[h1][center]Wild Expanse: A Sci-Fi Western Concept[/center] [/h1]

[center][i]Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.[/i] -Arthur C Clarke. [/center]

	There was a ton of human lore about first contact. Hopeful stories, war sagas, horror flicks. Each had its own take on when mankind would finally reach out into the reaches of the endless sea of space and make its mark. But the most common theory was the one that seemed truest when we began to seed other planets: the Fermi Paradox. Humans had been searching for signals from other lifeforms for centuries as they colonized planet after planet, and each time it remained dead silent. 

	We assumed we were the only intelligent life out there. 

	We were wrong. 

	It wasn’t a galactic conflict or some great war. It was a massacre. Countless human colonies were destroyed. The intergalactic highway we’d developed crushed in an instant. Fermi assumed other intergalactic civilizations would have killed themselves. He could never have imagined the might or the cruelty of the Rhelnast Empire. They had no interest in our resources, our people, or our technology. They just wanted to make sure they were the only player on an intergalactic scale. 

	Humanity was forced to flee the Milky Way. The old colonies, even our mother planet of Earth, were lost to us. But in the wild reaches uncharted space we found other races like us. Others had been crushed underfoot, eking out an existence in the wilderness of uncharted stars—a new frontier loaded with interstellar immigrants, making a mark on these wild galaxies.