The galaxy is deep and dark and old. It stretches thousands of light-years in every direction, silent and dead. Like children stumbling from the ashes of Apocalypse, we find ourselves staring out into a desolate wasteland. Space is empty, more empty than anyone had thought possible. Finally, the Fermi Paradox has come out of hiding.

It wasn't so bad at first. Visions of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice danced behind the eyes of many a corporate C.E.O.; the vast (and apparently unclaimed) wilderness drew opportunists by the hundreds. Soon Earth glittered with its very own stars, a ring of flickering reflection like a diamond necklace. The planets were in reach, the hyperdrive brought the solar system into our hands. We were rich, so rich, with asteroid metals and gaseous organics. It was a golden age.

But the excitement began to fade. Not even the temptation of other stars would restore the vigour of those early days, and the human race settled down. Business as usual. The Corporations moved in, their private investment in the space programmes and research projects paying off in spades. Or more accurately, diamonds. The nations resumed their bickering, the demagogues recovered their voices, and the planet choked to death. Yet, in the immaculate silence of hard vacuum, the disk antennae cried out in the night.

There was nothing. Not a thing. Nada, zip, zero. Absolutely fuck-all. Nobody home.

We didn't know what to make of it; we'd been expecting it for so long, it didn't seem imaginable. Weaned on a diet of space opera and Bug Eyed Monsters, it was impossible. The Galaxy was empty. No matter how long and loud we called out into the deep, nothing ever came back. Not a peep. The further we went, the more we thought about it. Life began to seem inevitable; we soon had a dozen garden worlds under our belt, and hungry for more. We were finding bugs, worms, and things that defy description all over the place, in the deepest darkest crannies a hundred solar systems had to offer. Sometimes all we found was traces of bacteria long dead, but we saw enough to start to believe that life must be common. But on some planets we found nothing to indicate that anything had evolved to be smarter than mice. The more we found, the weirder it got; some planets were teeming with higher life-forms, and others got no further than rodents (or their equivalents). We started putting it down to meteors... until we discovered the ruins.

They started turning up here and there, ploughed up in colonists fields, dredged out of lakes, dug out of rocks. But only on planets with no big animals. Devices, structures, ruins. Scraps of records. Bones. Soon we couldn't hide from the truth any longer. We had awoken in a graveyard.

Some of the critters on those planets that had not been scoured clean had been pretty smart. A few of them give us some trouble, but we got by. It was inescapable; the empty planets had to have had more life forms on them. The fossil record proved it, the Discoveries just backed it up. They had been here, they had been as smart as us, smarter sometimes. And somebody had reached out and pressed the RESET button.

Here. And here. And over there. Soon we were up to twenty. For some reason nobody took to settling those planets much. Mostly we got on with it, although you could feel a tension in the air. As the Fear grew, the nations started to get nasty, started to get rowdy. The Corporations walked into their fortresses and closed the doors behind them. Things got bad for a while.

When it was over, people started to talk. They started to wonder about who and what had killed all these species, all those millennia ago. The talk got pretty wild, and people are pretty scared.

But you see, it is our curse, our species, that things always go back to normal.