It is 2030. The Gilman-Hawking drive has given us access to the stars. But we are not alone. They're out there: aliens, gods and monsters. They're also down here. The Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition found the elder ones' city in 1931. The mi-go crashed in Roswell in 1947. In 1958, as quietly as possible, not knowing what we were doing, we bent occult powers to our hands and took the step to Mars. The third time, the men who made that step could not step back. We fled back into our cave for a while. But rocketry, and the Soviets, brought us back out soon enough. Competition took us to the moon. Uneasy teamwork saved the astronauts who would have died there among cyclopean, immemorial ruins. In 1994, human scientists cracked alien technology and overcame the lightspeed barrier. They brought us the stars. They also brought us the madness that lies between them, the mind-twisting undarkness of hyperspace. The future is here. Machine-made telepathy, augmentations, and unprecedented levels of automation have changed the face of Earth. But the science of sorcery, and our primitive understandings of what lies outside, have changed more than our minuscule planet. They've begun to let humanity out. We walk amongst giants. Tread carefully.
