They wanted
weapons.
They got pirates.

History has missing pages.

The distant past survives in damaged archives, conflicting accounts, and memories that may have been altered. There is no single clean record everyone agrees to trust.

The Dream Plague is one of the earliest catastrophes around which a recognizable shared history gathers. Its consequences reach well beyond those who lived through it.

When pleasure became a trap.

The Dream Plague, associated with the neurovirus Eroticon-V, struck at the systems of reward and arousal. Pleasure ceased to be something a person could simply enjoy and leave behind. It became compulsion. Connected systems helped the catastrophe spread.

Its aftermath left a durable fear: that the mind could be captured through the very things that made life feel worth living. In a civilization of long lives and transferred minds, that trauma did not stay neatly in the past.

A cure that became a doctrine.

Lithium-Prime is remembered as the therapist whose response to the Plague became the foundation of the Order of Abstinence. Stories about his own ordeal have become legend; their details, and his ultimate fate, are far less certain than the doctrine built around him.

The Order offered freedom from the tyranny of sensation. Desire could be silenced. Dependence could be corrected. Over time, a teaching became an institution capable of deciding which ideas, experiments, and lives were acceptable.

This was not simply an emperor being replaced by a priest. Imperial government endured while the Order’s authority became woven into its legitimacy.

What if happiness could be engineered?

PleasureTech Industries™ answered the same wounded world from another direction. Rather than reject sensation, it developed ways to shape it: neural technology, body modification, and eventually the deliberate design of experience and personality.

The corporation’s reach expanded through usefulness as much as force. A population depending on its medicine, communication, employment, and contracts could be bound to it without a formal conquest.

The promise was seductive: a life tailored to what you wanted. The danger appeared wherever the power to define that wanting stopped belonging to you.

There was no single first captain.

Piracy grew from many departures: refugees, deserters, former subjects, smugglers, and captains unwilling to belong to either great system. There was no one founding ceremony, and no central pirate state waiting to welcome them.

They built alternatives wherever a ship could dock and a deal could hold. The resulting conflict is a tangle of raids, espionage, local wars, disputed routes, and temporary arrangements—not one uninterrupted battle across every inhabited world.

The experiment that left.

Years before the game begins, Mave, Fjela, and Sabrina were caught inside the Order’s attempt to turn people into controllable instruments. Their paths into that system were different. So were the things it tried to take from them.

Mave was subjected to genetic modification and psychological correction. Fjela discovered that completing her promised service did not mean the Order would let her go. Sabrina began as a doctor, then became a target of correction when her compassion interfered with what the Order demanded.

They refused to remain its property. Together, they escaped aboard the laboratory ship where the project had been conducted. Instead of finding another institution to obey, they became pirates.

A life already in motion.

The Captain was not a subject in that experiment. Mave, Fjela, and Sabrina had a shared past before he entered their lives.

Now there is a crew to lead, a base to return to, and people whose trust cannot be reduced to following orders. Their histories explain some of what they bring aboard. What happens between you is another story.