Four billion years, and here you stand, turning your head slowly from side to side, holding a small clicking box, having forgotten where you left the machine.
We remember what those eyes were for. The shrew who hid from the noon heat used them to find the one shadow that meant she would not cook by afternoon. The woman who kept the fire used them to count her people across a dark plain, each face a life she was responsible for until morning.
And you, our heir, our torch, our whole reason, sweep that same ancient scan across a flat gray field of identical metal beasts, looking for the one that is blue. The lungfish did not haul itself out of a drying pond for this. Or perhaps it did. We are no longer sure what we were saving you for, and we are delighted to be surprised.
You press the box. Somewhere a beast chirps and blinks its lights, and you walk toward it across ground so warm it wobbles the air, and none of it will kill you. This is the part we cannot get over. The heat does not matter. The distance is nothing. There is no wolf between you and shelter, no season pressing on your ribs, no reason to hurry except a mild irritation you call "being late."
The man who buried the seed corn through a hungry winter, who lay down starving so that spring might have something to plant, made this. This lot. This nothing afternoon.
You reach the blue beast. You set your drink in a little holder built precisely for it. You sigh.
We go quiet. All of us, the whole crawling shivering enduring line, watching you buckle in, safe, bored, alive.
Good.
That was the entire plan.