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Many thousands of years from now, Earth is a ruined wasteland. The soil is dead, the air poisoned. Once-mighty cities have been reduced to bleached eroded stumps by supersonic icestorms and long months of unbearable sunlight.
In the wreckage, tardigrades the size of chows hunt gigantic cockroaches for food, while in the seas jellyfish the size of Rhode Island have evolved to metabolise gyres of indestructible plastic. All is gone.
And yet, into this dead solar system comes a mighty vessel, a ship clad in a shield of cometary ice to protect it from interstellar collisions.
It has been decelerating for almost a decade now, down from its cruise phase within a few percent of the speed of light, and now it is almost at its destination it begins to wake its crew from their long sleep.
It is following an expanding shell of transmissions radiated by its target world, a confused stew of Gilligan's Island and Britain's Got Talent, the Kennedy assassination and Prime Minister's Questions, signs of intelligent life.
Finally, the great ship brings itself into orbit around the target world and its crew begin their survey. They note the acrid atmosphere, the out-of-control weather systems, the crop-marks of great cities.
After a year, a smaller vessel leaves the great ship, bearing an advance team of archaeologists and specialists. They have chosen one of this world's dead cities as their subject.
They land, and emerge from their ship. They are tall and etiolated, pale like angels, wise beyond the comprehension of the people who built this city. But they're not stupid. They have lots of guns.
Their examination of the dead civilisation takes more than a century. They are patient and long-lived and expert, and piece by piece, layer by layer, they uncover the lives of the people who once lived here.
They find everyday items - vehicles and cutlery and electronic equipment and umbrellas whose fabric has long since rotted away. They find skeletons, and scan them so that the faces of these long-departed people may be looked upon again.
Toward the end of their time on the planet, they discover a great treasure, a primitive computer architecture which they are able to reconstruct and study, opening a living window into the lives of the lost inhabitants of the planet.
One of the crew's number finds the reconstruction particularly compelling. It discovers, in the archive, a social network called 'Twitter', into which the lost civilisation seems to have poured its joys and agonies and hopes and fears.
It spends many years studying 'Twitter', concluding that the inhabitants of the planet spent much of their time in a state of rage, broken only by the presence of small mammalian companions composed of what the natives termed 'floof'.
It comes time for the explorers to leave the planet. They have learned all they can, extracted as much data as possible, and other worlds await their attention. Their ships begin to depart the surface.
But one remains, the one which has been studying 'Twitter;. Its mind and intellect are beyond the comprehension of the people who once roamed the planet, and it has read and absorbed the entirety of 'Twitter'.
As its colleagues urge it to return to the dropship, it ponders, one last time, this jumbled, incoherent record of a long-dead civilisation, its Culture Wars, its orange leader.
It begins to close down the archive, but something stops it. It calls up the ancient browser one more time and reviews the great shouting stream-of-consciousness with which it has become so familiar, and it feels it should leave something behind.
It consults what it has learned about the people who lived here, and in the final few moments before it departs the planet for ever it reaches out and types, with long, pale fingers, the last tweet ever tweeted.
'Parklife'.
