"When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping" says an old adage from the times of ignorance.
Much of humanity's ambitions and instincts stem from the desire to live longer, to overcome their reliance on borrowed time and ascend the limits of their flesh bodies. When man accepted the demise of others, they built tombs and gravestones in their name; When came their own end however, they could not accept it.
As long as humans retain their mortality, no matter whether they live 100 or 500 years, the end is near and the journey feels short as seen from the boundary between life and death. When they stretched their vision to the unknown from the blue and green pearl they call home, maybe, just maybe they had accepted the remaining sand in the hourglass and their ambitions to cross the muddy waters of the infinitely wide river simply a desire to pretend or feel they have done great achievements within their world and have their names, symbols of their existence, etched on statues and memorials, and perhaps become immortal, if in name only.
Or perhaps it was so that on the time they were the weakest yet the wisest, when the tree has started to wither from the inside and the boundary between the eternal slumber and wakefulness grows more faint, they could look back and reflect at their life with what limited memory they have and feel ready to leave the physical realm.
When the Empire, too, started to wither from the inside, and its leaves(inhabitants) began to feel the lack of nutrients, a new technology would bring back some hope, not for the tree to bear fruit, for a dead tree can't create life, but for the leaves to persist tenaciously. Ever since the birth of civilization, scientists have been compared to deities and as the sciences grew along with the Empire, the division between the deities from the nascence of humanity and what humans have grown capable of has become vague and controversial.
During the Empire's descent into chaos, a device that would unknowingly change everything was released to the public; The premise of this device was simple enough. You would plug your brain into a machine that would pick up and decode every single transmission done inside of the human brain and effectively translate that into coherent date. In simple terms, this was creating a digital copy of oneself that could live forever in a virtual environment crafted to the wills of the user. At first, it was even touted as the agent of change that could revive the fallen Empire due to one simple feature, cognitive velocity alteration, which would render the millions of years light needed to travel from one end of the Empire to the other instantaneous from the point of view of a digital person. It was playing with the notion of time itself. It was playing with notions of 'self' too.
People flocked to this fake world and due to certain policies on it's usage, one had to terminate their real-life self(although this would eliminate discourse on cloning, it would certainly breed different kinds of discourse) to access the virtual network and therefore the Empire's already fickle population decreased even more and soon enough, the remainder of the human species would be situated in one pathetic planet and the prosperous Human Empire, a relic of an ill-fated past, though this would be a story for another day.
In the virtual world, meanwhile, the digital humans have already abandoned the Empire in favor of the stimuli offered in the digital universe where they could be whoever and however they want, literally, because when 'life' is reduced to mere bits of data and abstract concepts like 'emotions' and 'personnality' translated into lines of code, changing who you are is as simple as pressing a button. Hence they removed "sadness", they eliminated "lust", they deleted "longing", they made themselves "productive" and "happy" thinking they would feel good and joyful. Instead, they felt empty. So what did they do? They removed 'emptiness'.
And so they were 'blissful' for eternity, whatever eternity meant for beings with no 'desires', 'drive' or 'instinct' to do anything for that eternity. their 'desire' to become 'better' had ironically removed their 'desire' to do or be anything at all, except being some twisted and corrupt version of 'happy'.
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While the digital 'humans' lived blissfully unaware of the happenings of the real, cruel world. The Universe had already begun to feel the signs of ageing and an eon of darkness would soon enveil. Stars, which were the primary source of light in the universe and were numerous in the perigee of the Human Empire, now numbered few and most were dim red dwarfs; or white dwarf stars that will glow brightly in the final spectacle before the great darkness of the universe will replace all semblance of normal matter, and the rest will be found within the singularities of black holes and even those will eventually fade away to leave behind a cold, dark and empty universe.
This story, however, is a bit prior to that. Orbiting an inconspicuous red dwarf, a cold and similarly inconspicuous planet held a meaningless secret, that it's lonely inhabitants do not know but have figured out through looking at the pitch-black sky devoid of the numerous bright celestial bodies their ancestors have spoken about, the stars, and in their place, a single dim fireball emitting a red hue in the atmosphere.
This, was the single remaining planet of the Empire and that could be about to change due to a certain 'object' headed the way of the planet...