To the ignorant, for whom history means the spontaneous acts of great men, the Hegemonic Purge of 6782 is a surprising twist in the tale of a curious race. To the wise, who see the grand flux of civilizations, the Purge is merely the ultimate cause and final consequence of the Parallax Urgency, over a millennium prior. Consider: if the Generator’s violent end had not led to simultaneous scarcity and paranoia, the Viridians would not have sought simpler lives in smaller communities. Without this urge (after a century of technological explosion), that ancient society would never have returned to the stars in such numbers. Without this emigration, humans would not have established outposts in the Hermes Cluster, or at least would not have brought the Ctjn Empire’s distinctive politics with them. And even the ignorant must admit that without this fateful cultural import, growing quietly for over a thousand years until they achieved a quantum electoral majority in the 6700s, the Tomorrow Hive would never have heard the Viridians’ history, so strange and yet so familiar, nor would they have agreed to terminate as futile their historical scholarship, seal away their work “for the sake of yesterday and tomorrow”, and divert their funding to retroactive defense research.

—Thucydides Plutonium