The Forty-Year Discovery Period

Date: approx 2362 – approx 2401
Era: Era of Arrival

What happens

Discovery came slowly and unevenly over the four decades that followed. The first artifact yielded its secrets within a few years of arrival, while the last took close to forty years simply to locate. Throughout the period the colonists honoured their agreement to share, passing findings between the houses as each artifact came online: schematics, observations, the working procedures that turned a recovered relic into something they could actually use.

Consequence

By the end of the period every house could build hardened ships, run entanglement communications, draw power from matter itself, edit genomes, and ride the Drive. The recovered technology had become a shared baseline that no single house held over the others. There was one exception, and it would matter: silence could never be reproduced.

Related

• era-of-arrival (era)