Union

Union was the largest governing power in the Orion Arm, with most of its bureaucracy located on Cradle. Union was (where it was able to achieve it) communal and post-capital, having brought about a post-scarcity utopian vision in the Galactic Core. The majority of Union's population did not exist directly under Union itself, but instead under thousands of different member-nations that voluntarily swore fealty to the hegemony and assisted it in its wider project of expanding and securing a utopia for all of humankind.
  Union aimed to integrate all colonies and become united under a single front. By the Third Committee period, blink gates, the omninet, and manna were the three 'levers' of soft power through which Union managed and affirmed its hegemony.
 
  The context of Union's creation was rooted in the Little Wars, a series of global conflicts conducted by the various post-Fall nation-states of Cradle (then known as Earth) over the at-the-time advanced technology recovered from the Massif vaults. These devastating conflict lasted for 53 years before losing momentum, and upon concluding, the surviving governmental parties coalesced into Union in order to peacefully unify the newly-renamed Cradle under a single cause and directive.
  Early Union's society was organized democratically, with various groups across Cradle each sending elected representatives to the Central Committee's primary campus. With this organization, Union was able to stably distribute various Massif-derived technologies for unrestricted civilian use, including renewable power generation, telecommunications, and aerial travel. With the stability of the newly-christened New Humanity and its environment assured, Union was able to develop its own society and uncover the history of pre-Fall Old Humanity at a relatively leisurely pace.
  Over time, as Cradle's New Humanity became increasingly secure in its own long-term future, the topic of extraterrestrial human life began to arise as a field of inquiry. Archaeological discoveries indicated the existence of pre-Fall colonies throughout the Sol system, as well as the possible presence of interstellar human colonies created by the Ten. Eventually, CentComm approved a program of reconstructing interplanetary communications arrays with the intent of identifying avenues of research into the status of these potential extant human enclaves.
  This project, the third and final great trauma of early New Humanity, was completed in 1400u, and immediately brought to Union attention the presence of multiple millennia-old looped distress signals, confirming the extinction of all Sol-based colonies beyond Earth itself. Union leadership took this as a call to action regarding the state's new purpose: The reestablishment of Old Humanity's interplanetary presence and the expansion of New Humanity beyond these prior boundaries, in order to maximize the likelihood of humanity's survival and prosperity into the indefinite future.
  The first effort to achieve this purpose was the Union Space Program, announced almost immediately after the processing of the recovered distress signals. Using recovered orbital shipyards, along with terrestrially-found survey/transit data, the USP was able to land an exploratory mission on Luna 30 years after the announcement of its creation. From there, it took another 20 years to synthesize Massif-based ship designs with the shipbuilding capabilities of the Theseus Shipyard in order to produce the "first" nearlight-capable starships.
  The USP spent the next several centuries launching interstellar expeditions to follow up on recovered data regarding potentially habitable worlds, and thus the likely sites of Ten-based human colonies. This exploratory period also featured a sub-project of recolonization of the Sol system itself starting in 1700u. Early USP missions came to a head when the USP Anthem, sent to explore the distant Boundary Garden sector, picked up the distress beacons of the Armstrong and Rihla, then used that as a means of locating and making first contact with the Aun Ecumene in 1998u.
  The First Expansion Period marked the earliest instances of civilian-led Union expansion beyond the Sol system, though Union itself maintained oversight over such efforts by way of the newly-created UAD. This period saw the development of early colonial procedures for the establishment of human settlements on various interstellar bodies, as well as the separation of New Humanity into the Metropolitans, Diasporans and Cosmopolitans (though the lack of coordination and slow growth of Union during this time compared to later expansion periods meant that the former category was essentially confined to Cradle).
  As the First Expansion Period progressed, Union also began to make contact with other extant human groups beyond the Aun, namely los Voladores and later the New Federation. Diplomatic channels between Union and such groups were kept cordial, with the Central Committee affirming their rights and independence, thus recognizing them as political equals. However, such encounters also led to Anthrochauvinist theory developing and gaining traction within Union, as it was believed by some that Union's background and mission meant that the presence of external human states was a needless risk at best and a top-down failure to unify and stabilize New Humanity at worst.
  In the latter stages of the First Expansion period, CentComm's continued guarantees of Aunic and Karrakin independence despite those states' divergence from Union's ethical standards and hampering of Union's expansion efforts were seen as unacceptably complacent. Eventually, colonial conflicts between Union and the Aun Ecumene escalated into the declaration of the First Distal War. In response, Anthrochauvinist politicians among Union capitalized on the unexpected crisis to (in addition to other actions more directly related to the war) dissolve CentComm and replace it with the Second Committee in 2880u, with SecComm's predecessor being retroactively named FirstComm in turn.
  SecComm immediately proved to be more militaristic in its diplomatic endeavors than FirstComm, with it continually persecuting the First Distal War against the Aun, declaring war on the New Federation within a decade of its formation, and making (failed) efforts to forcibly integrate los Voladores. However, this administration change did not put a halt to Union's continued encouragement of colonial efforts, with the First Expansion Period as a wider movement only ending over a century into SecComm's history.
  The First Expansion Period came to an abrupt end with the Deimos Event in 2998u, in which MONIST-1 unexpectedly manifested "in" the Sol system, caused the disappearance of Mars' moon Deimos, and threatened to destroy Tharsis Civica before being appeased via the signing of the First Contact Accords in 3002u. This sudden appearance of a potential existential threat to Union in its capital system prompted the hegemony to order the withdrawal of a large portion of its assets beyond Sol and reform the USP into the Union Navy. As a result, colonial expansion was brought to a halt, and the ongoing Union-Karrakin War was dropped despite Union assets being present in Karrakis' atmosphere and preparing to launch a ground invasion that would have ended the war.
  Despite the crisis in Sol being resolved within half a decade, rather than immediately restarting its colonial industry, Union leadership opted to begin a period of study into the paracausal phenomena left in MONIST-1's wake. The more minor "Deimos entities" were constrained and exploited as the first Non-Human Persons, and research into the newly-discovered blinkspace and its potential applications was begun. Similarly, Union offered a peace treaty to Karrakis in 3007u (the New Federation having been dissolved and replaced with the Federal Karrakin Monarchy following the Union military's departure)[20] rather than resuming hostilities, which resulted in the Concern being peacefully integrated as a Union member-state and establishing itself as the Karrakin Trade Baronies over the course of the next century and a half.
  Starting in 3130u and ending in 3200u, Union researchers conducted an extensive project regarding the viability of blinkspace as a faster-than-light physical/informational transportation mechanism. By the end of the program, the first fully-operational blink station was constructed and proven as a viable medium for interstellar transit. CentComm responded by dissolving the UAD and replacing it with the Union Colonial Mission, announcing a new expansion period structurally in accordance with the ideological strictures of SecComm.
  The Second Expansion Period was a longer, more efficient, and more intense successor to the First Expansion Period, and represented the numerically largest migratory movement in human history. Over the course of the Second Expansion Period's (roughly) 1,400-year duration, tens of thousands of new worlds were settled by billions Union colonists, including worlds with indigenous First Expansion-era populations, as well as worlds whose First Expansion-era settlers had yet to arrive due to being outpaced by advancements in interstellar travel technology. A notable example of the former occurrence was Sparr, a mostly inhospitable planet settled by one of the ships of the Ten, whose indigenous pre-industrial population had their main population center immediately bombed and conquered upon Union arrival circa 4000u. The main motivation for this particular first-contact procedure was the murder of the initial UCM survey team that had arrived on Sparr roughly 650 years beforehand.
  Facilitated primarily by the continuously-extended blink network whose existence was enabled by Deimos Event-induced discoveries, the scale of the Second Expansion Period was also in part due to the much more hands-on administration of SecComm compared to FirstComm. The new UCM represented a Union-wide colonial ethos of minimal divergence among colonies from the 'standard' template of New Human society offered by Cradle and the newborn Galactic Core, and SecComm's dominant Anthrochauvinist ideology heavily emphasized New Humanity's right / moral imperative to claim desired territory and ensure the indefinite expansion of humanity at any cost.
  The beginning of the end of the Second Expansion Period came with the discovery of the planet Hercynia around the turn of the 46th century u. Hercynia featured the Egregorians, a pre-spaceflight civilization of sapient, corporeal, non-human life - the first and only intelligent, organic alien species ever encountered by humankind. Although Union attempted to initiate peaceful first contact, poor initial proceedings resulted in global war between Union and the Egregorians. Union's plans regarding the "hostile local fauna" changed from uplifting to extermination.
  In response to the ongoing, publicly-visible campaign of invasion and eradication being carried out on Hercynia spawned a wave of anti-SecComm sentiment in the Union populace. Existing dissent surrounding the launching of the (supposedly) still-in-flight PISTON-1 at the Aun millennia prior, as well as the long-standing unethical government conduct during the Second Expansion Period, combined with the backlash to the Hercynian Crisis to create a revolutionary "Third Committee" movement that advocated for the forced abolition of the contemporary administration.
  Shortly after the end of the Hercynian Crisis in 4560u (the latter stages of which were partially used as a testing-ground for new technologies to be used against ThirdComm revolutionaries), Union was embroiled in a civil war across much of the Galactic Core, between the Union military and civilian insurgents. This revolution led to the surrender of the remaining SecComm leadership and the Second Committee's dissolution in 4591u.
 
  The Third Committee was fully established as the new core government of Union by 4600u, drastically reorganizing the rest of the Union government and calling for an end to all ongoing colonial programs. Although in the following decades attempts would be made by SecComm successor organizations to destabilize ThirdComm and reinstate the Second Committee in full, ThirdComm was able to cement itself as the long-term future of Union leadership.
  As a consequence of decades of internal conflict, Union's core apparatus had been pulled away from large swathes of the Diaspora, cutting off contact between these areas and the rest of the galaxy. Similarly, the violent nature of the transfer of power meant that ThirdComm had inherited a poorly-maintained administrative information base, leading to the loss of information regarding several of the cut-off Diasporan worlds. ThirdComm thusly spent the first several centuries of its existence focusing primarily on a campaign of recontact and reintegration across the Diaspora.
  Conducting its geopolitical affairs as pacifistically as possible was seen as paramount by ThirdComm leadership, whose support base rested on the idea of a rejection of SecComm's militarism and the stability of Union and its member-states through peaceful, consensual collaboration. This meant that when it did make contact with a Diasporan state that had spent generations independent from the hegemony, Union prioritized peaceful diplomatic solutions where it remained as a distant overseeing body over forceful reintegration, though it did have more of an impetus to intervene if and when a recontacted state was shown to be in violation of ThirdComm's re-adopted ethical principles.
  Around the turn of the 51st century u, an unexpected surge in the presence of the Aunic (reorganized into the Aunic Ascendancy before the start of the Second Expansion Period) military was found to have taken place in Boundary Garden. In response to the threatening of the local Ecumenical remnants in the sector, along with the seizure of Boundary Garden's blink station, Union dispatched a relief fleet to participate in the newly-declared Second Distal War.
  As the 51st century u progressed and Union faced a multitude of Diaspora-wide conflicts that were less common but higher-stakes than their Second Expansion-era counterparts, geopolitical analysts within both Union itself and many of its member-states began to predict an impending "Good War". This hypothetical upcoming conflict was said to represent the breaking-point of relations between Union and those bolder-than-ever elements of New Humanity that were fundamentally opposed to its newly-revived vision of utopia (namely corpro-states and similarly capitalistic entities, I.E. the Karrakin Trade Baronies). While the most likely outcome of the Good War was unknown to proponents of its future occurrence, it was generally believed to represent the defining moment of New Humanity's long-term ideological future, and was large enough in projected scale that Union leadership resolved to avoid it at all costs. Although the Good War had not tangibly manifested beyond possible early warnings by the end of the 5010s u, the conflict was generally believed to be all but inevitable in its occurrence before the end of the century.