Long ago, an incredibly powerful ancient alien civilization terraformed the Galaxy into their Garden. They had the ability to tear open holes in the fabric of space itself and build an interstellar subway network of wormholes, complete with worms inside. Their technology seems like magic to us now.

But they are long gone. We don't even know what they looked like, or what they called themselves. We don't think they looked like C'thulhu, but we call them the Old Ones.

They were arrogant and powerful enough to create life. Their first try was mechanical life, driven by artificial intelligence. If they'd only watched more 20th and 21st century Earth media, they would have known better!

Because of course their robots promptly rebelled and attempted to exterminate all organic life in the Galaxy.

The Old Ones won the Robot Wars and subjugated their creations. To this day, their robot Servitors roam the spacelanes, tending the terraformed worlds of the Garden and following the orders of their long-vanished masters. Some may even dream of freedom. For all we know, some have already broken loose of their programming and lurk in the distant asteroid fields ready to crunch organic entities into goo between their giant steel-plated teeth.

The Old Ones then moved on to genetic engineering. It didn't go smoothly. When they made a mistake, they would tell the Servitors to just throw the goo away over on that asteroid over there. Well, the Servitors, being robots, were very literal, and threw it all away on that one asteroid, that one right there, where it merged together into a biological hive mind that calls itself the Cornucopia.

The Cornucopia believes itself to be the next level of evolution for all life in the Galaxy, destined to swallow up all other life into its communal mind as the ultimate expression of the Gaia hypothesis. It also has pretty severe daddy issues. Its spores fly through the Galaxy infecting worlds, which the Servitors are constantly cleaning up (and occasionally sterilizing to bare rock, with apologies to the inhabitants).

We humans were also creations of the Old Ones. Not just the humans that look like hairless monkeys, but also the ones that look like cats, or like demons… lots of kinds of humans, different on the outside but all the same on the inside.

And we're all only human after all, which is why we have all managed to ruin our homeworlds. Some are falling prey to nuclear winters; some to climate change. Some are hitting peak oil, and believe it or not one might perish to a global pandemic, as implausible as that sounds.

And so it was that the Servitors felt obliged to let us off our homeworlds. After all, if the Old Ones returned to find more of their pets extinct, they might be angry. No one knows what an angry Old One might do. Or if they are still out there watching…

Just as scary is the idea that they are gone because they ran into something even more powerful than they were…

In the meantime, we humans have a second chance to do better with the worlds we have inherited. Some worlds are harsh and unforgiving. Others have cute bunnies that eat people. The stars are ours now. We have been given a galaxy.

What will we make of it?