"Depending on who you are, my father was either an optimist or a pessimist." The man spoke shakily, grasping a crumpled sheet of paper as he spoke. "It's a difficult one to pin down. All I know for sure is that he missed Earth."
Watery, red eyes looked out across the gathered crowd but quickly dropped back down again, out of sight of the audience.
"He wanted me to stand up here and read you this last message."
The reader cleared his voice. It echoed in the metallic spaceship's halls. Everything did. It was a cold, hard prison the human race found themselves in, but one of their own devising. After all, they'd had to flee somewhere when the planet had died. Now all that remained of Earth and the people who had known it was this letter:
"I was a teen when we were swept away from Earth. Old enough to be sad to leave but young enough to not truly understand what it meant.
"I grew old quickly, though. We all did.
"Suddenly there was no fresh air, no wind, no weather, just recycled oxygen and LEDs. There was no space to run. No views to admire. No quiet spaces. Always the hum of the ship and a billion people on it.
"I miss the Earth. I miss the mossy forest floors I ran through as a boy. Miss the stormy weather lashing at my window and whistling through the cracks. Miss just how blue the skies were. I miss it now, because it was all too easy to miss at the time.
"You all say it was better in the old days, and you're right, though none of you were alive to see it. We, my generation, don't say it, because we know it more deeply than you ever can.
"Yes, I was a teen when we left, an adult when I realised what it meant, and an old man when I realised I was never going to see the outside of this prison-in-disguise again.
"I would be lying if I said that I never wondered what life would have been like if I had stayed. Shorter, no doubt, much shorter. But I can't help but feel that it might have been better to die in nature's uproar, passionate and violent, rather than to fade away in a hospital bed in a grey box.
"We'll never know. I only hope that one day my dust will drift back to whatever is left of Earth, settle, and perhaps become something new.
"Do not be disheartened by a sad, old man. I miss my home, the world that you will never know. At least the universe, and in it a new world and a fresh start, lies ahead of you.
"Things will never be as good as they used to be, not for me, but for you, they will get better."