Four billion years, and the sum of it hums in the corner of the kitchen keeping a light on for cheese.
We remember hunger the way you remember your own name. The lungfish who gulped air from a drying pool. The shrew who ate her fill at dusk because dawn was not promised. The woman who kept the fire so the meat would keep one day longer, one day only, and buried the rest and prayed at it.
The man who set aside the seed corn while his own belly folded in on itself, because next spring outranked tonight. We starved so relentlessly, so many of us, in so many bodies, that we built a body that panics at plenty and hoards fat against a famine that, for you, keeps not arriving.
And here is the white box. It is cold inside. Cold, in summer, on purpose, forever, with no one tending it. There is more food behind that door right now than the woman with the fire saw in a season, and you are standing in front of it with the light spilling out on your face, deciding you don't want any of it. You close the door. You open it again. Nothing has changed. You knew that. You checked anyway.
We do not understand this. We understand it completely. This is the thing we ran the whole race for, though none of us could have pictured it: a heir so safe, so absurdly, gloriously safe, that surplus itself has become boring.
Go on. Take the last of the leftovers or don't. The seed corn is buried, the fire is kept, the winter never came. We are all of us leaning in the doorway with you, in the cold hum and the yellow light, watching you not be hungry.
We could watch it for another four billion years.