Hello. Long-ish time wiki reader here.

[alexanderhamiltonalaska]

After a few centuries of increasing processing power, running (and in some cases, replicating) at vastly accelerated rates and generally ignoring and being ignored by their neighboring Periphery worlds they got attacked by an extremist Bioist sect lead by a S2 transapiant. The subsequent conflict made clear the disastrous consequences of thinking they could ignore what was going on around them, so after defeating the bioists they immediately set about working on ways of both working their way up to archai equivalency (mainly by focusing on developing the aiod portion of the population and creating aiod-based duplicates of the vircher portion of the population) and carving out their own empire in the outer volumes. By the 10400s they have succeeded in both these goals.

How would they defeat a force led by an S2 when they apparently weren't even S1?
 
See our page on intertoposophic conflict.

Todd

They had effectively reached ≈S2 status at that point. I probably should have made that clearer, but I kinda thought up the story on the spot.