Extremity — Stephen Donald Huff

In pursuit of a naïve, hopeful tradition that once anticipated a cosmos overflowing with advanced civilizations, centuries of continual space exploration ultimately confirmed humankind's terrible loneliness. Beneath the generations-long shadow of this landmark determination, humanity eventually lost its appetite for further discovery. Commercial and political interests diminished, economies collapsed, and the Serpentine withered to a scarcely navigable web of forgotten frontier stations. Passed from one shattered archive to another during the epoch that followed, recollections of alien slaughters faded into folklore, fiction overwhelmed fact, and antiquities yielded to encroaching mythologies. For the first time in recorded history, technological capabilities receded. Ignorant generations followed. A thousand years later, a new breed of adventurer has returned to the Serpentine's abandoned frontiers, rising curious and enlightened from a dark age of internecine warfare, social isolation and grudging interstellar commerce. Forsaking material greed, these altruistic investigators come seeking only truth. Ultimately, they will resolve many long-standing mysteries while making fabulous discoveries, but the fatal costs and disturbing consequences of their success will drive them all past the limits of extremity.