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The first person to lay their eyes on the Oort went mad.

In those first days, when humanity finally achieved near-light-speed travel, we didn't see any artistry in the stars, any poetry to our endeavors. We saw endless desolation, we saw gamma radiation, we saw black holes swallow up entire star systems, we saw a lot of random radio noise from dying stars and rogue gas giants. With the Oort, we saw one hundred thousand astronomical units of randomly dispersed clumps of ice, silent and nearly motionless in near-total dark.

When the first colony was set up in orbit of Proxima Centauri, it was placed on a completely uninhabited ball of rock and water, a planet that by all means could have had earth-like life on it but which was inexplicably uninhabited. There were others. Upsilon Andromedae, 359 Wolf, Gliese 445. A thousand years past and a handful of worlds were made into new earths. Humanity grew into a small empire, spanning one hundred light years, inhabiting thirty worlds.

We had no purpose. Wars still ravaged continents. Bigotry still prevailed over brotherhood. Our only importance was that which we made for ourselves, for we saw that earth was the only planet to give rise to life unaided. Some of us thought ourselves to be gods.

And then, on one of the outermost colonies, astronomers discovered a shattering truth.

Ripples in spacetime, emanating from novae. Stretching across three thousand light years was a string of burst stars, each preceded by a gravitational scar. As they lined up clearly in the lenses and radio telescopes on that distant world, it was made abundantly clear an unnatural phenomenon had torn through the galaxy, destroying particular systems in a line. Each nova was approximately one hundred light years from the previous, and the human astronomers deduced their system was next.

A plea was sent out across the endless desolation, the gamma radiation, the black holes that devoured whole systems, the radio-emitting rogue gas giants. It was sent to every human world, begging humanity to come together and face this threat, whatever it might be. Their pleas met with a mixed response--some colonies prepared for war, others laughed away the astronomer's predictions as insane for their dead universe.

The pleas went on and on, all across the empire, though they took one century to reach the furthest reaches. One day, they went quiet. As fast as the speed of light would allow, each of our worlds saw the nova engulf what had once been that noisome, desperate speck on the galactic tapestry. The pleas were no longer ignored by anyone.

This force, however, tore through our race's holdings. While before only single stars had been destroyed, every stellar object that gave light to a human colony exploded. It was known that this was no simple coincidence; an intelligence was inexplicably, inexorably exterminating us. We reacted in the only way we knew how; we built armies and fleets and we sent them in the direction of the nearest blast at near-light speed. No ships ever returned. Reports were mundane for months or years until they halted without warning.

We were going extinct. We, on the last planet, accepted our fate. We loaded a probe with the sum total of all human knowledge. We put it on a conventional rocket and fired it into the endless desolation, the gamma radiation, the black holes, the territory of rogue gas giants. We knew the chances of it being discovered were beyond negligible.

This has been the introduction to our final message. Please, remember us.

Please, find purpose. Before it is too late.