“Thirty-two years ago in the Altair system, Vasudan scientists discovered the remnants of an extinct civilization we now call the Ancients. In here we found the secret to defeat the Shivans. How close did we come to being a footnote in the history of a future species that would happen upon our ruins ten thousand years from now? Would they indulge in the fiction of their own immortality until the Shivans came for them, and how long had this gone on?
 
Did the Ancients stumble upon the monoliths and the tombs of their predecessors in this distant corner of space, dismissing the warnings carved into the walls of the sepulchre? And when the destroyers came at last what did the Ancients think as they sifted the cremation of dust and bones, staring into the mute remains for a key, some solution to their plight?
 
What if there had been countless races, stretching back into infinity and like the nine cities of Troy, each civilization had been built on the rubble of the one that came before, each annihilated by the Shivans.
 
The Ancients died eight thousand years ago, as humanity emerged from its Neolithic infancy, they believed their voyage across the sea of stars awakened the dragon that slept beneath the waves, that the Shivans were birthed in the flux of Subspace and their destruction was the revenge of an angry cosmos.”

“Cortana, all I need to know is did we lose them?”  
“I think we both know the answer to that.”

I agree.

Reminds me of the Illusive Man’s office.