And yet the Unifier planted the seeds of a deeper unity. Not since the collapse of the Coalition had the successors of mankind recalled that their ancestors had shared the same warm pond. After ten thousand more years that unity found a common cause.

Mankind’s hard-won Galaxy was a mere tidal pool of muddy light, while all around alien cultures commanded a wider ocean. Now those immense spaces became an arena for a new war. As in the time of the Unifier, disparate human types were thrown into the conflict; new sub-species were even bred specifically to serve as weapons.

This war continued in various forms for a hundred thousand years. In the end, like the Unifier, mankind was defeated by the sheer scale of the arena - and by time, which erodes all human purposes.

But mankind didn’t return to complete fragmentation, not quite. For now a new force began to emerge in human politics.

The undying. Us. Me.

Since the time of Michael Poole, there had been undying among the ranks of mankind. Some of us were engineered to be so, and others were the children of the engineered. We emerged and died in our own slow generations, a subset of mankind.

The hostility of mortals was relentless. It pushed us together - even if, often, in mutual loathing. But we were always dependent on the mass of mankind. Undying or not, we were still human; we needed our short-lived cousins. We spent most of our long lives hiding, though.

We undying had rather enjoyed the long noon of the Coalition, for all that authority’s persecution of us. Stability and central control was what we sought above all else. To us the Coalition’s collapse, and the churning ages that followed, were a catastrophe.

When, two hundred thousand years after the time of Hama Druz, the storm of extragalactic war at last blew itself out, we decided enough was enough. We had always worked covertly, tweaking history here and there - as I had meddled in the destiny of the Exultants. Now it was different. In this moment of human fragmentation and weakness, we emerged from the shadows, and began to act.

We established a new centralising government called the Commonwealth. Slowly - so slowly most mayflies lived and died without ever seeing what we were doing - we strove to challenge time, to dam the flow of history. To gain control, at last.

And we attempted a deeper unity, a linking of minds called the Transcendence. This superhuman entity would envelop all of mankind in its joyous unity, reaching even deep into the past to redeem the benighted lives that had gone before. But the gulf between man and god proved too wide to bridge.

Half a million years after mankind first left Earth, the Transcendence proved the high water mark of humanity’s dreams.

When it fell our ultimate enemies closed in.