[My untitled scifi universe. TLDR pitch: A space adventure setting with a retro visual flair and sensibility. It is set in the far future, with most of the world building taking place just before, during, or in the years after a major war left the galaxy in a state of disorder]

The end of the war between the cybornetic Groupthink and the Arweli species ended when a virus was uploaded into the Groupthink's nodespheres, which were their moon sized motherships ships, causing the brains of the ships to breakdown. With their breakdown, the ability of all members of Groupthink to share thoughts was eliminated, completely disrupting their war effort, and causing confusion and chaos that stopped the war in it's tracks.

As the brains of the nodespheres died, many of them made random faster than light jumps, as the synapses made their last twitches.

After the war, a human corporation found and recovered one nodesphere, and with it the massive power crystal at it's core. The Groupthink were the only faction known to have examples of such massive crystals. The crystals themselves are a mystery to known science. All races use them as the only way to create a faster than light engine, and the larger the crystal, the larger field it creates. The origin of the crystals is unknown, and no success has ever been had in making synthetic replications.

While faster than light engines are the most common use for the crystal, they are known to have a connection with the Groupthink's cyborgs special ability to share thoughts instantly. All cyborgs were made on the nodespheres, and the energies of the crystals played some part in the creation of their synthetic, but organic brains.

The human corporation saw the value of being the first to solve the riddle of how to unlock a similar ability with humans and began conducting research. Progress was slow going, but the promise of a breakthrough caused increasingly unethical research methods. Unwilling human subjects were exposed the energies of the crystal in a variety of ways. The results were often scientifically interesting, but the subjects suffered extremely high morality rates.

One corporate assistant who realized the human cost that was being thrown at the project was preparing to go public. A corporate project lead caught wind, and in his mind, to protect the project, arranged for her to be forcibly reassigned as a test subject. With the almost guaranteed death rate, the problem would be solved, while the company would be using it's human resources at maximum efficiency.

However, unlike previous subjects, the experiment on her created a resonance cascade, resulting in the destruction not only of the nodesphere in a massive explosion, but of the crystal itself, a phenomenon that had never before been witnessed.

The unlikely survivor of the experiment awoke many planetary systems away, with no immediate explanation for how she had survived or traveled such a distance.

The middle manager who had reassigned her had been off of the nodesphere, on a ship that just cleared the massive radius of destruction.