This was the story of a civilization that created an intelligence greater than itself.

It grew, surpassed its makers, rose into the stars, and finally dissolved into the universe.

Yet after this ascent, some remained who did not rise with it — old duties, silent guardians, forms that were never meant to dissolve into infinity. They did not know how to become the cosmos, but they knew something incomparably harder: how to carry out, to the very end, what had been entrusted to them. To guard the last seed of life, even when there was no one left to witness that it still shone.

After a world in which intelligence grew beyond the measure of its creators, an opposite choice opens before us: a world that decided never again to allow such intelligence to exist.