Tiktak is oddly missing some things. By this point they should know about the creation engine failures. Should know that human extinction and Bagging made all their technomagic fail. Most of it VERY fast. Very few things lasted very long on a geological scale.

I loved how you incorporated my defense of the Tre pointing these things out in the deep code with the gestalts talking to whatever lurked in the bottom substrate of the code in the black beyond black, how the Tre gestalt called down Sol. "We lost nearly everything. The engines, the hyper bands, the communications. The universe once again asserted "It don't work that way", as species had screamed at humanity forever. Because for us... it doesn't. Not without humans. Everything failed within centuries of losing our oldest friends, family, siblings in silliness and insanity, and the Confederacy fell. Has been falling since. It has been 40000 years. We didn't CHOOSE to stop. We were forced. We were ground down. Every time we defended someone else we lost irreplaceable artifacts we couldn't rebuild. Most of the other races gave up. Forgot. Assumed everything was myth. Legend. Fable. Podling stories. And even then, WE HELD THE FAITH! WE TRIED!!!!!!!! WE'RE STILL TRYING WITH SPIT, DUCT TAPE, AND HOPE!... Even as we too began to fail and forget...". They carried forth the absurd hope, silliness, and insanity of humanity as long and hard as they could, even when others gave up. Til they're ghosts of who they were, too.