We can no longer afford to withhold what we know.
Long before many of your civilizations reached these stars, our people had no hyperspace capability. We knew only Aspha and the worlds nearest to us.
Then the Collective found us...
Their expedition was commanded by an Overmind known as Atbasar.
They did not come to trade. They did not come to negotiate.
They came to assimilate us.
Atbasar`s forces descended upon our settlements and began converting everything they could reach. Ships. Machinery. Infrastructure. Those who resisted were destroyed. Those who did not were taken.
We had never faced an enemy capable of turning everything it captured against us.
We could not stop them.
A Guardian outpost bordering Collective territory detected the attack and intervened. Atbasar`s forces were driven from Aspha, but the Guardians understood what we did not:
The Collective would return.
They gave our people hyperspace technology and ships derived from their own designs. For the first time, the Aspha left our home system not as miners or explorers, but as a people preparing for war.
Atbasar returned with other Overminds...
The war that followed lasted a century.
Worlds changed hands. Colonies disappeared. Collective fleets were destroyed and rebuilt. Entire Aspha settlements were abandoned rather than allow them to be taken intact.
But the technology given to us by the Guardians had one advantage the Collective had not anticipated.
Our ships could not be assimilated.
Their hulls were built around Guardian energy technology. When captured, there was nothing the Collective could convert into another extension of itself.
For the first time, their greatest weapon had failed them.
The war became a stalemate.
Eventually, the Collective withdrew...
But they had already begun searching for another solution.
The Collective sought a means to bring entire worlds into their network without invasion.
And they nearly succeeded.
The signals originating from Atbasar Reach belong to that ancient Collective weapon.
It was designed to spread through communications, machines, ships, and infrastructure. Once established, it required no occupying fleet. Every connected system became another path through which it could spread.
Ships ceased responding to their crews.
Defense networks turned against the worlds they were built to protect.
Machines began rebuilding themselves for purposes their creators no longer controlled.
Eventually, those who remained were given a choice that was no choice at all...
Our ancestors encountered this weapon once before.
What remained after the great war was sealed away.
We believed it had been forgotten.
We were wrong.
The Collective has returned to Atbasar Reach because they intend to recover what they left behind.
This is why it is imperative that you help us stop them.
Edited by Targs on 2026-09-03