“That’s right. There’s nothing. The mountains were restored using stone and dirt extracted from the ocean. Vegetation and the ecology have returned nicely, but there’s no sign of any work by human hands. Ancient sites are present up to one century before the Common Era, but there’s nothing more recent. The ecosystem has been running on its own for around five thousand years, and the natural environment now resembles the Neolithic period, although with far fewer species.”

“How could there be nothing left?”

“There’s nothing they wanted to say.”

At this, they all fell silent.

Then the captain said to the ambassador, “You anticipated this, didn’t you? You must have thought of the reason.”

“We can know the reason, but we’ll never understand it. It’s a reason rooted deeply in philosophy. When their contemplation of existence reached its highest point, they concluded that nonexistence was the most rational choice.”

“I told you that philosophy scares me.”

“Fine. Let’s drop philosophy for the moment.” The ambassador took a few steps forward and turned to face the commission.

“The migrants have arrived. Thaw them all out!”

A last burst of powerful energy from the two hundred fusion reactors produced an NMR pulse to thaw out eighty million people. The next day, humanity emerged from the freezers and spread out onto continents that had been unpeopled for thousands of years. Tens of thousands gathered on the plain outside Freezer No. 1 as the ambassador stood facing them on a huge platform before the entrance. Few of them were listening, but they spread her words to the rest like ripples through water.

“Citizens, we had planned to travel one hundred and twenty years but have arrived here at last after eleven thousand. You have now seen everything. They’re gone, and we’re the only surviving humans. They left nothing behind, but they left everything behind. We’ve been searching for even a few words from them since awaking, but we’ve found nothing. There’s nothing at all. Did they really have nothing to say? No! They did, and they said it. The blue sky, the green earth, the mountains and forests, all of this re-creation of nature is what they wanted to say. Look at the green of the land: This is our mother. The source of our strength! The foundation of our existence and our eternal resting place! Humanity will still make mistakes in the future, and will still trek through the desert of misery and despair, but so long as we remain rooted in Mother Earth we won’t disappear like they did. No matter the difficulty, life and humanity will endure. Citizens, this is our world now, and we embark on a new round for humanity. We begin with nothing except all that humanity has to offer.”