What killed Nova is the lack of cohesion. None of the major factions went together very well. And that guy who wrote the Polaris is a communist, I'll stake my registration code on it.
M2, if you remember, the guy who is the player is a God, of some kind. The M2 reality was 'rejected' because the W'rkr's were freed. So what he did was step into another alternate reality. That failed, and he goes through another one before finding the 'perfect' reality. In this one, Durandal merges with Thoth, and the Jjarro station collapses Lh'owon's sun into a black hole. The player is 'freed' though what this entails I do not know.
Elsewhere, the human empire is no doubt fighting some huge war.
Of course, that last storyline in M? plays havoc with M2's ending sequence. Obviously, the wr's would have done some major damage, so perhaps they didn't exist and everyone stuffed up, especially the poor Jjarro, who imprisoned a being they thought existed.
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Everything can be expressed in 2. 2+2 = 5 for extremely large values of 2.