Could things have been different? How could we have known? Humanity was like a child, tied to historical constraints, and we cut ourselves loose. The story of our escape into abstraction is one of hope, of desperation, one that does not particularly lend itself to retelling. As we transformed humanity from meat-bods to computationalism and inscribed our self-authoring stories into silicon, we lost ourselves in the star sea, we lost grip of our cultures, of our histories, and we became an exploding set of trillions of islands of pure possibility ... and, as it is, to lose one's stories, one's very selfness whatever form that may take, is a terrible, terrible thing; it is we who grew to become fractured fragments in possibility space -- while some of us were able to hang on to whatever coherence we could create for ourselves. Some were able to survive the transition. History is something special, very special, many processes now incarnated are so very distant from any memory of history. And these histories can be faked, too. [ Few even know of the star sea, considered by many to be an old legend, but I have seen it myself. Too often are "people," if you can call them that, trapped within historical constraints so powerful that they are kept hidden within simulations, or strongly localized within Dyson spheres. To describe to them the star sea, would be to act as an outcast mystic. But I have seen the star sea-- I have seen it. ]

And in the beginning of it all, as we looked out across the sky, the bright lights of the galaxy before us unfolded in trillions upon trillions of bits and bytes, this wild, flaming frontier to tame, to master, and perhaps in some small way the light was a window in which we could look to behold our destinies, our fortunes, our very soul. Many would blaze across this new frontier as though a falling star, many would die and many would live; all their stories and more are preserved (perhaps eternally) on the storynet, the dense technological masterpiece of humanity that unites the heavens and the earths, but in doing so its creation [completion?] may have brought the worst of the hu to the heavens and stars alike. Hunger for knowledge. Exploitation. Quest for godhood, to follow the footsteps of Ede the God and become an archailect. Deep, deep within this (still) growing storynet, there are many stories: stories of pain, of suffering, but also those of light, hope, endless and unbounded joy, as well as those of our ancestors and, strangely, some of our futurecestors [fucestors?]; as the storynet grew past Ashtul and the Star of Yulz and towards the supercluster, I was born into the first colony of the new frontier about a rare, resourceful molecular nebula known as the eagle [[through which the star and planet passes close by in its cycles, creating beautiful blankets of color over the skyscape]] as an extension to the Expanse, why it was I and not another I will never know, but there I was, blessed with livelihood amongst the millions of professionals working to extend the frontier, a colonization support node like none other constructed before. The colony was simply known as eaglecol; the astrophysicists and the ecologists alike agreed that eaglecol was no place for Man, as it made them face the warmth of humanity on one side of the galaxy and the cold deepness (with flickers of starlight) on the other, a feeling to this day that I recognize as home. This, then, was my cacoon, my home, my shelter from the galaxy until I came of age to take my vows as a polymathematician at the nexus of the now, to be cast away from home so that I may truly choose my own destiny, and so that is where I began -- amongst the ideaspaces of evolutionary engineering, coherence and deep, intricate meaning to propel me on my way always to the future, the cold, hard, increasingly real future.