The Timeline of Everything

Hc Svnt Dracones: The (Very Unofficial) Timeline of Everything

Completely mapping the HSD timeline is tricksome. Dates in HSD’s history are, with very few exceptions, fuzzy: humanity’s final gasp is somewhere between “more than a century” and “less than 150 years” after the end of most terrestrial life. That sort of thing. Given that 700 years is frequently “nearly 1000 years” in other text, there’s a wiggle degree of about 30%. And when the megacorp machine has filtered every historical record through countless spin doctors…well, Henry Ford once said “History is more or less bunk.”

When does the Timeline Begin?

There is no official “start” to the HSD timeline.
My personal pick for the start of the timeline—the invention of the Geomat—is around 2070, but that’s an arbitrary decision, as are the arbitrary historical periods and many editorial choices on dates. I happen to like close-future games. The game’s author indicates that the canon timeline is at least 200 years in the future, so that sets the game in a distinctly more science-fictional period.

Following the rulebook, this timeline’s built with a gap of unknown length between 20th century Terra and the end of humanity. In the rulebook the only date reference is “700 AE,” the rest is inferred. What’s Latin for “let the browser beware?” So by all means, change the start date and increment as you see fit. Or delete the dates entirely, in a way they’re counter to the world’s tone.

Why doesn't this match the Sound and Silence timeline?

That’s a complicated story…I started this project well before Sound and Silence was created, with an Excel spreadsheet and a lot of best guesses, lots of lookups to keep X, Y and Z related, and a huge margin of error, 10% here, 30% there. So there were places where a given event could have occurred some 100 years off my estimated date. Ultimately, Radio Free Deimos’s timeline became the backbone for the canon timeline in Sound and Silence, with a fair amount of modification and correction, but most of the dates stayed more or less intact. When HSD 2.0 was created, it had an entirely new way of looking at dates, which gave suggestions of at least what century some events occurred in, and a clearer dating of key events (the story of Genotype, in particular). This helped clarify some of the timeline, fix some order issues, and otherwise gave a real shakedown to my first estimates of the dates…and it showed more clearly what the narrative timeline should have been.

In a sense, there’s three different histories — 1.0’s hazy narrative, Sound and Silence’s timeline, and 2.0’s 100-year-marker version, and the S&S timeline is a best-guess effort at sequencing 1.0, made without the clearer picture of 2.0. This current version of “The Timeline of Everything is essentially the S&S timeline, corrected whenever possible to fit with the date ranges in 2.0.

Epochs

1965 to...?Beginning of the "modern" information age...

The Prehistory of Sol

The distant past is largely lost to Vectors. The elements of the world’s history that were recorded describe the growth of a decentralized, global community on Terra linked by mobile communication and an independent spirit that would not be bound by government law. This is in some ways a racial myth, the legendary ancestors that […]

-32 AE- 116 AE?Settlement and cultural foundations of Mars and Sol

The Age of Mars

History is written by the winners, and we are dealing with the history of the vectors, the undisputed victors of the greatest, and last, culture war in humanity’s long history of same. When the curtain parts on Mars, the spotlight of history remains on the red planet. The Age of Mars begins with the fusion […]

130-280 AE?Sol experiments with the Free Market...

Corporate Boom

Early Sol’s corporate terrain was built exclusively by MarsCo. There’s no way around this. All Terran corporations that managed to survive in some form on the red planet did so as subsidiaries of MarsCo. The earliest of the Post-Terran megacorps–ASR, Pulse, Genotype–were founded as MarsCo spinoffs. At some point, the landscape began to change, in […]

~415 AE - ~508 AEA glorious age of space adventure spanning a century!

The Interplanetary Age

Up until perhaps 350 AE, Vectors hadn’t really expanded beyond the orbit of Mars. There was lonely Luna Colony, but it was still an airless moon. A few robots were decaying on Mercury as a part of the Dawn March project sometime in the 200s. Venus was just a mess. TTI’s first exploration of the Jovian […]

~509-535 AE?After the disaster on Luna, cold war, restrictions, and rivalries dominate Sol

The Whisper Recession

For about a decade, ripples of the loss of Luna spread across Sol. MarsCo pulls its strings. Traffic between worlds is drastically reduced, even banned. The Jovian colonies suffer as their supply lines are broken, and many corporations that are dependent on shipbuilding and travel go out of business. Paranoia sours relations between Mars and […]

550 AE - 600 (?) AETranscendent Technology revolutionizes metaphysics

The Transcendent Age

When TTI released the Transcendent Implant, that single technology shook the corporate space, but not since the GeoMat had a single technological innovation changed society so thoroughly… and perhaps never so quickly. Transcendent Technology revised Vector understanding of reality. With not even a gesture, a Vector armed with transcendent tech could create destruction edging into […]

605 AE - present (?)The darkest "new normal" yet.

Modern Sol

The Transcendent Age was a period that was, in a sense, controllable. The strange powers that Transcendent Technology gave its users were still the tools of Vectors, even if they weren’t perfectly understood tools. As the new century dawned, Sol seemed to be gradually darkening. This dark new normal may have begun around 565 or […]