Sir Arthur C. Clarke's third law

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Robert Heinlein – Time Enough for Love

One man's "Magic" is another man's engineering.

Clyde DeSouza – Memories with Maya

"What use was 'time' to those that would soon achieve Digital Immortality."

Prelude

By the 32nd century, man had found and colonized twenty-two new earthlike worlds. Along the way, they found three of those worlds already inhabited, but none of the three new races they found were beyond windmills and animal power.

The Chirr, amphibious hunter gatherers, were just learning the fine points of putting edges on rocks.

The Builders, a somewhat land crab like species were an anomaly, they had spread across their world with a single language and culture, yet they seemed limited to grand stone structures and copper tools.

The Dref were a severely balkanized canine like species, involved in their world's era of the great sailing ships. Their recent development of gunpowder was tracked to a human sociologist's 'What If' experiment. Already prone to a warlike nature, the new weapons spread almost overnight.

Scattered all around these were the ruins of others that had gone before. Precursors and Forerunners.

It hadn't been long after the first of the swarm of explorers and prospectors launched that the first reports came in. The void was found, almost fifty stars in close proximity, all the worlds seared clean. Everywhere in that region they looked, there was debris that spoke of a war of utter extermination. The Chel and Anori had been philosophical opposites, the Chel disdaining the artificial and using only organic technology, while the Anori became part of their tech. Both had only left traces behind. A million years later nothing lived in that region space.

The Vreen had towed five earthlike worlds into the same orbit, what should have been unstable, was almost two-hundred-thousand years later still mathematically precise. Their surfaces covered in single monolithic buildings reaching a kilometer above the surface, and extending fifty kilometers into the planet. Every mechanism, every artifact stripped, only empty shelves, a few mysterious murals, and mounting brackets left behind.

A hundred more systems bore traces of those and others that had gone before and were now no more.

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With plenty of room to expand into, human society turned its attention onto itself. Behavioral sciences steered all to calm, confident, crime free peaceful lives. Or so most people were led to believe, as the old crimes vanished from public view and adopted a more civilized white collar facade. Medical knowledge fixed almost all the known ills. No more birth defects, always perfect skin, perfect hair. The auto-doc allowed people to heal most any injury, and to adjust almost any DNA based feature, height, hair/eye/skin color, and even allowed for greatly extending life span, never a natural problem with birth defects unheard of.

Even in a utopia, people always wanted more...