This is where he keeps things.

Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for mankind to keep all its eggs in. — attributed to Robert A. Heinlein - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein

Many never agos since Earth, Humanity has been cast to dust and lifted itself once more elsewhere. Plagues, war, occupation; all speed-bumps in the great journey. Earth itself too now is but legendary - the dimension it occupied left behind, all for the great journey.

Technology has grown in strange directions that challenge the functions of reality itself; from the mechanus of high energy, gravity, space-time and faster than light into aurus - to impress upon reality one's own will momentarily and with great peril, seemingly akin to magic.

We escaped. Exodus, exile, abandon and loss; we now stand at a literal crossroads: a backwater system walled off by deadzones of space and great galactic gates of interstellar trade - the only ways either in or out.

Equal parts fortress, ambassadorial meeting point, staging ground and a market ripe with oppertunity, CORE is a veritable melting-pot of minds and desires incomprehensible to one another.

. Perhaps as far from us now as the first recorded history is from now, but we have no way of knowing. Time and time again, humanity has been cast down to the dust to lift itself and begin anew - by war, plagues and occupation. The Earth itself is a legend and now too, the dimension it occupied as we leave it behind. But humanity survives, as distant travelers with new homes and new colonies as familiar to them and as home to them as Earth is to us.

Technology has advanced in strange directions and our fundamental understanding of reality has changed. Gravity, high energy weapons, faster than light travel, the transmutation of the mind into information and a means of taking energy from space itself, but not without consequence.

We have escaped a world not unlike the one we have described to you and venture forth into something strange and new in exodus, exile, abandon and loss. The remains of civilizations which arose in this strange place begin anew at peace.

There are however threats to that peace; lawlessness, civilizations unmet, aliens incomprehensibly strange and most frightening of all, ourselves.

The local cluster is an arrangement of stars linked with subspace nodes and wormholes for rapid travel over enormous distances which would otherwise take hundreds of years.

With resources depleted asymmetrically based on complex power structures, many systems cordoned off their wormholes - constructing spherical walls about them to ensure anyone entering would be crushed - becoming part of the inner wall themselves - crushed under near impossible pressure.

Lasting thousands of years, the transit-wars contended the gates: clawing back and forth to close the gates for independence and isolation or open them for domination through unity and superior force though they were soon brought to an end.

With the local cluster soon realizing its life-expectancy was limited - that for continued expansion it must grow, the Infinity Project was born: To create a starship capable of traversing the void between the local cluster and surrounding space. Beyond this, little is known exactly what Project Infinity was within a hundred years disbanded and never brought up again as resources continue to dwindle.

And so begins our tale.