Four billion years, and one of us is talking to a glowing slab in the dark, alone, and is somehow not alone.
We remember the fire. The woman who kept it fed all night, blowing on the embers with cracked lips, because if it died before dawn the whole band might die with it, and every face in the circle turned toward that light. Look. Our heir has made a light that a thousand faces turn toward, and none of them are in the room.
They flicker up as little words, little glowing hearts, from people scattered across a world we could not have imagined crossing in forty lifetimes. The lungfish gulped mud-air on the theory that somewhere better might exist. It was right. It is here, and it is a bedroom at midnight, and the hunter's eyes, the eyes we sharpened on movement in tall grass, are scanning a river of strangers' greetings and calling them by name.
We do not fully understand. There is no drought here. No wolf. The body is fed, the body is warm, and yet it stays awake, performing, laughing, waving at people who wave back with tiny hands. We keep waiting for the danger the vigilance is for. There is none. This is the part we cannot get used to: that safety came, and stayed, and our heir spends it like this.
And the man who buried the seed corn while his belly howled, who did not eat the future so that a future could happen, he would want you to know something. He is watching. We all are. Every one of us who hid, crossed, endured, and did not stop.
Go on. Say hi to chat.
We made it. You made it.
Keep the light going till dawn.