For each side, the only acceptable outcome is the complete elimination of the other. Both sides now crippled beyond repair, the remnants of their armies continue to battle on ravaged planets, their hatred fueled by over four thousand years of total war.

The Core and the Arm have all but exhausted the resources of a galaxy in their struggle for domination. What began as a conflict over the transfer of consciousness from flesh to machines escalated into a war which has decimated a million worlds. A war like no other began, which has since raged on for four thousand years. Ironically, it was, however, the Core's final triumph against mortality that would prove to be its undoing, for when the Core mandated uploading all peoples' brain patterns into machines in a method known as 'patterning,' there was a massive rebellion from the Arm, an organization which banded together from the edges of the galaxy and demanded to keep their physical bodies. This organization pushed scientific progress and planetary colonisation forward until the human race covered almost the entire galaxy.

Long ago the galaxy was ruled by a wise and benevolent central body known as the Core (an abbreviation for 'Consciousness Repository').

Total annihilation intro