The Persean Lights

For thousands of millenia, humanity sat alone in a bleak and empty galaxy, searching for new life and new technology, finding nothing. For long they had predicted that the move to space would lead to exciting new worlds, and new discoveries, but that was far from the truth. The world was diverse and exciting when peered at through the pinhole of their homeworld's perspective, but the excitement faded as the laborious machine of a post-automation society began it's slow trickle of forward progress. The great barriers of medicine were overcome, such that a man could live ten-thousand years without looking a day over fifty or suffering from a single injury or disease for longer than the few short seconds it took to recover. With nothing left to look for in the world they had found, humanity became reclusive, creating a collection of worlds of fiction in which they could find purpose, and serve goals greater than themselves.   Then, a message arrived. From the Andromeda galaxy, a response to the laser signals sent long ago by the forebears of the new people, searching for life in an empty universe. Intelligent life was out there, and it was calling to them. A collective of people, inspired by this new call across the abyssal expanse, took flight in a new, slower-than-light (as all things are) worldship they named the Perseus. Over the course of six hundred slow generations, this worldship sped towards Andromeda, until it eventually landed at the source of the signal. The world was barren. As the drones and satellites spread and surveyed the world, they found no traces of heat, artificial light, or organic matter. The surface was cold and stony, and so small it was a miracle it could even hold a spherical shape. The ship stayed docked only for a few decades, after which all possible diagnostic scans of the world had been exhausted, and it was determined empty. In addition, new signals, reaching far out into distant worlds, came back with no response at all. Whatever had once been here was gone.   The Perseus took off again, planning on conducting a deeper scan of the universe in it's entirety. Unfortunately, before the millennium was through, an anomaly was discovered during a routine scan of the ship. Caught on camera, drifting behind the ship, was the ice-encrusted body of an engineer. The stranger thing here, is he's still on board.