that's what she said

When the wraith folk interact with us they appear as very pale and sallow looking humanoids, almost skeletal......the shes with long white hair almost to the ground.....and the hes with equally overlong beards.....there is always a sort of mist hanging around them, even in the heat of the day.....I've never seen them eat or drink, but they do smoke cigarettes.....the she-wraith who for some reason decided to haunt my front porch sat and chain-smoked as she told me this story:  Once this planet was green and fertile, with large oceans....there was abundant wildlife, and plenty of land in crops.....beautiful cities arose over time, and science progressed until space was conquered, and other worlds were reached and colonized.....as the mother planet of a growing empire, this world was bathed in wealth and glory.....the citizens lived in plenty, poverty was unknown.....but some people are never satisfied, some people wanted more than nature granted....they wanted to be immortal.....to keep what they had forever.....a powerful group of politicians and academics funded research into altering the nature of things seeking ways to keep systems from decaying over time.....formulas were developed expressing relationships between space, time, gravity, sub-atomic and quantum level mechanics.....and biological continuity......the time factor was isolated and posited to be what must be acted upon or altered so as to arrest harmful change.....experiments were performed aimed at changing the relation the ground of being has with duration.....this involved constructing a complicated orbiting apparatus which would pump a strange new particle vibration into the upper atmosphere......something went wrong.....