History
Around 6,000 years ago an unknown race moved a group of Mayan humans from Earth to the distant planet Raylicon. Then the kidnappers disappeared, leaving their victims, who later became known as the Raylicans, on their own.
The Raylicans developed star travel using the remains of three starships left behind by the aliens on their new homeworld. They reverse engineered the technology, allowing them to achieve spaceflight and colonize hundreds of planets. They also discovered the Locks, an ancient and sentient alien technology that allowed them to create the psiberweb, an interstellar network existing outside of normal space and time that transmits messages instantaneously.
However, their shallow understanding of space-faring technology, and possibly their corruption, led to the empire's collapse. This isolated the hundreds of planets in their empire from each other for thousands of years. Eventually, about 400 years ago, Raylicans re-achieved space flight, this time fully understanding the technology, and started to rebuild their empire.
At this time, however, the psions (and their genes) which had a strong enough KAB Rating to power the psiberweb had been all but lost. As a result, the Rhon project was created to genetically engineer the traits necessary to create the psiberweb. It was this project that led to the divergence of the two great empires in the series, the Eubian Concord and the Skolian Empire.
Read more about this topic: Ruby Empire
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is to be done about it?”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)
“Perhaps universal history is the history of the diverse intonation of some metaphors.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)