Pre-Elysium
Pre-Elysium is the long period of Aetheria’s history before Elysium, when humanity colonized Sol—the Solar System—and established most of the setting’s familiar institutions. Extracting resources and moving goods became central to how society was organized. Automation changed work, while governments and institutions increasingly used predictions to govern people’s lives. Arguments over which kinds of minds deserved recognition as persons grew less settled, leaving different minds with unequal standing.
The linked histories below follow centuries in which institutions turned each breakthrough into new dependencies, reinforced hierarchies, and bargaining power in markets. They also trace how those institutions managed decline. This history matters to the later crises over the nature of reality: humanity entered them with an established order that had spent centuries making technological advances serve those relationships of power.