History of Psionics

Psionic powers first manifested centuries ago in the wake of the first interstellar flights. Later paraphysicists speculated that something about the exposure to metadimensional energies incurred in spike drive travel changed these spacers, altering genomes or warping their energy shadows in a way that affected their eventual offspring. While this theory was never completely proven, it was demonstrated that psionic powers were far more prevalent on the frontier, in people who were descended of starfaring ancestors, than they were on Old Terra. On most frontier worlds about one in ten thousand children are born with psychic aptitude, while Old Terra displayed only a tenth of that incidence.
Psychic abilities initially seemed to be a congenital curse, one known as “Metadimensional Extroversion Syndrome”, or MES. Children manifested MES in puberty or early adulthood, after certain critical stages of brain development opened a channel between their minds and the churning maelstrom of energies that boiled in metadimensional space. By a conscious or unconscious act of will, they could release these energies in various forms. Even so, the passage of unmediated metadimensional force through unprotected neural tissue almost invariably caused brain damage. Repeated use of these abilities caused crippling disability, death, or madness. Most psychics were dead within a few years after manifesting. A few were able to control their powers sufficiently to prevent accidental discharges, but safe, controlled use of these abilities was unknown.
In response, the Terran Mandate initiated the Psionic Authority, basing it on a terraformed Mars. Children from throughout Mandate space were carefully selected by the Authority and brought to the institute in order to study and hopefully cure this tragic condition. Persistent legends speak of horrible experiments and ruthless sacrifices of “test subjects”, but no proof of such evil ever emerged, and after decades of study, the Psionic Authority was actually able to produce protocols that allowed controlled, safe employment of psionic powers.
The bloom of psitech development that followed and the wonders of jump gates and the Second Wave of human expansion are a matter of history. So too is the Scream that erupted six centuries ago and granted every living psychic in human space either violent madness or instant death. The interstellar societal collapse that followed and the centuries-long Silence between the stars has been a matter of living memory for many ill-connected frontier worlds.
With the Scream and the death or madness of every potential psychic tutor, psionics became the horror it once was generations ago. Untrained psychics suffer under the lash of their own abilities, doomed to early death if they aren’t fortunate enough to fumble into a means of damping their own powers. Men and women of some worlds now fear psychics, not only for the ancestral memory of the Scream and the chaos that followed, but also because their only experience with these unfortunates has been one of uncontrolled power, madness, and death.
In the past few centuries, however, a few worlds have managed to resuscitate the ancient psychic protocols and develop metapsionic tutors skilled enough to train new psychics. For some, it was the fruit of some discovered pretech wonder that damped psychic energies enough to safely experiment. For others, it was the product of coldly ruthless experimentation on disposable psychic test victims. A few worlds even retained some shreds of psychic mastery from the ancient days, the result of a Scream victim who was lucid enough to teach pupils, though usually for some demented or horrible end. Whatever the source, these institutions provide desperately-desired training for those few afflicted with MES.
These “psychic academies” are scattered widely throughout the sectors of space, usually based out of some amenable planetary polity or defensible deepspace habitat. Some academies are exclusively for the use of a particular nation or planet, while others will accept anyone who can pay the tuition or satisfy the interests of their patrons. Most are powerful players in the local political scene, offering services that mean life and death to MES sufferers and producing graduates who are extremely useful to local rulers. Others need to operate in secret, avoiding the fearful attention of populations that neither accept nor trust their powers.
In the Reach, small psionic academies can be found in almost every civilised system, especially within the Core Cluster. This has created a somewhat academic culture amongst the sector's MES's - many of them choose to remain with their academies after graduation to live and work amongst peers who do not judge or fear them.