It’s never easy to let go of the past, but rarely have the pleasures and dangers of clinging to yesterday been so vividly illustrated as they were with the Zintrag disaster. Descendents of the first Returners, the Zintragi’s chief source of income throughout the seventh millennium came from leasing the rights to their own history to the Tomorrow Hive’s lucrative chronal drilling operation, strip-mining the resources of the distant past for exploitation in the present. The partnership was an incredibly profitable one until 6999, when a rig orbiting Zintrag Beta unexpectedly exploded, consuming not only the Zintrag system but much of 6999 itself.

The resulting timequake tore open local spacetime, flooding the era with escapees from the past: Vermailians, T’ltssk, humans, possible Intoans, and things even more ancient and horrible—all confused and outraged to find themselves in a world where their species were extinct and their empires forgotten, and determined to declare war on the present to reclaim the future for the past. To complicate matters, they were equipped with modern weaponry—armed, as it turned out, by past-instances of the Tomorrow Hive, intent on raiding the resources of their future counterparts.

The nature of the subsequent conflict—a war fought between the past and the present over control of the future, fought in multiple time periods simultaneously—took its toll on local spacetime; by 7520, a Parliamentary investigation found that the war had so damaged the fabric of space that basic astrogation would become impossible within a few centuries, and with it, interstellar civilization itself. Parliament, backed by a panicked Tomorrow Hive, called on the temporally-transcendent Omniscium Wherescape for an emergency intervention to end the conflict, only to receive the response that this had already occurred, and not to worry—spacetime would heal itself, and interplanetary travel made possible once again, in a mere twenty-seven thousand years.

Fallout from the conflict has varied wildly. Zarlethihkers have been largely content to remain on their adopted planet, returning to a pre-spaceflight, even pre-industrial, way of life; Xoulic spaceriders, on the other hand, are debating the prospect of leaving the universe altogether, seeing migration to another dimension as preferable to a return to their homeworld. The Tomorrow Hive appears on the verge of collapse into multiple subsidiary species, each claiming creditor status in the others’ bankruptcy; beings like the Nova Entity and the White Flower Dreaming have flourished, content to reach other worlds through the power of thought. The Bazrahin have maintained a studied ambivalence in the face of their own possible collapse, citing their old maxim: “The future will happen with or without us; will we miss us if we aren’t there to see it?”

—Recorder 3000-21