From the Air

We are the cavemen. We are the Ancients, the Progenitors, the blue-collared steel monkeys; a thousand interstellar expressways in a thousand derivative works of historical fiction rose by our hands. We're the plot devices to let careless storytellers off the hook. We spin webs across the galaxy and conveniently disappear, millions of years before the real heroes arrive on stage. Oh, I've read the books; I've played the sims; I've watched the wraparounds. I've had plenty of time. I smile at every offhand digression, every throwaway line from bit players wondering what happened to us, where we went, what great filter might have driven us to extinction.

But we're not extinct. We're still out here laying the roads, crawling across the universe like ants, dragging your goddamned superhighway behind us. Don't excuse yourselves with legends of our fall. Don't justify your freeloading by pretending that we just went away, leaving all this miraculous infrastructure for you to play with. If you don't see us, it's because you don't dare look in the empty spaces. If you've forgotten who we are, it's because even now, in all your transcendent post-Human splendour, you're still too frightened to dip your toes into the void where we spend our lives. You're so used to stepping from A to B that you've forgotten the endless, infinite points between. Someone had to blaze the trail across that desert; and we got no help from magic carpets.

You will never catch up. You will always live in our slow, creaking, endless wake. You cannot go anywhere we have not already been.

And if, now and then, you happen to frown at some faint memory— if you ever wonder what you'd see if you bent down and peered into that abyss between the stars— the moment never lasts. You catch yourselves, and laugh nervously, and stop yourselves from thinking such foolish thoughts. Because you know there's no need to wonder. You know exactly what you’d see looking back at you from that place.

You know.