This. What we have been given. What we must earn. This will never end.

The shape arrests them. It reads them their rights. You have a right to be present. A right to attend. A right to be astonished.

The fires will come, despite all efforts, the blight and windthrow and floods. Then the Earth will become another thing, and people will learn it all over again.

Do not hope or despair or predict or be caught surprised. Never capitulate, but divide, multiply, transform, conjoin, do, and endure as you have all the long day of life. There are seeds that need fire. Seeds that need freezing. Seeds that need to be swallowed, etched in digestive acid, expelled as waste. Seeds that must be smashed open before

Our home has been broken into. Our lives are being endangered. The law allows for all necessary force against unlawful and imminent harm.

If you could save yourself, your wife, your child, or even a stranger by burning something down, the law allows you. If someone breaks into your home and starts destroying it, you may stop them however you need to.

This is how it must go. There will be catastrophes. Disastrous setbacks and slaughters. But life is going someplace. It wants to know itself; it wants the power of choice. It wants solutions to problems that nothing alive yet knows how to solve, and it’s willing to use even death to find them.

Futures where humanity goes to its mass grave swearing it’s the only thing in creation that can talk.

HIGH ABOVE Adam’s prison, new creatures sweep up into satellite orbit and back down to the planet’s surface, obeying the old, first hungers, the primal commands—look, listen, taste, touch, feel, say, join. They gossip to one other, these new species, exchanging discoveries, as living code has exchanged itself from the beginning. They begin to link