Before we discuss history, we must discuss time, for that is the canvas on which history occurs. Unfortunately, although we are used to thinking in terms of days and months and years, those are Earth-specific terms. On a different planet, Earth-centric periods will have little meaning, and its own rotational and revolutionary periods and those of its satellites will be more useful. Then we throw in the fact that wormholes connect across both space and time, so that a trip from Žemyna to Homestead will take you hundreds of years into the future, and the return trip takes you hundreds of years back in time. And this is even before we throw in how time slips between planets when considering relativistic time dilation due to different speeds and gravitational potentials.

Fortunately, all the weirdness of different time rates and going backward and forward in time can be ignored by the average person. This is because you never need to go from Žemyna to Homestead, or back, across the vast gulfs of interstellar space. You just take the wormhole between them. All you ever need to worry about is the coordinate frame that goes across the wormhole. When considering this reference frame, you're not hopping all over the place in time. If it takes ten minutes to cross the Žemyna-Homestead wormhole, when you get to Homestead the clocks will read ten minutes later than they did when you left Žemyna. By coordinating their time-keeping across the wormhole network, Žemyna and Homestead and all the other worlds of the Verge can agree on a common time to coordinate their activities. This is all travelers ever need to worry about, and they can then ignore all the relativistic weirdness.

But you still have to deal with each planet with its own day/night cycles and yearly periods that are incommensurate with those of the other worlds. Early on, the coordinating bodies of Earth introduced Coordinated Network Time (CNT) as the official time system to use across interstellar space. This time measurement system divorces itself from traditional Earth-centric days and years and uses the base SI unit of time – the second – with metric prefixes to give a planet-agnostic standard.

A time in CNT is represented as, for example, 6G 311M 347k 211.19s CNT - meaning 6 billion, 311 million, 347 thousand, 211.19 seconds from time zero. In everyday conversation, 1 gigasecond (Gs) is called a "gig", 1 megasecond (Ms) is a "meg", and 1 kilosecond (ks) is a "click". Times before time zero CNT are represented with negative numbers. This system avoids complications like leap years, a missing year when going from BC to AD, figuring out how many days hath September, and other such nuisances. The current time in the Verge is nominally set at 6G 820Ms CNT.

When The Bump in the Night struck, the Verge lost contact with the standards institutes on Earth that kept and distributed official time. For a time, the worlds of the Verge kept their own versions of CNT with the clocks that they had. Before long, a standards committee was established, and a new CNT was set up for the Verge Republic network.

Each individual planet also uses its own time system for its internal affairs. These are based on time units more convenient to that planet - the periods of rotation (days) and revolution (years) of the planet and of its natural satellites (months). For periods of time shorter than a day, some worlds have adopted metric time but the majority use hours and minutes. Most people can convert between metric and traditional time without much difficulty. When on metric time and no convenient planetary cycle approximates the Human diurnal cycle, the default is to use 100 kiloseconds as a "diurnal" - the time of the Human sleep-wake cycle. Although a bit longer than a terrestrial day, most Humans and Pannovas can easily adapt to it and, in fact, often appreciate the little bit of extra time they have before going to bed (or waking up).

Network Time	Earth Standard Time
1 s	1 second
1 ks	16.67 minutes
1 Ms	11.57 days
1 Gs	31.69 years
1 Ts	31,690 years
1 Ps	31,690,000 years
1 Es	31,690,000,000 years
60 s	1 minute
3.6 ks	1 hour
86.4 ks	1 day
604.8 ks	1 week
2.4 - 2.7 Ms	1 month
31.56 Ms	1 year
3.156 Gs	1 century

No one knows when life first evolved in the Local Cluster, but by -100Ps CNT (3.1 billion years ago) there is evidence that sapience had emerged at least once and had spread to many of its galaxies. The evidence is tenuous, for geology, space weather, impacts, and other ravages of time have erased most of the evidence. Perhaps the best argument for this early dispersal is the genetic similarity of microbes across the Local Cluster in two main groups, the bacteria and the archaea. Wherever you go, you find life related to these simple microorganisms.

The most prominent and consequential of these ancient dispersals were a species known as the Antecessors. It is not known what they called themselves, or even much what they look like. From the remains of their long-abandoned spacecraft, they seem to have been about the size of a grizzly bear, and walked with a horizontal posture, also like a bear. Beyond that, we are unsure. What is known is they inhabited the entire Local Cluster from approximately -18Ps to -16Ps CNT (570 to 510 million years ago). Where the Antecessors went, you find the fossils of what are assumed are their pests and feral pets. Deposited across the galaxies, these simple worms and bugs evolved to become the major movers and shakers in the ecosystems of countless planets.

Oddly, the Antecessors seemed to have largely eschewed life on planets, visiting terrestrial rocky worlds only rarely. Most Antecessor relics are spacecraft, orbiting some class K through F sun in distant elliptical orbits, or bases among the icy comets and micro-worlds circling the star beyond the reach of its planets.

Of significance are two important elements of Antecessor technology – the affector field and the wormhole. Affectors exert a force on baryonic matter (the stuff that makes up the normal stuff in the world around us) at a distance. Using affectors, you can make deflector screens, repulsor-lift vehicles, tractor beams, and other devices that operate based on a controlled force at a distance. Wormholes connect one region of space-time to another, allowing a shortcut between points that would otherwise be very far apart. The discovery of Antecessor technology has been key to the history of two of the major sapient species of the Verge.

No one knows why the Antecessors disappeared. None have ever been encountered by any existing sapient species, and no artifact of theirs has yet been recovered with an estimated age of less than 16 petaseconds (510 million years).

After the Antecessors, there is archaeological evidence of various sapient species who have taken to the stars. Universally, their spans of time in this universe are much shorter than that of the Antecessors. The reason for these rapid extinctions is still a mystery.

Antecessors and Earth

The existence of animal and fungal life on Earth is clear evidence that the Antecessors visited our planet. Their time would correspond to the late Ediacaran through the early Cambrian, and their escaped pets and pests were responsible for the so-called "Cambrian explosion". However, no one has found any Antecessor artifacts or buildings on Earth. In the time before The Bump in the Night, there was increasing evidence that they might have visited Venus far more often than Earth. In fact, the Antecessors may have been in some way responsible for the runaway greenhouse condition of Venus, the halting of Venus's plate tectonic cycle, and the extreme overturning and resurfacing of Venus's entire crust.

It was a stabilized wormhole. The first example, found that night in California, was only about a micron across. But after physicists poked and prodded and worked equations, they soon found out how to make them bigger. Big enough to fit a person through. Or a train car.

They passed these tricks along to the engineers. Starry-eyed, technical minded men and women set on making the world a better place through the power of technology, they worked out how to project and maneuver the ends of the wormholes, hold them stable, minimize their failure modes, and make them reliable enough for mass transit.

Soon the major cities of the globe started connecting together. No longer did cargo or passengers need to move across the lonely expanse of highways, or suffer the indignities of air travel, or cross the waves on container ship monstrosities. Cargo would be loaded into intermodal cargo containers and set on a flatbed, passengers loaded into a train car, and set down the track through the wormhole to their destination. The fossil fuel industry, still scraping by on selling Diesel and jet fuel, was devastated. Economies were ruined, and new economies were born. Military strategy quickly changed – why maintain supercarriers and foreign bases when you can just project a wormhole to the combat theater? And non-orientable wormholes allowed free, non-polluting power to an energy hungry world.

While Earth was undergoing its upheavals, the eyes of mankind were set somewhat higher. The first interplanetary wormhole was projected to Mars. But Mars was a desolate, dessicated, radiation-blasted wasteland with an asphyxiatingly thin atmosphere and caustic, toxic dust. No one wanted to go there. The other planets in the solar system were no better. So the wormholes started going to the stars.

Many countries jumped in the extra-stellar exploration game. Brazil, Iran, South Africa, Korea, Israel, England, Australia, Japan, Argentina, Russia. But it was four countries – the United States, China, India, and Europe – that came to dominate the exploration of the galaxy. For the incontestable physics of the wormhole was that it cannot form closed loops, since nature will not let causality be violated. A wormhole network must resemble a branching tree. Earth was its root node, and though the many countries set out twigs and branches, the four major nations outpaced them, surrounded them, and closed off further growth into the galaxy. These formed the major boughs of the network tree.

The Indian bough stretched toward the galactic center. The Americans dashed toward the rim. The Chinese set out spinward of the Indians, with the Americans to their spinward border. And the Europeans claimed the remaining quadrant. In their dash to claim territory and deny space to their rivals, they settled sparsely. Selecting only the choicest of worlds to colonize, they leapfrogged ever onward in a scramble to end up, when the dust settled, with control over as much of the galaxy as they could for a more leisurely settlement and exploitation at later times. Since they set off toward the rim, the outgoing wave of Americans soon crashed against this extra-galactic void. Rather than spreading radially outward, they moved along the galaxy's edge, beginning to encircle the magnificent spiral of the Milky Way.

They called these far-flung colonies on the edge of nowhere the Verge. Wild settlements, reminiscent of the myths of the Old West, with hopeful farmers and wildcat miners, crazy mountain men, criminals, confidence men, and folk fleeing the constraints and crushing pressure of civilization for reasons of their own. Honest folk formed small communities, traditionally minded, proud, fierce, and independent.

And these communities grew. And grew. And grew. As more people came through to farther flung colonies, many stayed to settle, do business with the would-be homesteaders, and make a life for themselves. Meanwhile, the ravages of climate change were still affecting the Earth, for despite the death of a fossil fuel economy the injuries already wrought took time to heal. Refugees from flooding, drought, wildfires, and the wars they spawned looked to make a home for themselves among the stars. So the Americans, with a history of welcoming immigrants of all kinds, soon had people of all backgrounds in their expanding territory, all pouring through the interstellar station at Spokane, WA with their hopes and dreams and what belongings they could salvage.

It is difficult to reconstruct the early history of the Zox Hierate. It is shrouded in myth and official obscuration. Definitive sources, if they exist at all, are probably only found in secret libraries on Mantheim, and which have now in all likelihood been destroyed by the Squirm. Historians of the Verge are left with trying to interpret myths and legends and obscure artifacts and forge them into a cohesive picture. Here, then, is the consensus best guess for the rise of the Zox and the Mant expansion into their home Triangulum galaxy. Keep in mind that much of this is uncertain, and many scholars hold diverging opinions.

Note: names given are latinized translations, and may have little resemblance to the Mant pronunciations.

The Zhitkat Directorate, ruling body of Mantheim, was in the latter stages of decay and collapse; with ennobled hives enjoying a decadent existence ever more isolated from the developing anarchy and desperation of the rest of the world. Into this spectre of collapse came Tzachi, a young hive with a talent for linguistics and scholorship, with patronage from some high ranking military factions. Several Tzachi researchers had come across an Antecessor compound with both a library and light industrial facility, still in working order despite the passage of geological eons. With characteristic hard work and penetrating genius, and the assistance of Antecessor translation software and autofacs, these Mants of Tzachi managed to acquire several pieces of advanced Antecessor technology and basic scientific and technological knowledge. In the hands of their military allies, this allowed the Tzachi-faction to outmaneuver and outgun the other aristocratic factions - wormhole phones, disruptors, deflectors, and repulsor cars can have a devastating effect on an army to whom state-of-the-art technology is semaphores and arquebuses. Perhaps more importantly, the Mants of Tzachi proved to be inspiring and charismatic, giving the huddled, terrified masses of Mantheim reason for hope in a glorious future as revealed by this gift from a long-vanished race, and rallying the support of the planet's populus. The ensuing revolution was quick, and after the various societal convulsions had died away and the blood was washed off the walls, Tzachi Muk the First was proclaimed emperor to general support and enthusiasm. Thus was born the Zox Hierate.

As so often happens, the initial euphoria faded and life went on. Those in power maneuvered to keep their power, establishing institutions to ensure their continued reign. Part of this included the near-worship of the Antecessors, with a priesthood overseeing the library and the emperor at their head. Thus was revealed wisdom distributed to the masses, and if this wisdom included teachings on a properly ordered society that, perhaps, might not have actually existed in the archives, who was to say otherwise? With a rapidly increasing standard of living, the promise of social stability, and plenty of opportunity for child hives, who would want to?

One of the difficulties of studying Gummi history from a Human's perspective is that it is really boring. Gummis naturally get along, and they don't form authoritative power structures. So there are no kings, no warlords, no wars, no great empires struggling for dominance. Just peace and exploration and a sort of cultural homogeneity as the ever-curious Gummis travel among themselves and intermingle their ways and beliefs.

That said, there are several events of note in the Gummi's expansion from a planet-bound industrial society to a galaxy-spanning colonizer. Gummis began their interstellar presence after happening upon an Antecessor outpost circling their star on a distant and inclined orbit. They managed to figure out how some of the equipment worked, then repulsor launched several wormholes to nearby stars to see what was out there. The findings of the initial explorers fired the enthusiasm of the Gummi populace, giving rise to a vigorous exploration of their galaxy, a small spiral galaxy on the outskirts of the Local Group called NGC 3109. To the Gummi's delight they encountered several pre-technological sapient species, some of which the Gummis were able to teach the trappings of technological civilization and which accompanied the Gummis to the stars. Soon they had hopped to the neighboring Antlia Dwarf galaxy and sent wormhole probes to nearby Sextans A and Sextans B galaxies.

At Sextans A, they encountered trouble. An implacable and rapacious species attacked without warning, mercy, or respite. At first, Humans who learned this history called these beings the Brood - but, disturbingly, it turns out they already had a name. The Brood pushed the Gummis out of the Sextans galaxies, smashed most Gummi settlements in Antlia Dwarf, and began to assault NGC 3109 directly. The Gummis fought back. Along with their more aggressive and war-like entrained allies (the Pirang and Tweechi), they developed the weapons and tactics and expertise that eventually began to turn the conflict around. It was a long, brutal, scorched-earth war, but in the end the Gummis and their allies began to reclaim world after world, and eventually reconquer the territory they lost and overrun the Brood strongholds.

To the Gummi's disappointment, they never were able to learn much about the Brood way of life. They never surrendered, and even when captured after being restrained, sedated, or stunned they would struggle ceaselessly upon recovery until they battered themselves to death or died of exhaustion. As far as the Gummis could tell, the Brood were an entirely military species that existed only to conquer and destroy. They found no evidence of art, leisure, or compassion; just an overwhelming dedication to an expansionist military juggernaut. Oddly, they found no evidence of where the Brood had come from - no homeworld, no evidence of old settlements, no evidence of their existence before the Gummis encountered them.

News reached the Verge of an encounter with an alien species deep in the Indian bough. An Indian expedition was attacked and wiped out, then strange beings came swarming through the wormhole to slaughter everyone at mission control. From there a flood of these things crawled forth and began to wipe the planet clean. The swarm invaded four worlds, killing every sapient, until the authorities decided to purposely break the wormhole connections to the infected branch.

Footage of the aggressive alien species caused alarm bordering on panic among the Gummis and Mants of the Verge, because both of them recognized that alien. To the Mants, they were the Squirm, which had ravaged their homeworld and was relentlessly advancing across their home galaxy. To the Gummis, they were the Brood, which they had defeated at great cost in a war that stretched across galaxies. And now it was attacking the Humans.

The respite from breaking the wormhole to the Squirm-infected branch lasted about 300 megaseconds (10 years) – unfortunately, the distance spanned by that wormhole was not all that large compared to many. The Indian Armed Forces were waiting and ready when the Squirm assault finally came. But unexpectedly, the Squirm were able to assault several worlds in that branch at once. At first, Human scientists thought this was fundamentally impossible. Only later was it discovered how the Squirm achieved this feat (see box The Physics and Tactics of Warfare Between Separate Wormhole Networks). With Squirm rampaging far behind their lines, the Indian Armed Forces were outmaneuvered and largely destroyed. The Squirm began their advance down the Indian bough. Earth itself seemed to be in danger, and Humanity faced an existential threat.

At 3G 138M 098k 194.354 532s CNT, automated monitoring systems on wormholes throughout the Verge logged a sudden onset of instabilities. This signature is common to causality attacks, but this time it was not confined to one wormhole cycle – it affected all wormholes, everywhere. Larger wormhole-connected distances, however, were more susceptible to its effect. Within microseconds, the wormholes connecting Garcia's World to Jefferson and the rest of the American bough, the Colonial Authority at Capital to the Triangulum Galaxy, and Gummi Space (via Grummer) to the NGC 3109 galaxy, all shattered. It is thought that this limited the extent of the wormhole connected region in the Verge enough that the oscillations could no longer build up to the point that the transit wormholes could be damaged. Nonetheless, many smaller colonies connected to the Verge with smaller, weaker wormholes were broken off. The main pulse was over in a few tens of microseconds, although ringing could be detected for milliseconds afterwards.

This is the event that would later be called The Bump in the Night. The Verge had suddenly been cut off from the rest of the universe. The immediate damage was minor - each broken wormhole produced a high-speed jet of debris that blasted out about ten wormhole diameters (several hundred meters), but transit wormholes were designed with this failure mode in mind and damage to other facilities was minimized. While this was tragically fatal to anyone actually in the wormhole at the time, most people simply read about this on the news and society seemed to go on.

But serious damage had been done. The Verge worlds were no longer able to trade with the wider universe for the things that they needed. Rustic backwaters like the Verge didn't have the industry to build aircars or microchips or produce fertilizer or all the other stuff that society needs in order to run. Further, a lot of people kept their money in off-world banks. This was money that they could no longer access. Businesses could no longer pay their employees. People with health issues no longer had access to vital medications manufactured off-world. What they had was a lot of cropland - more than enough to feed everyone a hundred times over, mines for minerals they could no longer use, and a lot of equipment that could no longer be repaired or replaced when it ran out.

At first, people expected a rescue wormhole would be sent. Or maybe Chinese occupiers would come through the wormhole that initiated the causality attack. But that never happened. No one came. The Verge was cut off and completely alone.

The Colonial Authority of the Zox Hierate had kept order in Mant Space throughout the chaos following The Bump in the Night. Initially significantly weakened, as they pieced their society back together they saw the opportunity to wipe out the pesky humans, now disorganized and cut off from their Earth protectors. They launched an attack across the wormholes from Rhuzzit to Gateway. Warned of the attack by a Mant defector hive, the Gators were ready along with impromptu citizen militias volunteered from several neighboring worlds. The defenders managed to fight off the attack, with heavy loss of life.

Terminology Note: The citizens of the Verge Republic call themselves Republicans. This has no relation to the Republican political party in the modern United States, nor does it mean that they endorse the platform of the modern Republican Party.

The Human and Pannova worlds of the Verge realized they were threatened by multiple adversaries – both the Zox and the Squirm – and needed each other for mutual defense. All the worlds except for Zhǎngshān agreed to form a republic for self protection. A constitutional assembly was called, and after a period of discussion and debate a Constitution of the Verge Republic was written, signed, and agreed to by the governments of its member worlds. The constitution was largely based on that of the United States of America, with important concessions to Tīan Nán to ensure the protection of their culture and language. The Gummi worlds were invited to join, but in typical Gummi fashion they elected to remain without a strong central government. 300 megaseconds (a decade) later, a different political party on Zhǎngshān came to power and formally requested admission to the Verge Republic*. After debate in the House and Senate, this request was accepted and Zhǎngshān was given full status as a Republic world. This move has been controversial on Zhǎngshān ever since.

Once people's bellies were full and they had some assurance of stability and employment, thoughts turned to what was lost. For Humans, this resulted in a period of turning back to the culture of old Earth - not just learning about it, but trying to live it. Before The Bump in the Night, the Verge Humans were proudly independent and tended to think of themselves as forging a new path forward. Afterward, they sought connection with their ancestral ways. This was the Earth Heritage Revival movement. People would learn the old languages of their people, try to work out the proper traditions, become devoutly religious, or even revive old religions long dead. This period of searching and longing and introspection lasted several hundred megaseconds (multiples of 3 years) at its most intense, but never entirely faded. Humans still look back on Earth as a revered homeworld, a promised land where everything was, if not always better, at least seen through rose-colored glasses.

It was in this time that new wormhole projectors started to come on-line. Some wanted to re-connect with Earth, others feared that The Bump in the Night was the only thing that saved them from Squirm extermination and that contact with former Human or Mant worlds would just open the Verge up to a Squirm invasion. Eventually, the pro-contact faction had their way. A wormhole was sent to re-connect Garcia's World to Jefferson. Wormhole dynamics meant that when the wormhole arrived at Jefferson, some 24 gigaseconds (760 years) had passed on Jefferson since contact was lost, although only 1 gigasecond (30 years) elapsed in the Verge's CNT. The Jeffersonians had not fared well. Society had completely collapsed and people were eking out an existence at a stone-age to medieval level of technology, using whatever relics of the old world they could find and still use. The fact that Jefferson had not re-contacted the Earth-rooted network in this time was very discouraging (it would take much less time from Jefferson's point of view for a wormhole to be sent in the same direction as the previous one from the American bough, as opposed to the opposite direction from Garcia's World). Most people assumed that Earth, or at least the vast Earth-rooted wormhole network, was utterly lost. For the safety of everyone in the Verge, it was decided that no further attempts would be made to contact other worlds from that old network in the foreseeable future. It did not, however, prevent people from exploring previously neglected worlds in the Verge territory of the Milky Way, or worlds that had previously been a part of the network downstream from Jefferson that had broken off during The Bump in the Night.