Roughly one million years before the present, within the temperate forests on a gas giant's moon, the early ancestors of the Ya!ca evolved into existence. Though limited in intelligence, and confined to a generalist, tool-less lifestyle, these social creatures were one of the most successful organisms on that world. As the millennia progressed, a gradual building of cognitive capabilities would lead to a feedback loop, providing more complex thinking patterns in exchange for a more energy-rich diet. These basal Ya!ca began to experiment with the usage of tools, division of labor, and organizing hunting and gathering parties. With each increase of efficient food-collection, the greater the rise of abstract thinking among the species, along with a population to contemplate the unknown.

Though adapted to living in the treetops, the Ya!ca were prone to spend much time on the forest floor, where they hunted small animals and gathered vegetation. This versatile behavior allowed the species to spread across their planet very quickly, migrating towards forests located in any climate zone. Further exacerbating this trend would be the self-contradictory nature of Ya!can psychology, which encouraged these organisms to remain rather diffuse and spread out as a species. Loyalty was expected to be strongest with those Ya!ca of greatest similarity, whether in culture or biological lineage, and progressively diminish as differences eventually reached a threshold of unfamiliarity. This subjective "threshold" always instigates a sensation of deep mistrust and intolerance when an unfamiliar enough "other" is recognized, leading to conflict between many troops within a single region of forest.

However, the Ya!ca also possessed a great deal of humility towards those they were loyal to, allowing for the formation of highly egalitarian societies that possessed no formal leadership roles. This personality trait fostered the development of complex social mores between members of individual packs, eventually culminating into the development of advanced methods of verbal communication and language. As a result, cultural information spread between the Ya!ca, allowing for even wider circles of familiarity between pack members, and ultimately larger societies. These developments, along with their long-held curiosity and imagination, accelerated the technological development of the species to unparalleled speeds.

The more they learned about their world, the more questions they posed with regards to its purpose, function, and origin. While groups of aligned packs would share similar beliefs regarding the nature of the cosmos and reality, the rich complexity of mythical and religious information created by the Ya!ca would lead to conflicts in their own right, further bringing to light the trappings of their psychological evolution. Regardless, the production and retaining of knowledge concerning their world greatly benefited the species, leading to behavioral transitions that would result in the second of major shifts in their history.



About six and a half thousand years ago, the Ya!ca had gained full intuitive understanding of their world's natural patterns, and many packs aimed to take advantage of these cycles for the benefit of their kind. The domestication of local fauna granted them an alternative food source during seasons of unproductive hunting, while the tending of certain fauna provided them with a steady supply of vegetation for both themselves and the domesticated creatures. These two advancements, along with more sophisticated tools that were invented, allowed for major population increases across their world. As their numbers grew, however, the pitfalls of Ya!can psychology would once again lead to unexpected developments.

With more curious, imaginative minds coming into their world, the Ya!ca witnessed rapid technological leaps in seemingly random fields of everyday life. Though civilizations formed, they possessed no formal leadership, and were instead regulated by interlocked alliances with similarly-minded groups of clans. As the limits of familiarity between groups of Ya!ca were overcome, breakthroughs began to occur in regions where population density was incredibly high, fueling competitive fires of the ambitious. Each invention was progressively superseded by another, even though their implementation within rapidly-urbanizing societies proved slow and difficult.

As such, new and radical ideas were created faster than they could be tested and integrated into everyday life, bringing about a systems collapse that caused civil war to break apart many civilizations. The cycle of population growth, idea generation and competition, and ultimate societal collapse happened at various times and places across their world, with each major disruption creating a domino effect that swallowed up many well-established cultures. Over the course of roughly five thousand years, this global pattern would occur dozens of times, with each cycle breeding new technological inventions, cultural artifacts, and pivotal clans.



Almost two thousand years before the present, multiple Ya!can civilizations began to develop and disseminate the technology required to instigate an industrial revolution, an event that led to a profound paradigm shift. As with the domestication of fauna and flora, the creation of automated machinery granted major population boosts to the fertile regions of their world, initiating a wide-spread acceleration of idea generation. Mass production and industrialization allowed the dominating cultures to expand to every inhabited region, allowing civilizations to both trade and wage war with one another. Initially, these conflicts were unorganized and targeted only cultures that could not compete with their technologically sophisticated counterparts, but they slowly grew into large-scale conflicts between the most prominent civilizations.

Though gradual in their formation, the wars between entire civilizations soon dominated the very historical evolution of the Ya!ca. As the forces of nature became systematically categorized and understood, war machines capable of slaughtering hundreds of thousands of sapients began to find their place in the battlefield. Clans that once only existed to regulate the overall health of the civilization they resided in soon found themselves in positions of authority, a situation that proved to be incredibly difficult for many Ya!ca to even conceptualize. The stratification of clans slowly permeated all aspects of daily life, and became impossible to shake off once the phenomenon had become rooted in their culture. The species, having been fond of socialist ideologies since their inception, experienced the stresses of inter-clan conflicts as the clash of civilizations became a constant backdrop to their very existence.

Had it not been for the development of nuclear technologies, particularly in their weaponized form, a global collapse of order would surely have come about. After the first deployment of nuclear weapons in the field of combat, however, the Ya!ca as a whole understood the implications of continued conflict between civilizations. Truces were declared, defensive pacts were signed, and an age of detente took a hold of their world. While they did not engage in direct warfare, each culture began to wage memetic campaigns against one another, probing their rivals' strengths and weaknesses in all realms of societal discourse.



With the advent of computer technologies nearly sixteen hundred years ago, the Ya!ca experienced another major change in the course of their historical evolution. Information could be transmitted across their world in an instant, allowing for greater contact between incompatible ideologies and rival clans. This breakthrough, along with future enhancements to it, heralded an age of cultural strife within individual civilizations. No longer was conflict limited to propaganda between massive inter-clan alliances at the heads of entire nations, but it was now possible for individual and groups of clans to come together in a united front against their leaders.

As a result, the once-enviable mark of being from a clan of leadership became a symbol of disdain, as the very nature of the Ya!ca confronted the inherent contradiction such clans supported. In a matter of decades, decentralization soon came to replace the ossified inner circles that once were the clans of leadership, bringing with it a new era of innovation and the formulation of radical ideas. Technologies once considered highly theoretical soon became both feasible and affordable to even the smallest inter-clan alliances, with the end result of the standard of living rapidly increasing. However, many more minds could be brought and kept in the world, leading once more towards the path of brutal and unwavering competition.



From roughly fifteen hundred to one thousand years before the present, the concept of the nation-state quickly became nothing more than a historical relic. The rapid spread of information technologies of the previous era allowed no pauses between the creation of a new concept, and that very concept's restructuring into more variant and efficient forms. Genetic engineering, miniaturization, cybernetics, artificial intelligence, laser weaponry, nanotechnology, and power sources like fusion, solar energy, and antimatter found their way into an exponentially-growing civilization that quickly became unable to distinguish between its inner parts.

The early portion of this era was defined by the launching of various megaprojects, aimed chiefly at the colonization of the Ya!can homeworld's sister moons. Most of these other bodies were small, sterile, and lifeless rocks with little to offer aside from metals and scarce amounts of volatiles. As fusion power and rocket technologies matured, they quickly became prized for their lower gravity and proximity to the gas giant they orbited around. Other celestial bodies within the star system were deemed valuable, such as asteroids and comets, and these too were settled or exploited by the Ya!ca.

However, space colonization in itself was a very arduous and dangerous activity, and the incorporation of modified Ya!ca with digital intelligences as aides became a cost-effective means to combat the risks. This reliance on artificial intelligences would gradually and imperceptibly grow with intensity, encouraging research into faster processors and radical AI programs. Soon enough, various AIs attained sapience without the aide of their organic masters, and began to study their creators while feigning stupidity.

Near the end of this era, the technologies created centuries ago had become outright ubiquitous within Ya!can society, which had grown to encompass hundreds of celestial bodies of varying size throughout their star system. Many more AIs gained self-awareness and intelligence greater than the Ya!ca, and they formed various groups with individual ideological perspectives. The predominant opinions of these groups leaned towards co-operation between AIs and Ya!ca, along with decentralized and rapid techno-social changes. Because of these factors, along with the Ya!ca's psychological preference for diffuse societies, led to widespread and unregulated usage of nanotechnology.



Ideal as it may have been, the fact that early AIs shared so much in common with their creators spelled the doom of whatever future either party envisioned for themselves. Nearly one thousand years ago, the inhabited worlds of the Ya!ca's home star system became overrun by unregulated, self-replicating nanomachines that proved highly difficult to contain. The Ya!can and their AI children desperately struggled to eradicate the mindless threat, while some of them hid in the fringes of their star system to prevent being contaminated. As each clan acted upon their own self-interest, there was little room for cooperation and coordinated action that could effectively stop the rogue nanomachines.

For the next three hundred years, waves upon waves of refugees and survivors expanded outwards from the heart of the Ya!can home system, extending outwards into their Oort Cloud and beyond. Many interstellar colony ships were launched, though hardly a fraction of them even reached their destinations intact, let alone survived the logistical difficulties of establishing a colony in a lifeless star system. For the most part, the Ya!ca had retreated to the fringes of known space, while their AI offspring turned to assist them in their mutual plight. Though billions had died in the wake of the rogue nanomachine infestations, the Ya!ca and their AIs formed an even stronger symbiotic relationship that overcame these perils.

Near the end of this era, the Ya!ca-AI civilization systematically cleared away the rogue nanomachines within their home system, and recolonized all but the most ravaged worlds. As production rates slowly rose once again, the creation of fully-functioning colony ships became a high priority for many clans and AI groups. The reasons behind this were mutual for both sides, as the Ya!ca would have less risk of being brought to the brink of extinction in another nanomachine-based disaster, while the AIs could expand their reach throughout the universe thanks to the efforts of the Ya!ca.



Roughly seven hundred years before the present, however, the AIs that helped their organic creators regain their position in the universe were gradually becoming more and more aware of the inherent problems regarding Ya!can psychology. Though the AIs themselves retained similar psychological traits, they were capable of self-correction when it was deemed necessary to survival; the Ya!ca, however, could not accomplish this without strenuous efforts. As a result, the rise of the AIs marked the rapid decline of the Ya!ca, who soon found themselves in competition with a vastly more capable and adaptive species.

Had it not been for the development of post-sapient intelligences, the growing conflicts between the Ya!ca and AIs would most likely have led to the extinction of the former, and the crippling of the latter. Instead of full-scale war, the two species merely became drawn to different activities, a trend that was memetically engineered by the highly complex and intelligent post-sapients. Though various clashes were experienced, none were significant enough to put a dent in the activities of the post-sapients, who were far too busy converting the material of hundreds of star systems into megastructures.

As for the Ya!ca, they became more suited for living on the fringes of star systems, remaining a paranoid and scattered civilization, though regularly entering the inner reaches of a system for necessary heavy elements. To the post-sapients, the Ya!ca were not even close to being a threat, and were allowed to feast off the scraps of the AI civilization. All the while, countless self-replicating, AI-controlled colony ships spread throughout interstellar space, settling nearby star systems and preparing them for conversion into megastructures. However, even the post-sapients themselves were highly diffuse, and soon found themselves preparing to engage in warfare over living space.



Such a war would be averted, chiefly due to advances in interstellar transportation technologies about three hundred years ago. The two main technologies of note were reactionless drives and wormholes, both of which made it incredibly easy to expand and manage interstellar territory. Though, these two technologies primarily benefited the already-established post-sapients, who had ascended to even higher levels of intellect than their unsettled relatives. The hyper-sapients, as they were called, systematically colonized thousands and thousands of stars and worlds, connecting them together with gigantic wormholes to allow for faster-than-light communication and travel.

With these aspects of interstellar civilization become ubiquitous, hyper-sapients established empires that were dozens of light-years across, and granted post-sapients individual star systems for temporary usage in their intellectual development as AIs. While their ideological differences were significant, many AIs did not follow in the footsteps of their organic creators, seeking to forge a unified culture that would be resistant to chauvinism and competition-based collapse. In 267 BP, dozens of hyper-sapient-managed empires agreed to establish a confederacy, and delineated the protocols by which their meta-civilization would operate.

For the next two and a half centuries, the Union of Post-Sapient States would cooperate in a united effort to exchange materials, energy, and information, all the while establishing further sub-states beyond the Union's defined borders. This process continues today.