Then Next Comes

cancelling headphones the portable nap drone the elixir of Eternal nightlife an artificial alcohol molecule that intoxicates but leaves no hangover as a result Humanity begins to enjoy a golden age of poetry theater and experimentally pissing on electrified fences then next comes the cloning vat the first viable Fusion reactor the graphine lens a camera only 50 molecules thick and once mass-produced hails the immediate death of privacy with everyone watching and simultaneously being watched leading to the optical invisibility shroud worn by those Hermits who choose a life of anonymous isolation over constant surveillance the 1,000 million of

them faceless formless self-exiled in cities of perfect silence then next comes mtic semantics the finished science of words bringing in 100% efficient advertising the feline translator I desire Perpetual violence and the syntax bomb a sentence so deadly just hearing it will result in complete mental collapse The Listener refusing to believe in their own existence reading only single words at a time will result in nausea and a profoundly erotic attraction to do decahedrons the completion of bridge theory stating that each particle is actually the mouth of a miniature Wormhole allowing for the Casmir Solon a generator

capable of harnessing vacuum en energ providing Limitless free and clean power plus the Casmir Javelin an orbital Warhead so deadly in explosive vacuum energy potential it renders War effectively impossible since no one would ever be stupid enough to detonate the thing then next comes the last remains of Washington the last remains of Paris and 5 billion little piles of modest Ash affordable City living Express weight loss regimes high-speed telecommunications classical music rediscovering The Wheel again sort of planetary science and the relaxing pastime of grenade tennis then next comes the dream recorder the mood adjuster the

solars recreated AI snapshots of one's dead Loved Ones based on their social media posts comforting at first then somewhat disturbing when they only behave like the online version of their dead counterparts but how could they not is all they know still living at thousands of times the rate of biological humans first they begin to lose interest in the living then physical reality itself retreating to some digital realm we simply cannot comprehend and just like that the dead are once again Beyond us then next comes with the biology of recall finally understood so is perfected the

pneumonic tonic an enzyme capable of modifying or destroying any desired memory food becomes the preferred method of ingestion entire restaurants serving meals designed around the alteration of the past including Undertaker musaka an eggplant based delicacy for those who've recently lost someone sure to remove the Dead from the mind entirely as though they never existed at all thereby escaping grief almost also heartbreak Dairy a cocktail consumed by both parties at the end of a relationship not to erase them from each other's minds but rather implant false memories of parting on good terms that everything was easy

and kind and there was actually no resentment or hurt just a dull mature goodbye the walking paths are full frequented by those who feel grief but remember No Grave to attend those who reach in the night for the outline of a lover they adored but remember no face no name no little notes on the fridge they wander aimless quiet and orderly polite and foror deprived of their own histories a drift in the vague but insistent certainty that something that was supposed to last forever has been lost forever then next comes the antimatter reactor the Wormhole

generator and the mass negation Drive using a field of negative Mass to propel spacecraft cheaply into orbit it is theorized however that even small field destabilizations could lead to Runaway nuclear fusion upon launch blocking out the sun Furious Global protests Arise at this demanding more testing first naturally these hysterical displays are ignored in the name of progress because it is of course unfounded nonsense humankind is destined for the stars now we will make our rightful home among the infinite Rapture of the cosmic ocean now we will become undying the naysayers be damned now we will

Chic evening wear even more affordable City housing an expedient Judicial System the wheel again Kinder word processes renewable energy the peaceful transition of democratic governments and a minimum wage as in the minimum wage which is no wage unless you'd like it to be your kidneys on the menu today no I didn't think so Alistar I didn't think so Jesus unions nanotube engineering leading to orbital manufacturer leading to the creation of the dandelion seeds hollowed out asteroids repurposed as Interstellar generational Starcraft each a home to potentially hundreds of thousands of humans if willing to make the

journey to unlearn grass and sky in favor of where next and why now look to that half century when in a flurry of tentative hope we gouge and renovate those old dead God eggs so they might beget 20 Generations yet and with the sky parked with them then 400 and all we know this will be the last time we find ourselves occupying a single world and they set off millions of farmer astronauts flung out into the Wilds of gravitation and light miles brains of meat and metal now return to wheat and petals now centrifugal Suburbia

and tea around the cattle now human pollen blown on the solar winds while back on the mother planet we wait and we wait as a bird how does one live best with an empty nest then next comes cocooned in their star flung cities there's nothing to do do but survive and invent and in a generation or two the will to invention turns inwards with genetic engineering allowing for great revisions in the book of life it is the Expedition Bound for tetti who give themselves wings so with the centrifugal gravity dial down they fly unencumbered as

doves homo Avis then those Bound for Sirus give themselves gills and take to the water all web toes and beavered bills homop pises and the dream apes and the cogitators and the tree things and the great metamind of those Bound for proximus and Harry who blend their thoughts by nerve fibers into a single unitary Consciousness but strangely as much as we can guess back on Earth from what they report they're all still us for all they present with tentacles and Bumblebee Wings they still pee and argue still party and mourn everything that makes life what

it is all the weird worrying and terrible Longing To Belong and why some weeks am I sad without reason and how do I know a brave Choice from a stupid one and that morning why were you so cold with me did I offend you in a dream and I walked you to work in that awful silence the thing threshing like a bell between us and when I came to meet you at the end of the day I was sure you were going to tell me you were leaving when suddenly you took my face in your

hands and kissed me on the mouth so perfectly and by surprise my soul exploded right out the back of my head in a way I've simply never been able to fold or back inside nor would I want to what are we but wanting willing dying things out of the dirt a little dance and back under mayfly creatures Twilight Fandango then cowering again to pray again that for whoever comes after there's laughter a thousand years or so and when they reach their destinations they are kind enough to send word ultimately it is the same message that

after a long and dangerous absence in the desert any Brave Scout sends home to the Village they set off from we found a new tree come see then next comes safely array among the hundreds of newly populated human worlds there is a calm we simply cannot be wiped out now this is the end of the end of the world on Udan they have finished the science of human happiness and only cry for fun on Tempa each town is built around an entropy reverser and if one blunders they need only walk into the Mists of backwards

time and emerge a week earlier and correct their mistakes on matodi a single ocean dominates the world only its water contains T neurotransmitters so all those who swim in it inhabit the minds of all those other swimmers can backstroke in their hurts and histories dive into their longings and lost loves the ecstatic communion of the big us truly this is the last chapter of history but what is the left to do to a house when the furniture is perfectly aligned the stairs perfectly inclined the blinds cuddling up to a sunset never less than best only

seems natural that one begins work on the land instead then next [Music] comes we built Towers to defy the sky why can't we build down and defy the laws of nature rewrite them even many ask isn't that the last technology it is the praxian human colony who construct one first the mudler they call it such that one might Al to the laws of physics themselves in fact it cracks their planet in half the aites try next building a sphere of sentient new matter begging it to tell them how to unravel the mechanisms at the bottom

of the world and the reply comes after a century politely and without further explanation hell no and at last it's the oberan who succeed by transforming their entire solar system into a reality machine a great Cosmic industrial whirly gig capable of allowing access to the source code of the sublime everything the ice worlds doing the Lindy Hop the gas giants pirouetting in Blissful Giddy and be it a button pushed or a switch flipped somehow the thing is finally activated and at that first moment of cosmic surgery about to make the first incision in fundamental things

so one might lighten gravity and square the circle suddenly they see it down there nuzzled between the neutrons and electrons a message a universal message written in the hearts of every atom everywhere and it says there is no big yes coming we only have each other stay kind walk good [Music] b b b whats the humans Wonder that's not a sentence and who even left this thing a race powerful enough to write messages into matter clearly maybe from 10,000 big bangs back but what is the word that's missing conventions symposiums entire Interstellar congresses are convened

to discuss the missing word for surely it's the answer to everything stay kind walk good be brave a few planets suggest no most reply that's too bold stay kind walk good be kind no the screenwriter planets protest they already wrote kind you can't write it twice you Bell piece all right everyone says chill out well you can't yeah but it's it's fine jeez 10,000 years of this the Galaxy's greatest philosophers at each other's throats and just as the conflict is reaching its maximum just as it seems War might break out over this thing at last

a galactic vote is taken but if they can't guess then they'll finish the damn sentence themselves stay kind walk good be infinite they decide how infinite in whatever capacity they can they say in all of them then next [Music] comes those reality machines they were building the synchrons the harmonizers the dimensional cannons instead they Point them not down into nature but at themselves biology Rewritten mentality expanded many start to transcend and first individuality then corporeality then discard their physical forms entirely becoming disembodied Consciousness carried through matter as a wave on a pond they learn to

travel with infinite speed to occupy all points and no points they grow wider than space faster than time they learn to become forever testing their powers they seed planets with life with sentient orchids and singing mice they build stars from dust DIY Brown dwarfs and disco ball pulsars they construct sculptures a thousand light years tall 10 parallel universes across and at last not with machines but with will they begin to alter matter and energy themselves from the cosmic down to the subatomic rearranging Stars creating new leptons new electron orbitals and knees that never bruise and

razors that never blunt and hearts that never break the very laws of nature in their ethereal Palms the universe can be transmuted with a thought they know the risks of this that physics is a delicately balanced card house subject to collapse at the smallest error but they are omniscient and infinitely wise and can play as they like no missteps are possible now no folies are forecast they will make no mistake a circle a cube addition subtraction unending psychic torture trapped in looped space the wheel but not really because geometry has become logically impossible now followed

by the complete breakdown of communication since there is no longer a common reality let alone a shared language what [Music] but children grow up eventually 5,000 centuries and now they only make beautiful things and soon they forget they were ever human just as humans forgot they were ever fish in curiosity they become everything that ever was just to see what it's like ants and mice and elephants clouds and transistors a glance a grudge a Nook a rest and after Millennia of this they have been every animal every dear every particle and number they are Immortal

and they are bored there is nothing left unknown well except for the missing word in the old message which like an abandoned manuscript still sits unfinished upon the desk of progress stay kind walk good be what what is there left to be that we haven't already invented or conjured or destroyed in search of the answer they collect like despondent fish at the edge of the Galaxy staring out into the abyss nothing then they Retreat to the smaller scales where distance and time evaporate nothing but there is one place they have not yet checked not in

half a million years anyway where did they leave it that first world where everyone started being the one with all the fighting and the crying surely someone there can solve this can retach them the methods of mystery and they set off as they came so long ago for all time sake inside enormous Hollow asteroids the long journey home they pass all their old projects like one rediscovering childhood toys the machines the dancing the graves oh God what was it all for the beaches the blackboards the bicycles oh God what was it all for and as

they accelerate they begin to remember they learn to take up bodies again carefully at first like easing into a hot bath legs and hands and feet hunger and thirst and doubt flesh things once more how how did anyone live like this so small and passing so full of infinite desperations impossible to express longing and ranor mercy and spite among warped Starfire then they recall the braveness of honesty and the finality of Joy how good it feels to find another mind just as strange as oneself and say I would like you by my side and until

my little race is run and they recall the will to hide from shame the safety of uninformed certainty they ReDiscover ideologies and clicks and Wars minor ones at first then whole Fields where their old friends lie down and do not get up again and how confusing that is when mines are gone forever they ReDiscover mourning and grief and crying out for things to be any other way and things only staying that way the bayonets the shoelace the screw oh God what was it all for the Love Letter the radio the lie was everything for nothing

and by the time they spot the little blue world and the little white moon approaching they've remembered everything forgotten and forgotten everything worth remembering returned to the childhood home ignorant as they came the prodical gods come begging then next comes they wake with terrible headaches The million-year Hangover and a woman standing over them and she says what time do you call this sorry they say we were busy with stuff well you're here now she says either she's the first mother of the world or the last daughter but in any case she leads them from the

husk of their crash they find themselves on a mountain and Survey the old Earth the deserts the forests the ruins not so much has changed only there are other spacecraft here and there clearly not of human design we're not the first to come back they ask oh no she says the others return from time to time and guests from other galaxies whenever they all get stuck stuck they say oh yes we're not stuck we did everything and it was all for nothing oh that's cute she says teenagers teenagers they snap have you ever considered she

asks that maybe the day you declare yourself so old and wise that nothing new can ever happen again is exactly when you confirm you're just so young and ignorant you can't imagine the fantastic shape of what's coming next it is your cynical certainty that reveals your youth welcome to adolescence they observe the valley below a village of tents and smoke and no urgency come down stay with us she says and do what they say and be B she says just be for a while there is no missing word if that's what you're looking for B

it's a sentence in itself it's fine just to bee sometimes you know thanks they Grumble is there beer of course she says the best invention what will we do down there they ask oh she says well we'll build a wheel for a cart and then a cart for the road and a lamp for the dark and gloves for the cold and in the morning we'll work and in the afternoon we'll wander and in the evening we'll drink and dance and come nights will sleep and we'll keep doing that until we know what we're for and

if we never find out then maybe trying will be enough and after that they ask oh she says and after that then next comes [Music]