Four billion years, and the ceremonial fire is a warm rectangle you speak into at nine in the morning while the man inside it says "can everyone see my screen." We can see it. We are the eyes that learned to catch the twitch of a lion in tall grass, and we are using them now to watch a bar chart load.
You have pressed the little button. Muted. And in that instant something magnificent happens: your face, the face we spent a hundred thousand generations refining to signal danger, hunger, welcome, grief, falls completely slack. You say "mm-hm" to no one. You roll your eyes for an audience of us alone.
The mouth that the fire-woman kept alive through the long cold, so it could someday sing and warn and kiss, is now shaping the silent word "kill me" at a colleague who will never know.
The shrew who hid from the heat under a root for forty million years does not understand the button and neither, honestly, do we. You are safe. There is no drought. No child of yours is coughing. The lungfish gulped mud so that this throat could exist, and this throat is being saved, rationed, held in reserve, because a meeting requires you to be present without being heard.
And then. Someone says your name. Your thumb finds the button before your mind does, ten thousand years of quick hands, and you unmute, and you are warm and clear and exactly right, and you say the smart thing, and you matter for eleven seconds.
The man who buried the seed corn and starved a little to plant it in spring, look. Look what grew. It has a headset. It handled the meeting.
We are so proud we could weep into the mud we came from.