Calendars and Historical Dates

Human Unity uses the Unity Calendar, conventionally abbreviated U. Its epoch, U00000, corresponds to 2358 CE, the year of the First Umoja Congress. Dates before the Congress are written with a negative sign, so that U-00038 corresponds to 2320 CE.

The conversion is therefore:

CE year = Unity year + 2358

The year U00197, the principal present-day date of Frontier, corresponds to 2555 CE.

Historians acknowledge that the chronology of the Collapse remains uncertain. The First Umoja Congress itself is securely dated, because the communities which attended it retained local calendars and agricultural records. Its relationship to the old Common Era calendar is less exact. The accepted correspondence of U00000 to 2358 CE may be incorrect by several years, but it is the standard used by Kumbu and Human Unity.

This distinction explains why surviving accounts can say that approximately 140 years passed between the beginning of the ABC War and Umoja. The war began around 2218 CE, while the First Umoja Congress took place in 2358 CE. Both statements are broadly true, but nobody possesses sufficiently complete records to identify a single moment at which the old civilisation ended and the long Collapse began. The archive itself describes the war as beginning around 2218 and the subsequent disintegration as lasting approximately 140 years.

Before the Conquest Era

1901 CE: The First Known Trader Presence

A survey vessel belonging to a species known in translated Trader records only as the People approached the outer Solar System in approximately 1901 CE. It encountered a dormant Trader vessel positioned near the Solar wormhole terminus. The vessel activated, offered to trade and claimed that the system lay under Trader control.

Humanity knew nothing of this encounter at the time. The record was discovered centuries later among the immense Trader archives placed in Kumbu. The Traders have never satisfactorily explained how long they watched Earth, why the vessel remained dormant or what they meant when they claimed ownership of the Solar System.

This is not considered humanity’s first contact because no human being was involved and no contemporary human government knew that the encounter had occurred. It is instead classified as the First Known Observation of Sol by an Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

2007 CE: Discovery of HO Librae

The planetary system around Gliese 581, later usually called HO Librae, was identified by human astronomers in 2007 CE. At that time, knowledge of extrasolar planets remained rudimentary and almost everything initially believed about the system would later be revised.

HO Librae nevertheless became culturally important. It was close enough to appear reachable, possessed several possible planetary targets and eventually became the object of the most ambitious corporate colonisation programme of the Conquest Era.

The Corporate Century

2050–2090 CE: The Great Delegation

During the middle and late twenty-first century, national governments transferred increasing portions of their infrastructure to multinational corporations. Communications, transport, energy generation, healthcare, water, orbital industry and eventually military services were governed through layers of private contract.

Automation increased material production but concentrated its benefits. People were divided between those whose labour remained more valuable than machines and those considered economically redundant. Conventional states continued to exist, but their capacity to act independently steadily diminished.

The period is known in Human Unity historiography as the Great Delegation because authority was rarely seized openly. It was surrendered through millions of apparently rational administrative decisions. Human Unity political philosophy regards this gradual abandonment of public responsibility as one of the principal causes of the Conquest Wars.

2090 CE: The Military Contracts

Around 2090, the United States placed most of its military operations under a corporate contractor. Other governments had already done the same on a smaller scale, but the American decision created a decisive shift. Four global service corporations emerged as military superpowers with client states, private intelligence systems, orbital assets and control over substantial portions of the world’s industrial infrastructure.

These corporations did not formally abolish the nations which employed them. They retained national governments as legal clients, sources of legitimacy and pools of recruits. In practice, governments increasingly fought wars selected, supplied and prolonged by the organisations contracted to defend them.

2090–2150 CE: The Corporate Proxy Wars

For approximately sixty years, the four corporate blocs fought through national and regional proxies. Much of the conflict concerned energy, mineral extraction, orbital access and control of infrastructure. Previously uneconomic fossil fuel reserves became viable again through new extraction technologies, ensuring that the world continued fighting over resources which should already have been obsolete.

Human Unity historians call these struggles the Corporate Proxy Wars. The contemporary term Conquest Era is broader and includes the political order which produced the wars, the orbital escalation which followed and the final descent into ABC conflict.

2138–2174 CE: The HO Librae Probe Programme

Between 2138 and 2174, six automated probes were launched toward HO Librae. The missions overlapped rather than waiting for one probe to return before launching the next.

The archive’s original claim that a probe reached HO Librae “at 0.1G” is clarified in the canonical chronology. The probes used drives capable of accelerations around 0.1g during manoeuvring and initial departure, but spent most of their journeys coasting. Their average speed was close to half the speed of light. Each took roughly forty years to reach HO Librae, while its transmissions required about twenty years to return to Earth.

The first useful survey data therefore began arriving around 2198. Later probes continued transmitting after the Seedship had departed. This allowed the colonisation project to accumulate extensive information about the system without requiring six consecutive sixty-year survey cycles.

2150 CE: The Io Incident

In 2150, an explosive device destroyed a corporate supply vessel, orbital dock and mining facility near Io. The Corporate Proxy Wars expanded beyond Earth. During the following fourteen months, at least twenty-one further incidents were officially recorded as accidents or mechanical failures but were almost certainly acts of sabotage.

2150–2186 CE: The Orbital Escalation

The Io Incident did not immediately produce the final war. It began a prolonged era of attacks on orbital infrastructure, covert reprisals, communication failures and short-lived armistices.

Large Earth-dependent habitats remained in orbit, housing hundreds or thousands of workers. These were workstations and industrial settlements rather than genuinely self-sustaining habitats. They required regular shipments of food, replacement components and other supplies from Earth. It would be decades before Masira Ba engineers the first closed-cycle Human Unity habitats, not the first structures in which people lived in space. The old habitats could sustain people only while the terrestrial economy functioned. Human Unity’s habitats could survive independently.

2186–2214 CE: The Armed Exhaustion

By the late twenty-second century, the four corporate blocs had exhausted much of their ability to wage open war but remained unable to establish a lasting peace. Governments, corporations and military systems fragmented into overlapping authorities. Vast resources were invested in automated weapons, hardened facilities, strategic stockpiles and escape projects.

The period is called the Armed Exhaustion. It explains the apparent gap between the sixty-year Proxy Wars and the ABC War of 2218. The larger Conquest Era was a continuous political crisis lasting more than a century, but it contained several distinct phases rather than one uninterrupted conventional war.

2214 CE: Departure of the Seedship

In 2214, one of the surviving corporate powers launched a heavily armed Seedship toward HO Librae. It carried an artificial crew, industrial systems, extensive archives and approximately 100,000 selected human zygotes. The settlers were intended to be the biological and ideological heirs of the corporate elite.

The Seedship used antimatter drives capable of sustained accelerations of up to approximately 0.01g. Its voyage lasted more than a century. It arrived in the HO Librae system around 2325 CE, depending on its precise flight profile and deceleration period.

Contemporary records available on Earth merely stated that the ship had departed and was never heard from again. The detailed information now held in Kumbu, including its complement, weapons and social programme, was reconstructed after Human Unity’s later encounters with the Conquest Society.

The Fall of the North

2218–2226 CE: The ABC War

Around 2218, the Conquest Era entered its final phase. Atomic, biological and chemical weapons were used throughout the Northern Hemisphere. The United States, China and the Middle East suffered the greatest concentration of nuclear strikes, while the United Kingdom, Germany, France and eastern Europe were also hit.

The identities of the original belligerents are unclear. National governments, corporate commands, autonomous military systems and breakaway forces all issued contradictory orders. Later generations would remember the war as the Roasted Pebbles War, a contemptuous expression suggesting that the old East and West destroyed civilisation while arguing over territory and resources which their fighting had already rendered worthless.

The nuclear attacks were followed by engineered epidemics which spread far beyond the original targets. Conventional warfare reached most continents as states fought over fuel, machinery, food, medicine and intact infrastructure. When launches and resupply flights ceased, almost all inhabitants of the old orbital stations died.

2226–2270 CE: The Great Dying

The collapse of sanitation, medicine, agriculture and communications killed far more people than the initial exchanges. Cities became disease reservoirs. Supply chains disappeared. Governments survived in name while losing the ability to administer territory beyond fortified centres.

The world population, which had reached approximately twelve billion before the war, eventually fell to around one billion.

Northern Europe suffered particularly badly. Industrial western Europe was struck directly, while the agricultural regions of eastern Europe were burned or poisoned. Climatic disruption, damaged soils and the loss of continental infrastructure turned much of the region into cold scrubland and tundra. These territories became the Northern Wastelands.

2270–2358 CE: The Long Collapse

The final ninety years before the First Umoja Congress were not uniformly chaotic. Local governments, villages, schools, religious communities, municipal systems and agricultural cooperatives survived in many parts of the world. What disappeared was the global system linking them.

Most historical records from this period are local, fragmentary or retrospective. Human Unity therefore avoids assigning a precise end date to the ABC War. The Long Collapse includes decades in which organised warfare had largely ceased but famine, disease, isolation and institutional failure continued killing people.

The Origins of Umoja

U-00038 / 2320 CE: Birth of Kesho Mbaye

Kesho Mbaye was born into a farming family in Senegal during the Long Collapse. Her father, Salo Mbaye, maintained crops, water systems and practical education at the family homestead. He died in his fifties, which was considered an advanced age under the conditions of the time.

Kesho later moved to Touba and founded the first Mbaye School. The schools combined literacy, science and history with agriculture, water reclamation, energy generation and mechanical repair. They were not intended merely to preserve books. They preserved the ability to build, test and transmit useful knowledge.

U-00010 to U00000 / 2348–2358 CE: The Umoja Movement

The word Umoja originally described a growing network of communities, schools, relief groups, trade routes and regional councils across central, western and southern Africa. It was not initially a country or formal government.

Over time, Umoja also became the common geographical name for the connected African and Atlantic heartland in which the recovered civilisation developed. In modern usage it may refer to the region, its culture and the historical recovery movement, but not usually to the federal government itself.

U-00002 / 2356 CE: Birth of Roderigo Ahumibe

Roderigo Ahumibe was born to Peter Ahumibe and Marta Ester Fontecilla during the early Umoja movement. His family embodied the emerging links between Africa and the surviving communities of South America.

Roderigo became an organiser, translator, labour leader, legal scholar and political philosopher. His life’s work did not transform a country called Umoja into a country called Human Unity. Rather, it transformed the informal Umoja recovery network into the political federation of Human Unity.

U00000 / 2358 CE: The First Umoja Congress

Representatives of African recovery councils, Mbaye Schools, agricultural communities, surviving municipalities and Atlantic partners met at the First Umoja Congress.

The Congress did not immediately create a single state. It established shared systems for communication, disease control, trade, education, transport and the peaceful settlement of disputes. Its securely recorded date was later chosen as the epoch of the Unity Calendar.

U00000 is therefore the genesis of the political process which produced Human Unity, while Umoja itself existed as a movement and region before that date.

U00014 / 2372 CE: Birth of Masira Ba

Masira Ba was born into a family noted for scientific achievement. Four of the seven Ba siblings entered advanced Mbaye programmes, but Masira became the most celebrated.

She lived for 148 years, dying in U00162. Her lifespan was exceptional even by Human Unity standards, although longevity treatments, organ regeneration and disease prevention allowed many citizens of her era to remain healthy well beyond old Pre-History expectations.

Masira’s longevity matters historically because she personally connected the first constitutional generation with the early age of interstellar exploration.

U00015 / 2373 CE: The Unity Accord

Fifteen years after the First Congress, its member communities ratified the Unity Accord. The Accord created Human Unity as a permanent federal political association.

Human Unity was therefore founded constitutionally in U00015, although its calendar begins at the earlier First Congress. Modern summaries which describe U00197 as nearly two hundred years after the formation of Human Unity are using the broad historical meaning, counting from the start of the Unity process at U00000. Strict constitutional histories instead date the federation from U00015.

The Accord also formally adopted English, Swahili and Spanish as common administrative languages. None was the majority first language of the population. Their use reflected African regional exchange, Atlantic contact and the incorporation of Spanish-speaking South American communities.

From this point onward:

Human Unity is the political federation.

Umoja is its African-Atlantic heartland, founding culture and geographical centre.

The distinction resembles that between Human Unity and Kumbu. Kumbu is not a state, but a particular place and institution of profound civilisational importance. Umoja is much larger and more diffuse, but it is likewise something one can travel through, come from or identify culturally with.

U00025 / 2383 CE: Death of Kesho Mbaye

Kesho Mbaye died at approximately sixty-three. By then, the Mbaye system had trained more than 10,000 teachers across central, western and southern Africa.

She is remembered as one of the parents of Human Unity because the federation depended upon a population capable of reading, maintaining infrastructure, evaluating evidence and cooperating across older ethnic and national boundaries. Her achievement was not simply educational expansion. She helped create the social conditions in which Human Unity could exist.

U00030–U00060 / 2388–2418 CE: The Expansion of Unity

During the decades after the Accord, Human Unity incorporated additional African, South American, island and southern Asian communities. Membership did not require cultural assimilation into a single model. It required compliance with the Accord, recognition of common citizenship and participation in shared systems of education, public health and resource distribution.

Roderigo Ahumibe was the principal architect of this expansion. His legal and linguistic work allowed communities with radically different histories to join the federation without describing themselves as conquered, absorbed or rescued.

U00065 / 2423 CE: Death of Roderigo Ahumibe

Roderigo died at approximately sixty-seven. By the time of his death, Human Unity had become the accepted political name of the federation, while Umoja described its founding region and cultural centre.

His statues commonly depict him as a labourer rather than a ruler. This reflects the Human Unity belief that civilisation was rebuilt through work, service and coordination rather than command.

Recovery of Earth and Space

U00050–U00100 / 2408–2458 CE: The Century of Reconstruction

Human Unity restored global communication networks, sustainable agriculture and long-distance trade. It also began cautiously re-entering orbit.

The old orbital ruins demonstrated the dangers of treating habitats as dependent extensions of a planetary economy. Human Unity space engineering therefore placed exceptional emphasis on redundancy, closed ecological systems and the ability of communities to survive without external resupply.

U00074 / 2432 CE: Masira Ba’s First Space Voyage

At the age of sixty, Masira made her first journey into orbit. By then, her work in power management, durable systems, shielding, life support and closed-cycle habitat engineering had made practical a new generation of reusable spacecraft and self-sustaining orbital settlements.

The flight was partly scientific and partly an act of recognition for someone who had spent decades making Human Unity’s return to space possible. Its high-inclination route allowed Masira to view Europe from orbit. Her recorded emotional response to the visible damage became one of the defining historical images of the recovery.

She is credited not with the first structures inhabited in space, but with the first genuinely self-sustaining space habitats of the Human Unity era.

U00100 / 2458 CE: The Post-Scarcity Threshold

Around a century after the First Umoja Congress, Human Unity’s core territories achieved what later historians call practical post-scarcity.

This did not mean that every desire could be satisfied or that resources had ceased to matter. It meant that food, water, shelter, education, healthcare, communication and access to fabrication were no longer normally allocated through personal wealth. No citizen of the connected territories needed to lack the foundations of a dignified life.

The archive explicitly places Human Unity’s arrival at post-scarcity around this broad period.

U00108 / 2466 CE: The First Direct Contact with the Traders

Humanity’s first acknowledged direct contact occurred when a Trader vessel activated at the Solar wormhole terminus and initiated communications with a Human Unity survey mission.

The Traders behaved as though the meeting was routine. They offered navigational information, technical exchanges and access to portions of their archives. They refused to explain their earlier claim to ownership of Sol or the encounter recorded in 1901.

Human Unity learned that the wormhole network connected Sol to a much larger inhabited region. Trader records described systems, settlements, hazards and civilisations which no human being had yet seen.

U00112–U00125 / 2470–2483 CE: Foundation of Kumbu

Human Unity established Kumbu as a network of protected data repositories. The principal public repository was constructed in East Africa.

Kumbu combined recovered human knowledge with Trader data. The quantity of alien information was immense, but its origin, purpose and truthfulness were uncertain. By U00197, Human archivists estimated that only around six percent of the Trader-sourced material had been accessed, much less fully understood.

Kumbu became both an archive and an epistemological defence system. Information was tested, compared, translated and classified before being accepted. Some Trader material contained malicious software, propaganda or information capable of producing dangerous social effects.

U00120 / 2478 CE: The Explorer Programme

Human Unity commissioned the first Explorer vessels.

The Explorers were designed as travelling universities, embassies, hospitals and rescue platforms rather than warships. Their crews used Trader maps to plan journeys through the wormhole network, but they understood that the records might be incomplete, outdated, commercially biased or deliberately misleading.

The early Explorer era therefore began with a peculiar mixture of knowledge and uncertainty. Humanity possessed documentation describing what lay ahead, but no human had seen it. Research teams spent months at Kumbu examining layered route maps and preparing for encounters which might not resemble their records.

U00130–U00160 / 2488–2518 CE: The First Expeditions

Explorer vessels began passing through the wormhole network and making direct contact with extraterrestrial societies. They discovered that Trader records were usually accurate in narrow technical matters but unreliable as complete descriptions of a world or culture.

The Traders recorded what mattered to trade. A world’s biology, politics or religion might be omitted entirely if it did not affect commerce. Some entries were centuries old. Some locations had changed governments, suffered ecological collapse or disappeared. Other systems contained inhabitants whose existence had not been recognised by the Traders.

U00140–U00180 / 2498–2538 CE: The Reopening of the North

Human Unity also expanded its rescue missions into northern Eurasia and North America. These expeditions used aircraft, orbital observation, medical teams and mobile fabrication systems to locate isolated communities.

The Northern Wastelands remained dangerous. Military remnants, epidemic reservoirs, damaged autonomous weapons, cannibal communities and successor states all competed for resources and survivors.

A recovering United States existed by this period, but it was not the direct continuation of the old federal government. It was a coalition of eastern and southern successor territories which had adopted the historical name and claimed legal continuity. By U00180 it possessed sufficient aviation and naval capacity to conduct missions in Europe, sometimes cooperating with Human Unity and sometimes competing with it.

U00162 / 2520 CE: Death of Masira Ba

Masira Ba died at the age of 148.

By then she had lived through the formal creation of Human Unity, the first self-sustaining orbital habitats, practical post-scarcity, direct contact with the Traders, the foundation of Kumbu and the first Explorer missions.

Her long life made her a living connection between the generation which rebuilt Earth and the generation which left it. Upon her death, Human Unity recognised her as the greatest combined scientist and engineer of the recorded era.

The Conquest Society

Approximately 2325 CE: Arrival at HO Librae

While Earth endured the Long Collapse, the Seedship reached HO Librae. Its artificial crew established industry, prepared settlements and brought its human population to term.

The settlers had been selected by the corporate elite and raised within an archive saturated with Conquest Era values. Their society regarded hierarchy, ownership, expansion and military preparedness as natural foundations of civilisation.

HO Librae c was difficult but habitable. It possessed land, oceans, native plants and some animal life, but had lower atmospheric oxygen, high gravity, heavy cloud and extensive permafrost. The colony survived through strict organisation, automation and exploitation of local resources.

2325–2545 CE: Development in Isolation

For more than two centuries, the colony developed without contact with Earth. It became the Conquest Society, preserving and intensifying the assumptions of the age which had launched it.

The phrase in the old account that it would be “hundreds of years before they found war” is interpreted as a little over two centuries between their arrival and their first conflict with Human Unity.

The Conquest Society had no access to the wormhole network. Its vessels travelled conventionally between stars. Human Unity therefore concentrated its early defences around wormhole termini and was unprepared for an enemy arriving through ordinary interstellar space.

U00187 / 2545 CE: The First Conquest Attack

The Conquest Society attacked Human Unity installations without warning. Its forces approached through normal space rather than emerging from a wormhole.

The campaign was brief but severe. The attackers advanced too far from their logistical base and were eventually forced to retreat. Human Unity lost several vessels, two Experts and an Explorer ship.

Initial records classified the missing vessels as destroyed. Later intelligence revealed that they had been captured. The Conquest Society had acquired a Key, giving it the potential to activate and navigate parts of the wormhole network.

The attack demonstrated that the archive of the past remained an active danger. The Seedship which Human Unity had regarded as a historical mystery had produced a living civilisation shaped by precisely the values Human Unity believed Earth had escaped.

Kibwe and the Northern Missions

U00192 / 2550 CE: Kibwe Qualifies as a Pilot

Kibwe received his pilot’s licence at seventeen and began flying local routes in a twin-rotor electric aircraft.

U00197 / 2555 CE: The Belgian Mission

Five years after qualifying, at the age of twenty-two, Kibwe served as lead pilot on a two-week aerial search-and-rescue operation in the former territory of Belgium.

The mission rescued four malnourished and diseased people. Its crews encountered military remnants, predatory communities and rival rescue operations from the recovering United States. After returning to Umoja, Kibwe refused further assignments in the north and began training for the Explorer service.

His decision embodies the two frontiers of the setting. The Northern Wastelands are the frontier of humanity’s past, entered with old maps and uncertain reports. The wormhole network is the frontier of humanity’s future, entered with Trader records and equally uncertain expectations.

The Present Day: U00197 / 2555 CE

Human Unity is a federal political civilisation with its administrative and cultural heart in Umoja. It includes much of Africa, South America and numerous associated territories across Earth and in space. Its citizens share a political identity without belonging to a single culture.

Umoja is the interconnected African-Atlantic region from which Human Unity arose. It is a place, a network of communities and a civilisational idea. A person may live in Human Unity without living in Umoja, just as one may use the archives of Kumbu without residing there.

Kumbu is the great repository of recovered human and Trader knowledge. It contains descriptions of wormhole routes, inhabited systems and extraterrestrial cultures, but the information remains incomplete and only partly understood.

The Explorer service travels outward using those records. Its crews know that life lies ahead, but they do not know whether any particular entry remains true. They arrive with laboratories, medical facilities, diplomats, rescue teams and cautious defences. Each voyage is planned in detail, but every destination remains a first human encounter.

The Traders move throughout the wormhole network and possess vastly more information than they share. They have watched Sol since at least 1901 and perhaps much earlier. Their motives, origins and relationship with the creators of the network remain unknown.

The Conquest Society has discovered the wormholes and possesses at least one Key. It represents not an alien threat but the armed survival of humanity’s abandoned past.

The Northern Wastelands remain inhabited by refugees, isolated communities, warlords, autonomous systems and recovering successor states. Human Unity continues sending rescue missions because abandoning those populations would contradict the universal claim contained in its own name.

The year is U00197.

Humanity has recovered its world, but not all of its people. It has inherited a map of the stars, but not the experience needed to understand it. It knows that the wormholes lead towards Life.