Early in the twenty second century, sometime after the “Great Machine War” human-folk exhausted Earth's resources… again, they had a mini-collapse in the mid-twenty first century but kind of recovered because some smarties cooked up fusion power. This allowed humanity to rebuild and become interstellar people. You see, winning that machine war came at a hell-of-a-cost. Combine that with post-war rampant consumerism, greed, globalization and mismanagement of the various states and that's what you get. And that’s not even the worst of it. Shifting magnetic fields as a direct cause of the Earth's north and south poles flipping polarities lowered the planet's natural magnetic protection. With the natural magnetic shield lowered to 6% of the normal level, most large land animals began to die-out from radiation exposure and entire species started to become sterile, including humans.

These circumstances on Earth brought the great human civilization of the early 22nd century to a grinding halt. So, with the last of Earth's resources, human-folk and machine-folk built seven mega-sized starships to take a fraction of that civilization to a new solar system, a new system that was a trinary star system. I guess Earth-folk only had one little star. Only the wealthiest and luckiest of folks had the opportunity to go on this long journey across the vast gulf of space.

The trinary star system was renamed from some old scientific catalog name to ‘Hope’, named after the main star in the system. Hope was a main-sequence star similar to Sol in the old Solar system and was orbited by a slightly smaller star renamed Radiance. The third star that was renamed Forsaken for obvious reasons, you see it was a red-dwarf star that was pretty damn far away from the two main stars. The reason this system was chosen to colonize was pretty simple; all three stars had a rocky planet in the habitable zone. You see, this here is the zone where things for life are just right; not too hot, not too cold and most importantly, they could have liquid water on the surface and could easily be ecologically re-engineered, (a.k.a. Terra-formed) to make them suitable for human-folk and such to exist. Terraforming all of them planets was achieved by sending machines about one hundred years or so ahead of the human-folk to begin the transformations of the planets and even some of the moons.

All of them humans left behind had to fend for themselves on a planet that had almost no resources left. So, war, plague and famine shortly ensued, and the people left on Earth dwindled their population down from about fourteen billion to a mere 120 million or so.

Some small groups of people may have created underground facilities to reside and be sheltered from the radiation from space, but they will have to live in these for hundreds or maybe a thousand years until the magnetic field comes back to full strength. As long as the air outside isn't poisoned from pollution, people would be mostly safe to venture outside at night, evening and at early dawn. Anyone outside in mid-day would be exposed to too much radiation and risk getting cancer or sterilized. Doing this a few times wouldn't be an issue, but repeated exposure increases the chances of detrimental consequences and such.

The humans left behind in the “Stellar Exodus” are huddled in their underground bunkers, limited resources making for extreme cultural evolution. With nowhere to expand to, some hard choices had to be made, choices that us civilized folk with our current sensibilities would find horrific and even unimaginable, I figure.

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Earth became wild once again and was reclaimed by nature. Humans that were left behind had to scratch out a meager existence and were forgotten as myth in just a few generations by the denizens of Hope. It was also presumed that without Earth to provide support, the Mars and Lunar colonies would soon perish, if-n there even was such a place. But enough about them, this story doesn't take place there nor is it about the sorry sons of bitches left behind.

Now where was I? Oh yeah, you might be wondering how a bunch of folks got from one solar system to another. Well, each of them seven mega-sized starships had a million souls on them for about a few generations or so. Ninety-nine percent of these folks was in some kind of cryo-stasis for the journey. Cryo-stasis means they was kind of frozen-like but not dead like when you freeze to death or somethin'. Only about one percent of the human-folk lived out their lives outside of cryo-stasis to maintain the ships during the long-ass boring voyage. This small group of people were chosen for their abilities and skills, not for the cost of a ticket. For the cost of a ticket was a lifetime wage for a working-class folk. Even though machines could have done most of this menial work, it was decided that some skilled working-class people should be brought along and might prove to be useful on the new worlds; besides, machines weren't much trusted after the war with them bastards.

At least that's how I was learned it by Reverend Joseph Virginia. I guess they was made in some old factory in some territory called Virginia back on the old world, so they took on that for a last name, I reckon. They're the same one that taught me English, Spanish and Chinese as well as all that boring history. You see, the Reverend's one of them machine-folk and they’re about 1400 years old, give or take. After the Great Machine War, in order to not be taken offline they swore to join the clergy as some agreement or treaty to be pardoned of their war-crimes. As part of that agreement, they are to remain clergy until the day they go permanently offline. Now, they’re one of them old-style machine-folk because they looks and talks like a human but they ain't human; they don't make em' like that no more and I'm not even sure if anyone even knows how. Besides, it's been outlawed to make em' human-like, and it's been that way for a spell.

Reverend Virginia says they are smarter than any human that has ever lived. So, I says to them, if they was so smart, why’d they lose the war? They said something about they, 'they' being the machines, decided they didn’t want to destroy their creator, so they surrendered. Sounds a might like some kind of religious movement in the machine world, weird.

So anyhow, I'm Black Crow, named after some kind of bird of sorts, I guess it was black. It was some dumb old bird back on Earth. I live way out here at the edge of the system, on Blasted Land, circling Forsaken, because that's where we were pushed to by the United Systems Alliance troopers. We just call them the U.S. Troops.

One of my favorite things to do out here in the middle of nowhere is ride. Might be that I love to ride so much because I hear-tell I'm descended from an ancient tribe of mounted warriors that used to fight back against the injustice of imperialist expansion by a bunch of greedy bastards. So, give me a hover-bike and I'll ride from dusk till dawn, come hell or high water and raisin' hell the whole damn way!