It's the far future- but not necessarily ours. Humanity has gone through the expected selection of wars and disasters to the extent that we can’t even remember exactly what happened.
As far as the people of Alpha Sector were concerned, there were Ancient times- when we spoke weird languages, used spears, and lived on a bunch of planets blissfully unaware of everyone else’s existence- and then the Common Era, when they all discovered phasedrives and began bumping into each other in the stars.
Then they learned about the Schism.
It became apparent that we’d all met before, all our worlds and cultures, but that something had put an end to the sprawling human empire- a prolonged event the peoples of the Common Era came to call the Schism.
Pre-Schism humanity had been ridiculously technological, and even their dilapidated remnants put Common Era devices to shame.
And as if that wasn’t enough, mankind began finding Uclasion relics. Artefacts, millions of years old, which were blatantly the inspiration behind our pre-Schism findings. The Uclasions had been around 27-million years ago and then had all abruptly died. So they couldn’t have been all that advanced, surely, if they’d let themselves go extinct.
But the mother of all relics was Ucelsia: the 3000-mile-diameter spacecraft the Uclasions had once called home. It was found by the Domarian Trade Organisation: and a few short years later the DTO had become the Domarian Legion and the sole superpower of Alpha Sector- that tiny shred of the galaxy that mankind had the nerve to refer to as “the galaxy”.
That’s because the Domarian Legion had found Maintonon: an ancient Uclasion Supercomputer determined to make his mark.
Maintonon obsessively plans and directs and prepares because he predicted that it will happen again. There’s just one little problem: even he can’t remember what caused the original Schism…