For this writing assignment, I know I need to write something that is science fiction. No dreams, no ghosts, no paranormal things, no things that are kind of science fiction but really are about human nature thinly veiled with a hint of science fiction, no. The teacher said it has to be science fiction. I understand this. Black holes and space travel and aliens and so on.

My story would take hundreds of years to tell. This doesn’t do many people a whole lot of good because no one is going to be around for that long to actually read the whole story, but we’re talking about science fiction, and if I’m going to do it properly then it needs to be worthy of the mantle. This is big, here. If you’re going to write science fiction and it has to be about space travel and all that other stuff, then it needs to fit the bill. There’s a lot of space out there, and there needs to be a lot of story to do it justice.

So my idea is to write this story that would take hundreds of years to tell. It involves the inhabitants of our little planet working and toiling for years to muster up the courage to build our first rocket. After that, it takes us just as long to send one of us beyond the reach of our atmosphere. Then we start to timidly explore the planets around us, eventually discovering that the only life in our solar system only ever sat on our planet. The human race is mildly disappointed, but that only lasts one or two election seasons, then we start back into the whole space exploration thing in earnest.

At this point in my story, I’ll start to weave political and social intrigue into the whole mix.

Over the course of the next few thousand years, we finally manage to build ships to take enough of us to other stars. There, once again, we find no life. Again, we’re disappointed, but we set up shop anyway, make ourselves comfortable, stock ourselves up for the next long haul, and we make our way out to other stars again.

This repeats in much the same manner over several volumes of my science fiction story. It continues on through hundreds and hundreds of generations and one forth as many election seasons.

I’m not sure how I’m going to fill this middle part. Maybe something about robots.

It will all build and build while the human race explores the reaches of the galaxy, discovering disappointing lifeless rock after disappointing lifeless rock. We terraform them, of course. I forgot to mention that. But it all builds to the point where our scientists are certain that there is still life out there in the galaxy somewhere, only there is no more “somewhere” because we know where everywhere is and have been there, so the scientists have actually narrowed it down to one small solar system on the farthest edge of what now can truly be called “known space.”

So we go there, the last descendants of our race, and we land on this planet. We turn all the instruments off as we descend through the meager atmosphere, and everyone is thinking that it’s going to be another disappointment, but yet we have hope in our hearts that here, the last corner of the cosmos, there exists life. And if not life, there exists an abandoned city that we could study and conjecture over for thousands of generations more.

The ship lands, the lights are turned off, and the ramp descends. The last version of the human race step out onto the dusty earth and find… Nothing.

After that, humanity needs to deal with the fact that it’s spent all this time worrying and wondering and reaching and striving for contact with some other thing out there that could possibly explain or help us explain what living is all about, and it’s not there. The whole story ends with humanity being left with a cold truth: that who we become is the same as who we are to begin with.

So what do you guys think. I want your honest opinions here.