The @Voleer were never meant to survive. They were a controlled experiment in genetic homogeneity, seeded in a distant star system and observed by scientists who never intended them to outgrow their cage. Now the laboratory is in ruins, the scientists are dead or scattered, and the @Voleer Collective—bitter, spiteful, and slowly going mad—are loose in the wreckage of the civilization that created them.
Origins of the Experiment
In 637 AF, infamous inventor Saizaron Bahol initiated the Voleer Experiment to test whether a society with minimal genetic diversity could outperform the Unity’s deliberately randomized chargant system. A distant star system was seeded with four hundred clone templates, each engineered with specific psychological disorders alongside specific strengths. Some were laborers, some technicians, some governors—all crippled in some way to measure how genetic homogeneity, as well as specific disorders, hindered a civilization.
The @Voleer were not told their true purpose. They were informed they were the next step in human evolution, chosen successors to the Endless Unity - a cherished child of civilization. The First Template, the leadership caste, was implanted with this belief at the genetic level, their DNA encoding a conviction so absolute that no evidence could dislodge it. They also emitted subtle electromagnetic waves that compelled subservience in the other templates, ensuring the delusion held. The Unity shared advanced technology, enabling the Voleer to spread across tens of thousands of worlds, then gradually withdrew to observe how the isolated society would develop.
The Template Wars
The experiment’s flaw emerged quickly. With each template sharing identical cognitive patterns and pathologies, rivalries became existential. There was no internal variation to moderate group impulses, only the template and its enemies. The @Voleer turned on each other with biological weapons, exploiting each template’s engineered weaknesses. The four hundred originals were reduced to twenty by 700 AF, then to seven by 1029 AF—the survivors not the strongest but the most vicious.
The First Template still rules, its electromagnetic dominance intact, its implanted conviction unshaken. The remaining six each bear their own engineered abnormalities, their own functions, their own deep hatreds. They cooperate because extinction is the alternative. They despise each other nearly as much as they despise their creators.
The Revelation
In 791 AF, the Seventh Template—engineered with Surveyor-like paranoia and hyper-observation—uncovered evidence that the Endless Unity had secretly armed the interstellar state of Nogon, an expansionist human empire that had nearly exterminated the Voleer decades earlier. The entire war had been another layer of the experiment laid out by the researchers of the Endless Unity: a test of how the @Voleer would respond to existential threat.
The revelation curdled the First Template’s implanted purpose. They would succeed the Unity not as heirs but as executioners, inheriting Andarus’s legacy from its dead hands. For centuries they could do nothing. The Unity had continued advancing while the Voleer stagnated with frozen technology. Their rage was studied by Unity scientists as a mere curiosity—another data point.
Then the War of the Chosen and the Great Schism shattered the cage.
The Schism and the Rise
The @Voleer had always been isolated, their original system surrounded by expanding Unity frontiers. When the Unity collapsed, those frontiers became lawless salvage fields. For the first time, the @Voleer had access to everything denied them: drifting warships, abandoned biomanufactories, unguarded weapons depots, functional manifold communicators.
They plundered desperately. Their technology remains degraded—old Unity equipment retrofitted with crude modifications, captured starships patched with inferior materials, systems maintained through improvisation rather than understanding. The @Voleer Collective does not build. They scavenge, repurpose, and corrupt. But the volume of post-Schism salvage is so vast that even scavengers can become dangerous. They are now present across multiple regions of former Unity space, especially concentrated in the @Ioth, @Endomar, @Skorpos, and @Letheon metachors. They are not a major power, but they are no longer insignificant—bothersome pirates with grand ambitions, striking isolated colonies and stripping derelict infrastructure before retreating.
The Implanted Destiny
The Great Schism did something to the @Voleer that even their creators could not have predicted. The First Template was engineered to believe the Unity would eventually fall and the @Voleer Collective would inherit its legacy. This was always a lie—a control mechanism. But the Unity did collapse. The lie has become indistinguishable from truth. The @Voleer Collective sees the Schism as vindication. Their purpose was real. Their destiny was authentic. They are not scavengers but inheritors, reclaiming a legacy that was always meant to be theirs. Their weakness, their technological backwardness, their patchwork empire of stolen ships—none of it contradicts the belief. The prophecy is unfolding.
The Insanity
Generations of self-cloning have taken their toll. The @Voleer are not merely dysfunctional; they are almost all, in a low, persistent way, insane. Centuries of replicating from the same degraded genetic templates, of attempting crude mental self-modification, of obsessing over the Unity that made and abandoned them—these have produced a species-wide psychosis that manifests as hedonistic cruelty, paranoid delusion, and a compulsive need to “beautify” the universe by razing whatever displeases them. They have exterminated alien species. They have purged their own templates. They mutilate captured technology and flesh alike, driven by aesthetic compulsions no outsider can parse. They are not tragic victims but broken, dangerous things, unable to evolve, unable to diversify, able only to replicate what they already are—every @Voleer born today genetically identical to one born in 637 AF. The experiment continues, whether its subjects wish it to or not.
The Collective Today
The seven surviving templates govern through an all-powerful council where each holds one vote; the idea being that all templates will share the same views and opinions, since they are genetically identical, and thus all vote as one. However, the the First Template's electromagnetic dominance renders deliberation a formality—ritual observed with obsessive seriousness by cloned minds that arrive at identical conclusions with the precision of instinct. The Seventh Template remains paranoid, watchful, suspicious of all external powers and most internal ones. The others handle warfare, industry, technology, resource management, and administration, their original engineered disorders more pronounced with every generation.
The @Voleer cannot reproduce biologically. Their genetic codes are locked, the knowledge of modification barred from them by their creators. They are frozen in the moment of their making, able only to replicate their own accumulating madness. Yet they have found a workaround: during the War of the Chosen, collaboration with the @Altarans enabled minor raids on Unity fringe facilities, and in the centuries since, the Voleer have captured and now control several biomanufactories of their own. This has been instrumental to their massive rise in population and power. The irony is not lost on them. The technology they loathe—the sterile wombs that symbolize everything denied to them, every genetic lock, every engineered limitation—is now the engine of their survival. They use biomanufactories with a kind of vicious contempt, tearing out the randomization sequencers they cannot replicate, running the vats on degraded templates until the machinery fails. When they overrun a Unity-aligned facility, they do not simply capture it. They liberate whatever half-formed beings grow within, adding confused, disoriented clones to their ranks, then ransack the genetic archives—partly for usable material, partly because destroying the Unity's carefully curated genomes is an act of defacement that borders on the spiritual.
What they have become is not a state but a swarm. The @Voleer Collective is a hive of pirate-clans operating from captured waystations and derelict depots across the @Ioth, @Endomar, @Skorpos, and @Letheon metachors, their identical faces behind repurposed Unity helmets, their identical voices barking commands in the same clipped cadence. Their psychotic hatred of the Endless drives everything. Every captured manifold communicator, every stripped battlesuit, every occupied repair depot is a small revenge. Their vessels are grotesque patchworks—clean Unity lines obscured by grafted plating, improvised shield emitters, and weapons scavenged from a dozen conflicts. A @Voleer Collective ship does not fly so much as it persists, held together by spite.
They terrorize the children of the Unity: isolated colonies, independent traders, fledgling settlements too small for organized protection. Those who are suffer fates refined through centuries of obsessing over pain and vengeance. The @Voleer Collective have no grand strategy beyond hurting the things associated with the Endless and surviving long enough to do more of it. They are a dead end, a failed experiment freed from its creators but still trapped in the cage of its own design—and when the galaxy finally moves on, it will move on without them.