On Ethyear 0,
the Sun, which has supported and nurtured life on Earth for millennia, imploded and scorched the entirety of Milky Way with its fiery touches. Luckily, we had built colonies in other galaxies before our homeland was burnt to crisp.
Eons passed,
and homo survivalis, or "Terrans", as we had come to be known, had lost the ability to not only speak, but produce any form of nonverbal noise from our windpipe. Laughter was gone in our lives. We had to guess how frustrated or sad someone was from their facial expression only.
This was all due to the fact that we had become overly reliant on vision, consuming only images, gifs, and texts. Abundance of visual display, from personal electronics to embedded screens in our eyes, led us to mistakenly construe audio an inefficient way of conveying and gathering information, which ultimately led to our vocal cords deteriorating completely over centuries. The same fate occurred in all races of humans across different universes.
Then on Ethyear 8,888,
a group of 100 ethereal beings by the name of Alpha Centum, or "Centums", started appearing in various places. They were omnipotent cosmic energies, spiritual beings that flowed from one galaxy to another beyond temporal or spatial limitations. They each possessed one authentic voice that demanded such respect and awe, as the world had long forgotten what “a real voice” was.
The Centums summoned 1,000 Cosmic Architects, or "Architects", to obey their beckonings: they were charged with creating new, and revitalizing old, planets, and to manage which Terrans were deserving of a voice of their own. In return, Architects were awarded voices generated from mixing two pure Centum voices, while Terrans were given voices that were bred randomly from a multitude of voices. No one knew why Centums were here - but everyone knew that this was our only chance at recovering what made us, and our ancestors, truly human.