"Emily. Not helping."

"Sorry, just trying to find a silver lining."

"Not much of a silver lining there."

Rose's usually composed expression is clouded.

"No, there isn't."

"We're going to get in contact with the rest of the groups later, hopefully."

"Mmm."

"As a consolation prize we might be able to live forever, who knows what'll happen in all that time."

"What?"

"The clinic has a really wide range of abilities. I think it might be able to treat just about any medical condition including age-related degeneration."

"Impressive."

"It is, it's still good even if it won't be as high-impact as I was hoping what with fewer people around to be helped."

"Yes."

Sigh.

"On the bright side, we'll have the opportunity to build a new society mostly free from the bureaucracy of Earth. Our decisions will shape the very future of humanity." Riley smiles broadly.

Claire whimpers. "That's a lot of pressure. Please don't say things like that."

"I don't think we'll manage to avoid bureaucracy, at least not forever. I think that might be universal to large-scale societies."

"Well obviously, and there's no guarantee we'll make anything better than what existed back on Earth. Still, we have the chance to try."

"We don't actually know for sure that Earth is doomed. It's possible that we never will. If there's any significant amount of EM flux coming from the sun it'll wipe out the communications satellites and that might be our link into Earth's news."

"That's true. I wish we had internet, NASA probably published data and if they did that's unlikely to be doctored."

"Hard on people, not knowing. Well, some people would probably rather not know for sure if....but I'd rather know and I doubt I'm the only one."

"The people who built this place probably know. Maybe there's a way to ask them."

"Maybe. They don't seem very interested in talking though."

"They do seem to be shy. I wonder why."

"Why shy Emily? Are you just being coy or do you think you know something?"

"This place has just about everything we could need. I don't think they're hiding out of malice, so they're either not talking because they can't, or they're not talking because they aren't ready to talk to us yet."

"Hopefully they'll talk to us eventually."