The Dark

The Dark is a roleplaying setting. It begins in the year 2100 with a machine apocalypse on Earth, humanity's home planet. A military superpower creates an artificial intelligence designed for efficiency in death, and 99% of the species is wiped out over the course of a month. Millions are forced into servitude by the wealthy to build life-sustaining habitats in space for the refugees who survived.   Adjusting to their new role as the galaxy's refugees, humanity has three chief weapons against entropy: Gene modification technology with which to build custom lifeforms, infosleeve technology to allow humanity to experience life as data, and resleeving technology to allow a dying human to be born again and again. Functionally immortal, humanity makes its first halting steps into a wider galactic community. Unfortunately, the species' propensity to fracture and split causes difficulties as human factions fight among one another rather than focusing their energy on grander goals.   At the dawn of this new age, another startling discovery is made. Evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life aware of the existence of humanity is discovered. A probe from deep in space landed on Earth to spread an alien virus. The trajectory of the probe was tracked by The "Scrud", a legendary hero of folklore. She traced the probe to an interplanetary wormhole generator discovered in an ice crevice of Triton, one of Neptune's moons. That wormhole generator led unfailingly to dozens of worlds in solar systems all over the Milky Way galaxy. Suddenly, transhumanity and the galaxy's host of alien life have full and immediate access to one another.