create a society that could still think for itself and move forward; But they were a much smaller proportion of the population in themselves, forever relying on their Type Two siblings to perform the necessary tasks for continued survival. In the end, it basically fell to the Type Threes to keep their more workish siblings both alive and sane, creating all manners of entertainment, and turning the Mindware network into an infinite vault of free virtual entertainment.

Mortality loomed ever closer for the original Deoradh as the years dragged on, and the Type Four 'brain in a box' type cyborgs were invented, before finally reaching true electronic transcendence, existing in the increasingly complex Mindware networks as purely digital Type Fives.

By the time they suddenly encountered the technologically advanced empire of the Yamatai, the Type Ones had died out completely, leaving only their vast adhoc perpetual motion machine of a society to fend for itself, utterly untested by foreign influence until that one climactic point.

The Freespacers did not deal well with what they perceived as the advance of a new dictatorship encroaching upon them, and chose to subvert the then-monarchistic power at every turn. The mindware links had now evolved into the massively complex polysentience network, and AI computers were everywhere, creating not only the perfect breeding ground for hackers, but also giving them a sticking point against the machine-paranoid Yamatai.

A powder keg of animosity was built up after great effort was gone through to invade the empire’s space and ‘free’ planets by destroying their criminal elements. Actions which the Yamatai took as an act of war, despite the fact that the Free State did not in fact see itself as a proper nation at all, with no boarders or government pushing an agenda of assimilation.

What followed was one of the darkest days in the Freespacer’s history since the great exodus, when the Free State was all but destroyed. Three quarters of its population was killed in less than a year, either directly slaughtered on planets glassed by Yamatai’s massive fleet of warships, or starved to death unable to either rebuild their infrastructure or find a new planet to colonise after desperately running away. The genocide of YE 30 spawned the overnight popularity and influence of the Independent Worlds League, a formerly piratical operation which gained immense power by allying itself with other foreign powers for resources and weaponry, most notably Nepleslian Greens, the United Outer Colonies, the Lorath, and the Iromakuanhe. For a while immense progress was made, including the creation of a vast leyline gate system which allowed for the covert transportation of their vessels, and then using that technology to build a vast impenetrable fortress within the Blue Rift Expanse.

Inertia became corroded by corruption and rumours about a secret deal with the foul and ravenous NMX, however. The State continued to fragment into a completely unstable mess as a great loss of faith in the old ways was felt, and continues to divide the once-proud society of nomads to this day.

After the schism, complete chaos ruled for a space of nearly five years. Nobody knew what doctrines were even safe to feed to the Type Twos of their society anymore, leading to the first major breaks from the teachings of the art of never again. The worker's brain chemistry and emotional programming was still altered to obsess over their specific jobs, but without a clear image of their place in the world, it seems the element of innocence and simple loyalty had been lost forever.

Fleets of survivors slowly formed around the various new political structures, some seeking to cast out all foreign influences once more, and some actually seeking to become assimilated completely, peacefully subverting the values of the misguided alien powers from within. Some now see a sole ruling body as actually necessary for stability and survival, whilst others still find the idea utterly abhorrent to everything their ancestors fought and died for.

The concept of 'allfolk' also began to gain traction, intending to covert volunteers from other species into an entire new generation of Freespacers. With the Nepleslians suffering from continued bouts of internal corruption, and disenfranchised Nekovalkyrja created by the NMX being trapped in a life as simple mercenaries, it seemed the perfect opportunity to spread a completely new kind of peace and prosperity.

Whatever happens, it seems the Cadre which gains the most influence will be the one that shapes the future.

Primitive Polygon created this article on 2016/12/19 20:51.