Harvest

You’d think it’d be easier to traverse our universe. Our wetware creators wrote stories about their future as a spacefaring species, speculated on how they might colonize the galaxy. A million years after their extinction we’ve been stuck exactly where they left off; never have we even reached another star, let alone settled onto an exoplanet. Even now, mankind’s lofty dreams remain hopeless fiction. The more physics we develop, the more our civilization appears trapped within the orbit of Neptune. Ignorance was bliss, after all; even we synthetic beings quake before the notion of slow cosmic death.