When the Cover was Broken"Just because the dustpeople can commit even greater atrocities than humanity already did, this does not justify their extermination: their minds are still human, and thus any atrocity done against them is a Crime against Humanity." - Israel Rosenberg, War Crimes tribunal, 5085 A.D.
Related StoryIt was inevitable. No matter how hard they tried to cover up their own existence between humanity, being also anarchists and perhaps even more resentful of authority figures than the human majority around them, the dustpeople couldn't afford maintain tight controls over everybody, while researches to create perfected strains proceeded. A chain of events, leading to consequences that would shape forever the future of the Confederation, would be triggered by one man's actions: an alleged Ravian scientist named Julius Lovecraft. Alleged, for his actions happened during the time of the Great Isolation when the majority of Solar Communes systems were isolated from the more known universe, where Eden lied, the stage of what the Society of Eternal Twilight most feared: the most tragic genocide of Solar Communes history.
The alleged creator of the Zscience strain, Julius, have injected the strain upon countless of unwilling subjects through the use of rats and dogs as vectors, leading, in a few weeks, to an outbreak of uncontrolled new dustpeople that, in face of psychological stress provoked by the sudden transformation, caused several deaths of victims discovered to have not even a drop of blood in their corpses, triggering an immediate deep investigation by a group of highly xenophobic humans led by Marcus Metzger, now infamously known as the "Hitler of the 51st Century". Upon discovering the existence of the dustpeople, Metzger have accused the dustpeople of being doppelganger alien parasites that killed their first victims and stole their identities and memories, proclaiming the human and eldar inhabitants of Eden to hunt and exterminate all dustpeople through extremely sadistic and cruel methods.
This call for genocide have triggered the death of roughly ten to forty million innocents, or perhaps more as no census exist about the dustpeople population before this sad event. However, worse atrocities than mass slaughter happened against the dustpeople. Metzger, in his madness and perversity, have designed sarcophagus capable of completely enveloping the entire physical bodies and innards of dustpeople and provoking pain against every inch of them, locking them eternally in a hellish torture machine worse than everything ever created by man before. Even worse, mutilation, flaying, evisceration, gang rape and several other extremely savage and brutal atrocities were commonly done against the dustpeople in Eden. However, Metzger understimated the "alien scum", and the fact many among the military forces of Solar Communes in Eden were dustpeople, thus, they fought back, triggering a brutal civil war between dustpeople and the humans and elves who sympathized with their plight and those who sought the complete subjugation and extermination of them.
The conflict happened in all fields: sea, land, air, space. The dustpeople had a strategic disadvantage by initially lacking control over most of the industrial infrastructure of the planet, but in a bold advance, that included even exchanges of weapons of mass destructions between both sides, transforming an entire paradise-like continent with lush jungles into a windswept nuclear wasteland, thanks to tactical and strategic brilliance, they have managed to push and control part of the city of Noveau Paris, where their leader, Hernan de Voere, would uncover a strange portal in the home of the first person injected with the Zsience strain: Aune Delacroix. A portal that, according to Aune, led them to a massive network of cyclopean underground caves of black stone, deep beneath the frozen continent of Antarctica, from where only Aune managed to escape. According to her, Hernan de Voere, a major diplomat responsible for reapproaching the Confederation with Allanea and for his contribution to eliminate the long racial tensions between humans and elves in Eden, was eaten alive by
something that nearly killed her, and that she simply described as "a large and untold horror beyond my worst nightmares". Her arrival in Earth's Antarctica however would provoke the opening of a new multiversal gateway, ending the Great Isolation.
When the inhabitants of Earth contacted the first dustperson, they saw her not as a doppelganger murderer and parasitic alien like Metzger's goons, but as the true next stage in the post-human evolution of their own kind, while also discovering that the primary source of energy of the Zsiences was not blood, but electricity. Upon hearing about the major atrocities being commited in Eden, which has remained isolated from the Solarian main universe for decades, Sol have prepared a massive space force to forcefully end such genocide, as its inhabitants nearly unanimously sided with the dustpeople.
Eventually, Metzger forces were defeated, and all major instigators of the genocide were condemned to be thrown helpless into the Warp for their immense lists Crimes against Mankind, while all identified perpetrators who participated upon mass killings, gang rapes, torture and equal atrocities against dustpeople were executed. With the tragedy over, countless of victims have gone willing to massive memory wipes in spite of the ethical concerns about completely erasing past memories of individuals, as a means of psychological treatment against the traumas left. From the few who have, due to several reasons, chosen to never forget, many have descended into schizophrenia.
However, in spite of the massive tragedy, the discovery of the dustpeople and debunking of Metzger's lies about them being aliens killing and stealing identities would lead to massive conversions, as the sheer majority of human beings living in Eden and in the Relativistic Universe have willingly chosen to become part of the Zsience strain and shed their biological lives, believing that such was the next stage in their evolution. With this, the dustpeople thus became the dominant species of Solar Communes, even though nearly every one of them once were humans.