The planet's ruling elite, the top one percent, finally manages to do the unthinkable: stir the dragon. They awaken the ninety-nine percent from their apathy and despair and sense of helplessness after decades of systematic abuse and subjugation. But the results are not what anyone could have anticipated.

The FutureScape board's ongoing genocide, conducted in an effort to return the planet to its once pristine, Garden-of-Eden state, causes a split among the survivors.

A small percentage of humanity will remain on Earth to learn the game of power and politics from the masters in an effort to beat them at their own game. To gain the skills, in short, to govern more than just one planet.

Why is that so important? Because the rest of humanity, now evolved into humanoids and hybrids, and more aptly labeled trans-human or post-human, are not long for this world.

They will use the incubators of the genesis ships in low orbit around Earth, driving their bio-diversification, to colonize not just the solar system, but the multiverse, taking advantage of warp drive engines and other ahead-of-their time technologies.

Technologies that might not have been available, ironically, for ages to come, were it not for the desperation of countless minds to escape from under the thumb of a small oligarchic group. Proving, at least for the religiously inclined, that the devil too shall do God's work.

And why is it so important that we do more than colonize the cosmos in a systematic way, starting with our solar system, then branching out to our nearest star, and so on?

Quite simple, really. Turns out that looming threats from within posed by fellow transhumans, as well as from without--from lifeforms already populating the multiverse--with power to destroy entire galaxies with a wave of their hand, means that spreading out to the rest of our solar system is no real protection at all.