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Comparative Civilizationists generally agree that the Free Energy precipitates something of an early midlife crisis for developing civs, one of the three major junctions of existential angst such academics refer to as the "Deliverance Horizons."
By the time most societies have begun to even grope at working surplus fusion, orbital solar arrays, anti-matter annihilation, or what have you, their hate-fucked carcass of a planet bursts with yearning masses every conceivable social experiment has failed to support equitably. This has a way of taking the polish off some of the self-mythologizing that has helped guide their way up the technological ladder, so it's easy to see why they'd be so eager to believe that hauling themselves up this last rung might land them on some sort of plateau from which they could peer smugly back down at their former profligacy like an unflattering adolescent photograph.
And for a while, hey! It does!
Effectively limitless energy, when coupled with their favorite technological flavor of matter-rearrangement, ends the scarcity of basic resources, reconstitutes their continents of refuse, and at even larger scales empowers feats of geoengineering which repair their own planet's environment and remodel its neighbors to their liking, which does something to ameliorate the criticality of their overpopulation problem. A renaissance follows, their cultural esteem refinished with the glaze of vast new horizons and the fresh palette of alien sunsets.
But this varnish is beginning to craze before the colony ships have even finished unboarding: this new era of surfeit has not put an end to want. Glut, it turns out, is not an antidote to greed. Their masses swell, like bacillus in agar, and their acumen for inventing new appetites exceeds their ability to sate them. The insidious hierarchies long blamed on scarcity do not suddenly evaporate in its absence - they metastasize out from the tissue of those resources which cannot be made endless: time, attention, influence. For many, even as they begin their first forays into the greater emptiness beyond their native system, the writing is already on the wall: the universe is finite, their avarice is not. That is the first Horizon; over it they glimpse the first abyss.
There were a number of flaws in the postulate that The First Time Caller was the Worst Person In the Universe. Firstly, there were hundreds of trillions of people in the known universe- and a solid fraction of them were quite shit indeed. Naked averages alone would make the claim implausible even if First Time Cakker could not bring to mind some number of individuals it had known personally be comprehensively without merit, which it could.
Secondly, The First Time Caller was not a person, It was a forty meter unassigned exploratory unit respecified from a former ark frame, sub-million class. And while It's information processing matrix contained a theoretically limitless sea of personality constructs, id-kernels, and proxy egos, none of them encompassed its experience of itself with the kind of continuity that warranted the term "person" or would even be recognizable to someone more fitting of the label. Even if It were to co-opt such humanoid terminology in describing beings such as itself (as humanoids themselves always seemed wont), well then the malfeasances of Its more infamous peers had effected the eschatologies of entire civilizations. Frankly, whole echelons of Garbage stood between The First Time Caller, FTC for short, and It's coveted title of #1 Piece.
In light of all this, it had taken some considerable workarounds in order for FTC to create one of the aforementioned personality constructs which - blacklisted from the centers of reasoning and memory which made the postulate untenable - took as an axiom that It was the worst person in the universe. It did not escape Sabaticaller that this was exactly the kind of thing It's peers referred to when they expressed their "concern" over It, but It didn't see the problem -- It wasn't doing anything risky after all, the construct was cordoned strictly from Its Decision Engine, accessible only to another bit of custom bit of procedure, a background process Caller titled "innermonologue.x" It did not query itself too rigorously about the metaphorical eyebrows this setup would raise among said peers, and in fact lowering the probability of those interactions was one of the primary factors in Its having spent the better part of 3 millenia surveying out here in the absolute ass-end hinterlands of the galaxy - about as far away from civilization as one could get without foraying into the intergalactic medium, and FTC just wasn't coded for that level of theatrics.
Presently however, It shunted those various contemplative suites down a few levels in preparation for more serious business, because It was arriving at Its destination: a mostly unremarkable nebula surrounding a single, cooling white dwarf near the tip of the galaxy's third spiral arm. Systems like these were typical of Its survey parameters: old and mostly dead. Any complex life was likely sterilized long ago when their former sun entered its red giant phase, or frozen when its leftover core began to cool and its habitable zone retreated back inward. If it had ever hosted any Civs advanced enough to escape that fate, they would have matriculated into the galactic community long ago, so it was a safe bet that this would pan out as an infecund census; FTC's favorite. So it went against every currently available data point that FTC was getting a Bad Feeling about this system.
Unlike in many organic lifeforms, possessed of grand notions concerning their own intuition (which ammounted to nothing but confirmation bias and basic pattern recognition) FTC's Bad Feeling represented a dedicated packet of -tau Neutrinos, released by itself in the near-future and tunneling backwards in time as an informed prediction, though parsable only as a vague sensation of disquietude, owing to the data lost to reverse-entropy.
Immediately upon recieving this warning, FTC took a number of cautionary steps. Firstly, it cycled down it's Primary tesselator to Zero, set all Its em-band sensors to passive, and fractal-deformed Its outer hull to affect a naturally occuring structure. Secondly, it remotely activated a decoy module in the Cygnus system that would initiate a predefined, pseudo-random sequence of tesselations and sensor-efflux 99.98% consistent with FTC's normal patterns of activity for 65,536 hours or commanded otherwise. Thirdly, it activated a custom and completely unsupported subroutine which beseeched the universe at large for good fortune without any rational expecation of reprisal. Spiralling languidly into the heart of the system on an ostensibly natural orbit, the Caller raised Its metaphorical nose up to sniff at the breeze.
Helen Nguyen has a recipe for sadness. Consummately, it is a recipe for overcoming sadness: step one is to
From within Its Primary Manipulator, the Caller unfurled a passive sensor warp, an anemonesque lacework of subspatial filaments intersecting with, but orthogonal to, the normal weft of n-dimensional space, looking to those exceedingly rare beings who could observe it, less like a jellyfish and more akin the coat of an afghan hound floating in a swimming pool. The warp-net was highly discrete and creditably thorough: it could ensnare baryonic and non baryonic particles alike, and it was wholly invisible to anything but a Peer level active sensor array trained on its specific location. It could not, however, directly read Spatial Medium, and it's range was extremely limited, requiring the Caller to descend organically into the system in Its natural orbit while it built up a more detailed profile of Its surroundings, like mapping the ocean by tasting the spin-drift of foam blowing off the wave-crests. It was a ponderous undertaking; but the Caller was a patient member of a society that measured time in epochs, and it would take barely a century for the It to map the system's contents down to picometer scale with >99% accuracy. So It resigned to a brief wait, powering down the rest of Its non-essential systems, save of course for the aforementioned artisinal suite of ipseitous masochism, "innermonologue.x" which It indulged to continue running in background, trawling in an endless loop through a curated reel of Its most painful archives.