1 Prologue - Stay Calm, It can't get any worse.

In the grand scheme of things, a thousand years is nothing but an eye blink. To a species such as Man it means everything. Throughout the majority of Mankind's evolution, progress had been gradual, with spurts of innovation sparking new paths on it's March ever forward.

This all changed with the advent of the Industrial age in the eighteen hundreds. Leaps and bounds of technological and scientific advancement in decades instead of centuries. Then the unimaginable happened in 1970, the first computer. From that point innovation became a daily occurrence. A scant few decades later, in 2025, and it was interstellar travel with Mankind's first hyperdrive units, the products of a multinational race to reach other solar systems.

The winners of this race were not the nations, but the mega corporations who had fielded their own experiments. The loss of revenue by the world's governments during this period lead to their eventual downfall, but we will get to that later.

Enter the two greatest Mega Corps to ever rear their heads. Slate Corp, with it's Blink™️ Drive, dubbed for it's complete lack of travel time, though it had massive safety issues, was an early winner.

The true champion was L.I.N.E. Corp. While Slate Corps' device allowed instant travel, it could take months of calculations for just one jump, as they used a fold space engine based on the idea of wormhole formation. LINE Corp, on the other hand, had harnessed the Tachyon, to create a true faster than light speed hyper drive engine.

Though the Hyperdrive equipped ships took longer to arrive somewhere than the Blink drive equipped ships did, they could launch almost instantaneously. Blink drives became the work horse of interstellar travel, since they worked far more efficiently in known space, instantaneous movement of people and property in massive quantity, safe for the most part.

Hyper drives were used for everything from short distance travel, to interstellar scouting, as they worked no matter what, plus they had the upside of not blinking you into a planet or sun directly because someone misaligned a jump coordinate.

LINE also had their neural enhancement chipsets as their backbone, which they were named for, Linear integrated neural enhancement chips, or LINK. Now the thing to realize here is that the Link device was what made everything possible. A small shot of nanites into your brain and Bam, Link installed, then a few moments later you were registered on the Web and holy shit instant web access in your brain case. So while you had everyone clamoring for space travel, you also had everyone connected directly to the Web, with access to information at anytime, plus full dive simulations for entertainment or training usable while you slept. Recipe for disaster? Yeah you guessed it.

Nearly a thousand years and several thousand wars between corps, planets and even species later shit finally starts to calm down. LINE is still around, though everyone cals them the Terran Alliance now. They own and run just about everything, that is unless you live on a backwater frontier planet or something similar that no one gives three shits about. Though even on a backwater you still needed a Link to do just about anything other than the worst menial jobs.

Which leads us to our subject class. Damien Fenix, an awkward, abused young man on the verge of his coming of age. An orphan slave on a small backwater planetoid called Rekkar, a habitat of pirates, mercenaries and all manner of interstellar scum.

Rekkar City is all Damien has ever known, his parents gone before he was two. He has spent the last thirteen years of his life in the not so loving "care" of his "Uncle" Ian Drake, a small time crook, bar owner and full time bastard. Life has not be easy or nice to young Damien, whose awkward clumsiness seems to contantly drive his "Uncle" Ian completely insane, often leading to severe beatings and public shaming.

Young Damien shuffles his way through the bar day to day, doing his best to stay out of trouble, not knowing how quickly trouble would soon find him.