For the last four-billion-and-some years, Gaea had been a lovely little rock. In a secluded corner of the Five Tail galaxy (what Kandarosians would go on to call '𐰋𐰀𐱃𐰀𐰣') it sat and spun and frothed with potential; on and on it went, and as the eons passed the planet of Gaea eventually gave way to a dominant group of intelligent, bipedal mammals who would have all sorts of adventures along their sordid road to the modern day. Importantly, as a natural development in economies of excess and societal greed, a capitalist framework emerged, and while it was violently contested at various points it was never supplanted. While massively destructive, it had a few key advantages over competing systems that allowed it to adapt and overcome in the Gaean ecosystem, although "advantages" was generous.

Within the exact conditions of Gaea, Capitalism was allowed to flourish, and was largely uncontested during global unification. There were any number of possible explanations. Did the Anarchists and the Communists bicker too much, or were they too annoying and cringeworthy to the everyday worker? Were the Labor Unions too shy, too greedy, or were the rich neoliberals too charming? And what about the moderates of Gaea: were they too afraid of poverty or violence or icky gay sex or what have you? With all remaining history books on the topic thoroughly focus-grouped and scrubbed for evidence, there was no way to tell the truth, but to wit: Capitalism was never defeated on Gaea, even after globalization and the early days of space travel.

Unfortunately for the majority of Gaeans, Capitalism did evolve. What came next was something loosely described as a global super-conglomerate, named the Gaean Authority, which persisted all the way through to the discovery of Kandar and a little while beyond. To define it: the Gaean Authority was a hyper-authoritarian techno-oligarchy operated by a hierarchical board of boards, who structured society for the large majority of Gaeans to live and toil in squalid conditions, with just barely enough in the way of wages needed to anesthetize themselves with creature comforts. This way, the Gaean Authority churned through the workforce in a drive toward interstellar logistics, quantum computing, and other technological pipe dreams, and a galaxy full of heavy metals, gaseous fuel, and other exploitable resources on the horizon, but just out of reach.

Those early expansion initiatives throughout local Gaean space were able to mine asteroids for critical resources easily enough, but the realities of terraformation within the solar system proved far more challenging than the marketing copy. While gardeners on Mara were still struggling to create pockets of breathable atmosphere out of nothing but dust and hate, huddled in Green Domes for warmth by the thousands, like zits on the face of that dusty, white planet, rocket scientists had rolled out lightspeed travel. Thus the Gaean Authority figured they might scrap the terraformation idea altogether, and instead set their sights on the colonization of their nearest, habitable stellar neighbor: Kandar.

To the glorious new day of the Gaean empire, Kandar was both dawn and dusk. All the Gaean Authority's hopes and dreams  were pinned to the prospect — a brand new garden, full of ripe new apples: prime real-estate, ready to be dissected and re-packaged into cute plastic bags with kitschy little slogans. Three colonies touched down on Kandarosian soil — Den, Nest, and Cove — and got to work. That momentous occasion was just under a hundred years ago; however, before the planted flags could grow roots, the locals dropped by to welcome their new neighbors. And then there was a two-year war.

Most Gaeans in the postwar period day operated under a similar set of core assumptions:

• Nest started it: a private orbital reconnaissance platform is known to have fallen out of orbit and right on top of a Kandarosian welcoming-committee. Supposedly an accident, the Kandarosians have gifted the crater to the Nest colony for use as a campground and heritage site
• The GCSS escalated the conflict: top-secret documents leaked from within the Gaean Authority show clear funding patterns for the Gaean Colonial Security Services. 
• The bugs won: via the power of incomprehensible, ultra-violence, the Kandarosians gutted all military resistance. They devoured Cove in its entirety overnight, and the war was pretty much over after that

In the aftermath of apparent genocide, the Kandarosians held the two remaining colonies hostage and threatened an intergalactic war of extinction if the Gaean Authority did not sign an extensive and stringent treaty, heavily weighted against them: the Kandarosian-Gaean Non-Aggression Treaty (K-GNAT). It was after this point that Gaean society lived in plain admission of the open secret: the Kandarosian plan for diplomacy was a complete (albeit peaceful) subsumption of the Gaean people, and anyone could see the writing on the wall. After a few more generations spent wriggling in the jaws of Kandarosian kindness, Gaea would inevitably become an exhausted, broken vassal state: completely reliant on the bugs for basic function if they weren't utterly devoured and licked clean.

But as long as the intrepid mammals of Gaea still had some fight left in them, then the business of creative solutions was booming, and a dream of a galaxy to be conquered was only a few quarterly earnings reports away.

One of the hottest, subversive fashions at the time was the marriage of simple and complex — primitive and avant garde. One might point to no better example than that of a little-known fad that popped up around encrypted communications. The process began with physical punchcards sealed in foil-lined envelopes: slipped into a pocket and transported personally by a series of trusted couriers along nonsensical routes, where they would be deposited in the hands of their recipient to open and decipher using the most secure algorithms running on the most hardened computers available.

So enters a dilemma: where and when to open and decipher? With any native insect a potential threat, then even the flies on the walls might be listening (and they certainly seemed to be watching, with their beady little eyes), then add into account that intel regarding the enemy was so desperately sparse? How could anyone find a private moment to crack a code in a world where their every move could be watched from an unchecked seam in the crown molding, or a particularly stagnant air-duct? And what about a mite tucked beneath a dead skin cell? And then if you managed to create such a safe haven how could you keep it secure? Could you do so cost-effectively, without the need of controlled substances like insecticides?

A market for a product emerged.

Privacy guaranteed — no muss, no fuss, no plugs, no bugs: the Privacy Box.