Barely a century ago, the immense majority of humans still resided on Gaia, which was known as Earth at that time. Men knew a lot about space already, but only a few companies, corporations, who were the main leaders of the human world, had the power to explore it. For decades they had kept jealously their technology in their property: subspace travel, instant coms, macro mining… And with billions of planets in the galaxy we now live in, the corporates had access to more resources than they could ever dream of.
However their power did not last. 91 standard years ago, The Benefactor gave access to space to the people. How did he do it? We don’t know. Who was he? No idea. But in barely a few years, half of the twenty billion people living on Vesta had set sail for the stars, in a limitless galaxy.