John C Wright - Chapter 10: The Lonely Stars lyrics

For half a million years after the first exosolar colony was established, the skies remained oddly empty, save for the two human polities at Sol and Cygnus X-1. The men and machine life at Sol discovered, through the noumenal mathematics, the secret of eternal mind-preservation. With this, d**h was fled away, save as rare and strange accident: the Men of Sol called their civilization a Utopia, their age a Golden Age, and perhaps they can be excused this exaggeration. Meanwhile, the men and machine life at Cygnus X-1 discovered the irrational mathematics needed to describe the interior conditions of singularities, and exploit the event-horizon conditions to fool the quantum bookkeeping of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Somewhere in the black hole core, perhaps, entropy was increased in equal and opposite counterbalance, but for all practical purposes, their technique was extropy; a perpetual-motion machine; something from nothing; a free lunch. No other stars were visited, except by patient machine-crewed vehicles. No one of the First Oecumene was willing to risk the real and final d**h pa**ing outside of the broadcast range of the immortality network might involve, and no one of the Second Oecumene was willing to travel far from the Infinity Fountains that orbited their singularity, and gave them their wealth and leisure. Each Lord of the Second Oecumene had an endless supply of power, and the art to create, using that power, diamond asteroid-palaces, which they stocked with companions and toys and dreams and private mental networks, servants and replicas of friends and lovers. No real need to suffer the discontents of human contact ever arose. They also called their society a Utopia, though with far less justification. The extremely long-range communication lasers used to pa** ten-thousand-year- old missives from Cygnus X-1 to Sol fell into disuse, and so the Second Oecumene became the Silent Oecumene, and the men of the constellation Cygnus became as silent and splendid and ghostly as the swans from whom they took their name.