Four billion years, and here we all are, holding our breath in a room the color of nothing.
The one who crawled from the drying pool gasping its first raw lungful of air, it is here. The shrew who slept through the fire that ended the great lizards, here. The woman who walked her sick child across a frozen river at night and did not stop and did not sit down, she is here, and she is looking at these chairs, and she does not understand the chairs.
Cushioned. Bolted in a row. A machine in the corner offering warm brown water for a coin. There is a box on the wall counting numbers upward, and everyone obeys the box.
You are afraid. We know the smell of that, the cold hands, the shallow breath: we spent a hundred thousand years arranging your body to feel exactly this so you would run, and there is nowhere to run, so you jiggle your foot and read the same poster about washing your hands eleven times.
We keep waiting for the wolves. There are no wolves. There are people in soft shoes who are trying to keep you alive, and clean light, and a floor that will not flood, and someone whose whole purpose is to come find you and say a name aloud. Your name. The one we carried this far.
Understand what we are seeing. Every one of us died before help came. Every single one. And here you sit in a warm dry room, terrified and bored at once, waiting for the strangers who fix things.
We would have wept to see it.
Go on. They are calling you now. We have got you.
We always did.