‘Don’t be.’ I was sitting fully upright now. It felt intimate talking to Amy this way, darkness covering the distance. ‘I kind of love it. It’s so macabre. The reason we haven’t seen or heard from anything off-world is that reaching off-world status is a civilisational death knell. Life either gets stuck there or destroyed there. It still doesn’t really explain anything though – we can’t see anyone because it’s impossible to see anyone. It’s circular. It doesn’t say why becoming space proficient dooms us.’
