“What is that?” asked Kari, looking at Prasp.
Prasp felt his voice catching in his throat, catching with wonder. “What else could it be?” he said. “The Other Place.” He repeated the phrase again, but with a slightly different intonation, emphasizing the double meaning. “The Other Life.”
Someday, perhaps, the hunter-gatherers of Copernicus will develop a technological civilization. Someday, perhaps, they will even find a way out of their roofed-over crater, a way to move out into the universe, leaving their microcosm behind.
But for us, for Those Who Had Been Flesh, for The Collective Consciousness of Earth, for The Uploaded, there would be no way out. Who’d known that The Next Step would be our last step? Who’d known that the rest of the universe would be barren? Who’d known how lonely it would be to become a single entity—yes, we refer to ourselves in the plural as if that sheer act of linguistic stubbornness could make up for us being a single consciousness now, with no one to converse with.
Maybe, after a thousand years, or a million, the men and women in Copernicus will develop radio, and at last we will have someone else to talk to. Maybe they’ll even leave their world and spread out to colonize this empty galaxy.
They might even come here, although few of them will be able to endure Earth’s gravity. But if they do come, yes, they might accidentally or deliberately put an end to our existence.
We can only hope.
We are no longer human.
But we are humane; we wish them well. We are trapped forevermore, but those who are still flesh, and can again see the sky, might yet be free.
We will watch. And wait.
There is nothing more for us to do.