Not sure how familiar you are, and it's a bit convoluted, but the super short version:
The Joint Council no longer actually existed. They had themselves monked so that they could live forever, but had to put themselves into a state of hibernation when they realized after the fact that the process had a fatal flaw. Everything was actually being ran by the half-mad creator of the monking process, who had digitized his own brain into a server to stop his own continued mental degeneration. He was using people's reconstituted dead bodies to create physical avatars in the real world. No one realized that everything was being ran by a crazy brain in a box.
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It is impossible to live in the past, difficult to live in the present, and a waste to live in the future. (He/Him).