Our history is at once terrifyingly dull and tediously fascinating. It's littered with explosions, romance and plot holes. It was built on the bifurcated arms of the irrational fear of springs and fastidious self-demoralization. Our strength has grown as time after weary time we who believe in GRID crack our might against those who would ignore us and force our will on those who would allow it. To call us heroes is to insult us. We are more, much more than heroes. We are GRID. And we will deliver your package on time or lie trying.

GRID started as a merry bunch of louche philosophers flapping our jaws and wagging our chins in shadowy parts of shadowy worlds, content to cackle and snort at religion and its followers. However, having earned a solidly kleptomaniacal reputation everywhere around, we were treated with hasty and critical skepticism if we loitered overlong anywhere within arm’s reach of someone’s back pocket, and the members of our dialectic tribe began running thin on currency. We thusly had to resort to doing real work to survive and naturally gravitated to smuggling. This sustained our lust for ignobility (without the messiness of piracy) for the short stretches when we could find work. We’d keep our ears high to the sky for any stale whiff of a job to be done and show up mewling like a starveling cat at the feet of anyone disreputable enough to hire us.

It went on much like this for a few years until we happened to make an unlikely friend: a lawyer who was on the right side of the law from our perspective, but quite the wrong one from the law’s. We did a couple of odd jobs for him, mainly smuggling evidence in and out of his clients’ possession. And in exchange he gave us the contact for someone who could incorporate our ragged and illicit syndicate and give it legs to grow into a proper business. So we called on this gentlewoman and within days she had made professional GRID marketing material and drawn up officiating paperwork making us more legitimate than we could have imagined and would, really, have desired.

Our business grew swiftly into 10s and 20s of employees all scurrying around the system moving stolen ship stereo systems and knock-off MobiGlasses made on Spider. We had a few big jobs spread sparsely around our company’s peak business, but the original group that had started in the shadowy places on shadowy worlds had all risen to more executive positions within and no longer personally ran deliveries or made deals. It was the ideal way to exist. For them it was right back into philosophizing and sitting around uselessly, waiting for their next hot chocolate to arrive in a chipped and dusty ceramic mug at the small, squalid local bar which they had always frequented. The only difference now was that they could always pay their tabs, though sometimes for due deference to old times still chose not to. Times were comfortable and well fed. They’d hired their lawyer friend (the one who had helped them get their first big start) to run the business from the legal side of things. The business, after all, had to appear legitimate from the outside and to do so, had to do some actual legal business. This wasn’t a problem as GRID had gotten so large and successful at this point that business just poured in. Local developing worlds made up a large percentage of GRID’s legal dealings and were replete with requests for supplies to be brought in from factories in and out of system. The company seemed to run itself. These were heady days and seemed like they would never end.

But as is commanded by the demon lord, Murphy, and his filthy law, disaster must strike. And so it did. GRID had been infiltrated by several Banu from a rival smuggling business who got just deep enough into the company to have corrosive information to give the Advocacy. We barely had time to react. We had a tip-off that the Advocacy would be coming for us minutes before they were banging on our front door. The whole headquarters fled as quickly as they could in different directions, grabbing any small belongings of their’s within arm’s reach. The original bunch, the few who started the whole organization, took one last look around their HQ, their palace of plunder, sent a distress message out to any GRID members who were on the job off planet, telling them not to return, and then left the building together, not bothering to collect their things.

That is where our story picks up. The originators of GRID, before leaving, took one of the company fleet’s Constellations, and set off to another system hoping to keep GRID alive in some small way, far from the Advocacy and anyone who would remember them. But they would have to scrounge for jobs again. They would have to make all new connections with a new shifty underworld. They would have to start from the beginning. Well — almost the beginning; they at least had their Constellation which they had decided to name: Socrates Reborn.