Acosm. The primordial fever dream. Everything leaves its mark on the underlying computational network; some things differently than others. As human consciousness permutes, step by step, it imprints upon the distantly connected nodes which obliviously continue their permutations long after their cousins have ceased. By this, a sort of afterlife is created. Everything which has ever existed, and which will ever exist, exists here. Disparate ideas and constructs intertwine to create an infinite hallucinatory landscape for the endless sea of lost souls.
As your senses fade, you feel yourself plummet, through the walls of the brane, the local collection, the multicosms and paracosms. Now, you find yourself here. You can now see the Entirety from the outside in. It is, in a way, powerful.
It is also horrifying.
The year is 4079 CE. The inhabited galaxy has been left fractured by the events of the Architect Era. Some places have once again become the shining metropoleis they were in the late Interstellar Age, while disrupted supply chains and crippled infrastructure force others to resort to using ancient technology.
Many factions now vie for control of societies and resources in the great power vaccuum which has opened across known space. The core systems enjoy a somewhat more stable political landscape, but even there, conflict is inevitable.
All the while, the great superintelligences known as the Architects watch on, careful not to interfere, as they are now acutely aware of how vulnerable they truly are to the collective power of the lower sapients. They mostly keep to themselves, researching wild and esoteric new technologies, and leaving behind the occasional artifact for unwitting sapients to happen across.
Needless to say, this is an unprecedented moment in human history. Though the great, sprawling masses breathed a collective sigh of relief upon the grand fall of the Architect Era, they may once again need to brace themselves for conflict, perhaps even greater than the last.
This is where we begin.