After they found subcellular corpses on Mars ‐ close but once on this side of life — exobiology crossed that other thin line between the fiction-rooted cultural certainty that brings forth nothing but more fiction and the fiction-rooted cultural certainty that dedicates hectobillion fortunes to prophesied exponential returns: for extraterrestrial life implied with unassailable narrative logic extraterrestrial culture and with it for the first time in centuries the possibility of a culture not yet overexploited. Private lunar farside radiotelescopes and ruinously long basely interferometers and even stranger devices were set up and securitized, financial futures of still unheard signals set loose to be traded on in the certain expectation of sooner or later receiving from the heavens a monetizable word.
People and salesbots dreamed of and marketed something that could restore the planetary meta-ecology we had burned off; something to push the ever-larger computational furnaces we kept trying to stoke into sentience beyond the smooth facility of statistical imitation; something to keep away death; something to kill with we had never thought of. Markets long detached from explainable calculation peaked and crashed higher and deeper every time as the universe's steady silence overlapped with our flickering belief in the existence of minds inside the sprawling cities where only computers were at home. Our listening became desperate in its betrayed greed. We tortured computers and data and as always ourselves; nothing came of it that hadn't come before. On a final day of horror we decided we were truly alone and we decided we were therefore gods, and what do you do when living on a disfigured world covered with layered scars of stupidity and atrocity but perform a sacrifice? And our past dead and our present a husk, we only had our dreadful tomorrows to feed the pyres.
There was life after, and mind, but it looked back to its past with steady blank eyes born to the stark barren beauty that was above and below and inside.