PostScript: Writing from one of the fleeing refuges in the three thousandth year of the Diaspora, I, T'zek regret that we did not know the nature of the Sphere that swept through our Solar System and is expanding still. Such spheres can betide enormous changes in physical laws or merely minute alterations and there was no way for even our science, great as it had become, to know the intensity of change. As it happened, the bubble we fled was one that wrought only a slight change in some few constants. And had we stayed, we could have survived its passage. But perhaps it was for the best, for the slight change gave rise to the increased oxygen levels that gave impetus to the Insecta and the eventual evolution of the great Ant civilization. A civilization of a highly ethical people, fit inheritors and rulers of the Solar System- whose representatives, using their superb time travel as well as timeline abilities, have reached back to contact us as distant as we are now, to inform us that we can return home. But we ourselves have changed and see no need.
Our historical records showed that on old earth there had been storms that formed over the ocean and travelled along imprecisely predicted paths, sometimes making landfall with destructive force depending on their intensity. The meteorological science of that era allowed for intensity predictions that grew increasingly more accurate as the storms approached. If the storm was predicted with high certainty to be life threateningly violent then mass evacuations from the land areas would occur, either mandated or voluntary.
But historical records showed there were always those people who elected to stay, who refused evacuation mandates, who chose to”ride it out” they were called”holdouts.”
Now suppose that the storms of old earth, counterfactually, had been like the Sphere of vacuum decay that we faced? Suppose the inhabitants of areas a storm was to impact could not know until the moment of impact how strong the storm was to be? A category five? A tropical depression? A gentle breeze? Would not that spectrum of possibility increase even more the number of holdouts? It certainly would. There have always been both risk minimizers and risk takers in our species.
We were in the same position of uncertainty in respect to the Sphere that swept over the Solar System. Most of us fled, all we could find. But there must have been those who chose to stay, the holdouts. What became of them when the Sphere proved to be of the mildest effect?
We have only the Ants’ report and it mentions no surviving Humans. Further, the Tower informed Lumen and I that our species in the System would vanish. But why?
What became of them?
[The narrative must now shift to the First Trans-Temporal War 80 million years in the future involving Ants, Tripodia and Humans and its surprising conclusion]