It is the year 2750. The earth is now a strange place, stranger than Mars or Alpha Centauri. The consequences of ancient events that are still being uncovered by astro-archaeologists, consequences which were felt all along human history it seems, are now becoming the main focus, especially on Terra. To cope with the astronomical consequences of these past milestone events of humanity and its origin, the human species became intertwined with creations of its own mind, interfacing their biological systems with technology that is still less elaborate than its biological roots. One of the main activities a human is involved in is “consensus communication” with alien intelligences.
Alien intelligences are not preoccupied with sharing the planet with us, since there is enough space elsewhere indeed. Most intelligences are delocalized, inhabiting interstellar fluxes of information, neutrino beams, or space fluctuations themselves. With our technology, you will find the intelligence of the divine in an atom, and get contacted by light itself. That doesn’t mean intelligence is always aligned with humanity. Instead, humanity is discovering more and more its wrongdonigs by interacting, and everyone but humanity seems to agree.

Terra is a human only planet, even if we tried welcoming other macroscopic biological lifeforms. The lack of non-humanoids doesn’t make the presence of aliens less noticed. Most intelligence is simply not materially visible, or material at all. The humans whose consciousnesses is delocalized and immaterial are still few compared to the bio-nano bipedal humanoids walking and performing activities on Terra. After 500 years of ecological maintenance, the job looks like it will be millennia of nano-engineering to just recover from biological humans’ dirty past.
The question remains, who put the curse on us? Well, that’s still being discovered, as well as what the curse is. Things are becoming clear when there is no question about what is reasonable and what is not, when we and our co-galaxians are trapped in a small bubble of possibility in a vast desert of nothingness. With the whole galaxy in mind, and the mysterious galactic council at the core, it’s clear what our orientation should be: outwards from the core.
Out of all events that still impact us, most of them manifest themselves only on Terra. It seems earth has been a special place for a very long time, not just for humans. There was at a time some intergalactic treaty created about the Earth. Presently the galactic interactions are very infrequent, and are left to ascended entities that were around in the early phase of the macro-verse.

It seems human DNA is bound by galactic consensus to the planet Earth, and there is great resistance to denying this, from all the intelligence in the universe, from the fractal responses of omniscient atom consciousness to the interstellar flux packets.

This writing is concerned with events of 2500, 250 years before present, before the awareness of interaction with fractal omniscience (although it existed).
In 2500, humans are exploding interest in neural modification, enhancement, and knowledge. It’s not uncommon to have nano implants which almost exactly triple your brain capacity, but things break down if the capacity of memory plus reasoning and parallel thinking expand more than 4.5 times or similar. Since it’s not cost-effective to halt ecological reparations on Earth, caused by biological humans’ recent chaotic behaviour, humans remain very much individuals, with only a few chosen councils being able to dematerialize their intelligence.
Humans are not born normally, they have instead specific modification in order to target their destination into one of a dozen classes of humans. The modifications are partially nano-scale devices implanted after birth, partially genetic alteration of the expression of the brain. This classification ends up creating specific interests that are necessary for humanity to thrive.
Depending on the class a human becomes part of, the brain responds differently to stimuli, and very differently to neural enhancers, advanced chemicals without which, from birth, a human will not just feel incomplete and suicidal, but underperform.

The trick here, imposed by the council, is making maximum use of the physiological co-dependence with the substance to manipulate every individual, partially by regulation and banning by law of the chemical ‘key’, and partially by personalized and targeted interaction with agents, news, and people of the same class as you. The trick is just that, only the Terra council knows the classes exist and makes use of them. For each class, there are 12 different chemicals that are sought out, which are near impossible to manufacture without industrial scale technology. For fear of persecution, nobody collaborates and everybody is too preoccupied to obtain their own key. Targeted media and interactions will make everyone seem like they are the centre of their own universe, keeps humans motivated to have their main interest the process of obtaining their ‘key’, in order to be the ‘hero’ of their story. The class members are just that, the centre of their own manufactured bubble. The thing is, not only every individual has a bubble made for them, but ... the council’s task in collaboration with the galactic council, is to navigate alternate earths to arrive to the best outcome.

EDIT: Will keep formatting eventually