byAt the time I wish to write about, there were only five humans living on Earth. I say “humans,” but the ancient definition of that term must be considerably expanded to include us. Even if outwardly conforming to baseline humanity, we still deviated extremely from the old norm. Deviant by genome, both embedded and in the cloud, and by powers, both interior and exterior. But in any case, we were still the true inheritors of the old ape lineage.
Sharing the planet, we five nonetheless all lived widely separated and isolated lives in our extensive redoubts, each of us busy with our own hobbies, concerns, crotchets, obsessions and projects. For reasons which I have since offloaded from my memory into backup, we had, during that interval, looked backwards some ten or twelve millennia and cap
