About the Setting:
para- An affix originating with Latin, meaning “near”.
Parahuman: “Near-human”, commonly referring to a variety of clades derived from a mix of human and non-human genes.
Imperium: “The power to command”, usually synonymous with “empire” or “an aggregate of nations or people ruled over by a powerful sovereign government”. As in the Imperium Rōmānum.
Para-Imperium: An aggregate of nations or people ruled over by a powerful sovereign government that won’t admit how close it is to an empire. Such as the Federation of Parahuman Species.
It has been nearly two thousand years since Sol was lost to those relentless mechanical foes of unknown origin. Two millennia since a few scattered exosolar colonies of transgenic refugees became the last remnants of what once was the human race. And less than a thousand years since the immortals of Alpha Centauri ventured out from their enclave.
Now parahumanity stretches across a sphere of space stretching roughly five hectolightyears in diameter. Ideological dissidents fleeing (or banished) from the growing Federation only to be sucked back in by data merchants bringing the light of civilization across the depths of space in the name of profit. The people of the Federation Core live indefinite lives of comfort and ease thanks to ubiquitous nanotechnology while the Outworlds are resigned to nanotech-free lives that are often nasty, brutish, and short. That is the universe of the Para-Imperium.
About the Author:
Joel Kreissman, known on many sites as Zarpaulus, is an underemployed Biologist from Wisconsin who decided to apply his scientific knowledge to writing science-fiction.
The Para-Imperium 