Four billion years, and the relay comes to this: our heir, in a chair with wheels, watching six faces trapped in a glowing pane, saying nothing, muted.
We are all here to watch. The lungfish who first gulped air in a drying pool. The shrew who lived nine million years in the dark, one ear always turned, because a single mistake ended the whole line right there. The woman who carried fire in a horn of packed moss for three days across open ground so her people would not go cold.
We spent everything so those eyes could spot the leopard in the grass. Now they are spotting a colleague named Brad who has not done his section.
Look at the hands. Those are fire-tending hands, seed-burying hands, the hands that knapped flint until they bled and then knapped more. They are drumming on a desk. They are typing "sounds good!" while the face says the opposite. We do not fully understand this ritual, this "sync," this arguing about who owns which square of a document that no one will remember. There is no weather in it. Nobody could die.
That is the part we keep circling back to. Nobody could die. The room is warm. The belly is full, or one delivery away from full. Someone just muted themselves to sigh, safe enough to be bored, which is a luxury the shrew could not have dreamed if shrews dreamed.
We buried the seed corn and did not eat it, through the famine, so that one day it would come to a Tuesday exactly this dull.
Go on. Say your piece. Unmute.
We are all leaning in.