A Declaration of War... Against the Entire Human Race.

Threads is a very complicated setting, but its modern day can broadly be interpreted as a blend of military science fiction and space opera, tied together by time travel, dimensional warfare, and a former secret society adept at both that once ruled Earth- and now rules a terraformed Venus and Mars alongside Earth, collectively known as the Homeworlds.

This secret society is known as the UNMC, and after a cataclysmic war with another, much more advanced timeline, Earth was left broken and rebuilding, while Venus and Mars contributed the resources they could fortifying and defending the Homeworlds against further attack. But, in the process of winning that battle, the UNMC inadvertently caught the attention of multiple hostile alien species. The first of these invaders are known as the Strix, a species of ammonia-based, six-limbed vertebrates often compared to crows or ravens.

This species, unlike humanity, failed to withstand the invasion of the other timeline, forming a religious empire that conquered the stars while Earth stalled and died. But when the UNMC cut off the invaders from accessing this world, the Strix lost their Gods. And, in anger, they turned their warfleets to Sol.

Humanity, just a few years after the deadliest and most destructive war in history, Earth still being bombarded with fragments of its own shattered moon, once again in conflict with a more technologically and industrially superior foe.

The image is, to date, the sole diplomatic correspondence ever willingly sent by the Strix Empire. While ultimately the Strix Empire was forced to surrender thanks to the threat of a biological weapon known as Agent Hemlock, this communication was done soley under duress of having their metropolis home world destroyed. The image itself is a spectrographic signal designed to interface with human devices, as the Strix Empire was made aware of human technology before their overlords were routed. It was sent by an unfathomably powerful electromagnetic pulse transmitted by an invasion fleet, three weeks before their ships entered the orbit of Mars and began a campaign of destruction known as the Strix Interdiction. The image, in the decades since, has been nicknamed READY by xenoanthropologists.