The short-term rage to be sated at the end of a barrel was too easy to act on. Staving off extinction required something else, something with more vi… - Hugh Howey

NASA garb inside out and scattered like a tux on a wedding night,

We devolve into animals when we creep near to death.

The races I study still employ their immune systems, and the parallels between those systems and us as a race are striking. For we have become what Earthlings would call white blood cells. We remove foreign bodies from the cosmos. And every one leaves an imprint, a bauble of tech or a new idea, all of which we neatly coil into our lives, into our molecular structure. We are an immune system, and we are immune to death. This last, alas, is our curse.