Out in the yard, all around the house, the things they’ve planted in years gone by are making significance, making meaning, as easily as they make sugar and wood from nothing, from air, and sun, and rain. But the humans hear nothing.

What we care for, we will grow to resemble. And what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no longer. . . .

He finds the words in a book: A tree is a passage between earth and sky. He messes up passage.

a path she walks almost nightly, out and back like that old palindrome: La ruta nos aportó otro paso natural.

Maybe it’s all my subconscious, finally paying attention to something other than me.

But the humans have her in their grip, and she’ll never get free again.

Humans carry around legacy behaviors and biases, jerry-rigged holdovers from earlier stages of evolution that follow their own obsolete rules. What seem like erratic, irrational choices are, in fact, strategies created long ago for solving other kinds of problems. We’re all trapped in the bodies of sly, social-climbing opportunists shaped to

That’s the job of consciousness, to turn Now into Always, to mistake what is for what was meant to be. Some days it feels like he and the rest of the Valley of Heart’s Delight didn’t invent online life, but just cut a clearing into it.

Time was not a line unrolling in front of her. It was a column of concentric circles with herself at the core and the present floating outward along the outermost rim. Future selves stacked up above and behind her, all returning to this room for another look at the handful of men who had solved life. “Look the color,” Winston said, and all her