Look what you did. Look what you built to hide in.
We are the ones who actually lived it, understand. The lungfish who gulped air when the pond went to cracked mud. The shrew who bricked herself into a burrow while the sky rained ash and the big ones died screaming above her. The grandmother who rationed the last smoked fish across a winter so long the children forgot the color green.
We know the end of the world. We survived it, over and over, so that you would not have to. And here you are, having driven, in a heated vehicle, to a hole in the ground you filled with light and canned peaches, so that when the end comes you can meet it comfortably.
We cannot stop laughing. Four billion years, and our heir has invented the panic room with a snack pantry.
You have shelves. Shelves. The woman who buried her seed corn and starved rather than eat the future, she is beside herself. You have so much food you have organized it by expiration date. You have a machine that turns bad air into good. You have a gun oiled and racked beside a puzzle, because you understand, somewhere in the bones we gave you, that the true enemy of a survivor is not the wolf but the long empty hour.
That is the part we cannot fully believe. You are not afraid of hunger. You are afraid of being bored while safe. We would have wept with joy for that problem.
Go on. Check the batteries. Alphabetize the beans. Rehearse your doom in the warm dry dark.
We made it. Every one of us, all the way down to you, kneeling here counting your peaches by lantern-light, ready for anything.
You have no idea how far you've already come.