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Hundreds of millions of years before humans rose on Earth, a grand civilization had come and gone among the stars of the Milky Way. Its vestiges were only discovered recently, so "ancient alien" is the sole current designation researchers have arrived at a consensus for in terms of nomenclature. Archaeological geo-assays have revealed the staggeringly huge material extent of these aliens, with some form of their structural remains present on every single habitable planet discovered so far in our galaxy. Further analysis strongly supports that the aliens created a thriving, centralized, interplanetary society which even discovered techniques for small-scale teleportation and shared consciousness. The byproducts of alien civilization have held up remarkably well since the aliens' own disappearance approximately 300 million years ago and show incredible promise to expand our current understanding of the universe.

Ancient alien society appears to have been stratified on both personal and geographical levels, with planets being the principal unit of societal organization in terms of settlement. Alien structural remnants have been found across the entirety of planetary surfaces, suggesting that the aliens were either wealthy enough to build planetwide cities, or they had been growing or extracting resources from worlds on unprecedented scales. We are not currently able to distinguish the specific functions of most given alien structural remnants, but notably, all of them have featured objects classified as "Artifacts", either preserved in what appear to be specialized caches or incorporated into the architecture itself. Though no physical remains of the aliens themselves have been discovered to date, clothes, tools, and manuscripts partially translated using natural language interpolation have allowed us to make some fairly plausible deductions on what alien settlements and society actually looked like.

The aliens enjoyed an excellent quality of life with their advanced technological developments. In contrast to their material wealth, the aliens' architecture was angular and minimalist, reflecting growing ascetic or spiritual interests. As inferred through alien manuscripts, they did not need to perform any sort of hard labor within their settlements thanks to a very high degree of automation. However, certain things such as Artifacts, artwork, and code were still produced by hand. This arrangement led to the formation of settlement-wide vocational guilds, each of which functioned as an independent faction complete with political ambitions and esoteric rituals for its members. Despite guild affiliation causing some degree of friction within alien society, all aliens appear to have been united in the pursuit of knowledge in both science and philosophy. Many of their governmental buildings carried some sort of educational purpose. Though much of alien pleasure was intellectual, analogues of ballcourts, bars, theaters, and clubs have been uncovered in many alien settlements.

Since the early days of social organization, the ancient aliens venerated their ancestors, erecting statues and temples in their memory. When they eventually began to creat an artificial collective consciousness, they realized that this veneration had not gone to waste. Many individuals testing out the experimental neural interface system reported hearing the voices of their dead relatives whispering to them, and after the ensuing mass hysteria had been assuaged, the aliens correctly deduced that their ancestors' consciousnesses inhabited another plane of existence which intersected with their own in the junction of their minds. Intense research on the nature of this phenomenon, which was dubbed the "Realm of Thought," led to both the invention of Artifacts and an enduring racial memory.

Soon after discovering the Realm of Thought, the aliens figured out how to more comprehensively interact with it. Alien artifacts, whose inner workings are yet unknown to human minds, functioned as conduits between the physical universe and the Realm of Thought, allowing the aliens to somehow project their minds across realities to communicate with their ancestors' spirits. The process of the artifacts' creation remains perhaps the most closely guarded secret of the alien civilization, known solely to small guilds of alien artisans who spent most of their time locked in high-security worklodges. Not even the ancestral beings in the Realm of Thought knew or were willing to disclose this knowledge with individuals outside of the guilds. However, the artifacts themselves were ubiquitous, and in a matter of time, the aliens found an arguably much more practical use for them.

It turned out that artifacts were not only able to transfer consciousnesses between dimensions, but energy as well! What's more, the beings in the Realm of Thought were able to transfer energy back into the real world. This energy appeared in a small area around its Artifact, capable of being concentrated into highly specific points to perform "miracles" such as the transmutation of elements. The aliens wasted no time in putting this newfound phenomenon to work, leading to the classic alien manufacturing design framework we are replicating today. The artifacts have one flaw, though: they heat up very readily and eventually overload without proper maintenance. We have yet to figure out an effective way to disperse heat from artifacts, thus higher-load operations such as mass steel production regularly burn out their Artifacts. Good thing we can find new ones everywhere.

The ancient aliens took Artifacts one step further by endowing them with their own consciousnesses. This could be seen as a potentially disastrous choice, but the aliens had discovered that the magnitudes of the artifacts' capabilities were dependent on the willpower of their ancestors in the Realm of Thought, and understandably, they soon became annoyed with their descendants constantly asking them to psychically create microchips in the real world. Sealing Artifacts in bodies of metal with methods even more esoteric than those used to create Artifacts themselves, the aliens brought to life relics, machines of godlike power which could propagate effects of far greater magnitude in the real world than anybody in the Realm of Thought could ever achieve. Fortunately, these relics never turned on their creators, but instead plunged the alien civilization into a golden age of technological advancement, in which breakthroughs such as physical teleportation were made.

Nowadays, Centers for Artificial Learning are becoming rather similar to relics. CALs employ Artifacts as powerful capacitors for their neural networks, which means that the Artifacts burn out regularly. As the Artifacts are destroyed, fragments of psychic information which leak out from the Realm of Thought are somehow picked up by the neural networks and transcribed into readable diagrams. Though nearby organisms also pick up on these snippets of thought, they are completely incomprehensible to even human brains. Thus, AI has become a powerful tool for learning about the ancient aliens, albeit in a rather unexpected way.

About 350 million years ago, the aliens figured out that chaining Artifacts together in a certain manner would lead to the opening of a wormhole. They scaled up arrays of Artifacts into galaxy-wide teleportation devices, and eventually even managed to open a wormhole to the Realm of Thought. They became immensely interested in the possibility of sending matter to the Realm of Thought, and eventually, they decided as a species to transport the entire galaxy into the Realm of Thought to free themselves from their current universe's laws of physics. Planet-sized wormhole beacons were constructed and deployed throughout the galaxy, but when activated, they collectively failed and melted every last alien into pink radioactive sludge we know today as Ether before their own spontaneous existence failure. Especially prevalent on so-called Abandoned Worlds, Ether and its derivatives are a good indicator of the extent of alien impact on a given world.