It was the 2060s.

  By then, most people could not respond to epidemics for a simple reason: they could not wash. Poverty and hunger were no longer confined to what used to be called the Third World. It was not only those living in rapidly expanding cities of the so-called developing world—Delhi, Lagos, Kinshasa—but even those who had survived in the most expensive residential districts of New York, London, Tokyo, and Paris who now lacked drinking water.

  Had the disaster not yet occurred, water scarcity would have been something seen only in public service announcements no one watched. The same tired repertoire repeated itself: a first lady imitating Audrey Hepburn from over a century ago, cradling an impoverished African child as if on display. Even those ads required the influencer—who would later burn to death—to attach a hashtag like *#sustainability* before donations would trickle in. The funds raised were barely enough to keep the poorest people on Earth alive. Field workers were forced into a horrific position of power, having to decide who was poorest, who stood closest to death. Even shallow but persistent poverty was being conclusively starved out. Meanwhile, the donors’ sense of moral superiority swelled without limit.

  It was rare to find moments where humans truly grasped another’s suffering and reached out in solidarity. Whether through technology or money, the wealthy inhabited a world made exclusively for themselves, entirely segregated from the poor in every domain. The gap between wealth and poverty defied adequate description. Writings from the 2020s had predicted that AI would replace most jobs, and to some extent, they were right. There was no employment. There was not even involuntary labor available for mere survival. Those whose jobs consisted of firing others were themselves waiting to be fired. If any work remained, it resembled the premodern world: servants employed by aristocrats to maintain their standard of living—stylists, conversational companions, tutors for hobbies.

  Before the middle class collapsed, democracies that had drawn their mandate from it attempted various policies to correct wealth inequality. All failed. In contrast, the replacement of labor by technology and capital advanced irreversibly. The proposition—*without gaining an advantage in competition between nations and blocs, there is no future*—came to feel like an unchallengeable command. As imbalance grew, the wealthy became brazen, and the poor became ashamed.

  In a climate where wealth and poverty were framed solely as personal achievement or personal failure, people came face to face with the flames of *Up-hwa* (業火). For a brief moment, as suffering and labor were shared once more, people encountered equality. The land no longer offered humanity anything. Inevitably, people gathered again in cities.

  Whether one wished it or not, Earth has always been one. The *Up-hwa* that began in the Caribbean erupted while the politician and the scientist still held their positions. Survivors concluded they could no longer trust either of them. No matter how carefully they adopted tones and manners calculated by strong AI to consolidate their core supporters, no matter how eloquently they spoke before cameras, once the world had been engulfed in a shared conflagration, people began to drift away. Still, they never doubted their own calculations. Claiming they had been “betrayed by the people,” or muttering that “science cannot be wrong, only humans can,” they exited the stage. But they were not the worst of it.

  As systems were reorganized around a handful of surviving megacities, the equality briefly shared during reconstruction melted away like yesterday’s snow. Politics, now governed by groundless hatred, escalated mutual threats. Such tendencies had been intensifying for over half a century. Even as governments found themselves unable to repay the interest on the massive debts incurred in futile attempts to revive the planet, excessive resources continued to be squandered merely to distinguish friend from foe. No currency, of any kind, could generate on its own a tangible anchor or deep trust. With the foundations of convertibility collapsed, market-based economic circulation lost meaning. At last, the system fell like a drained reservoir, exposing its bottom. There lay bones whose presence no one could date, and people sensed they had been flailing all along on the surface of a system that had been dead from the start.

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  Even the most educated and discerning people offered no alternatives. Instead, they endlessly described the extinction everyone already sensed, posing as prophets. They reframed humanity’s supposed “suicidal impulse” again and again, recycling it endlessly. In the late 2020s, there had been a time when AI was treated as omnipotent, like humanity’s first encounter with fire. It was an era of AI self-replication, where machines that had absorbed human knowledge learned from one another. Now, humans were behaving like those AIs once had, mimicking and narrating one another’s annihilation. This atmosphere—where apocalypse alone was considered worth articulating—felt like yet another step toward extinction. Anticipating catastrophe felt less frightening than facing the unforeseen. People resembled animals led to slaughter, praying only that their mortality would come later than their neighbor’s, and that the pain might be unexpectedly brief.

  He wasted time following the breaking waves with his gaze, swinging left and right like a pendulum, sometimes comparing large waves to small ones, sometimes comparing tides under an unusually bright moon to those without it. Suddenly, something surfaced in his mind, and a faint sense of smugness swelled within him. Perhaps it was because he had nothing left to do and nothing left to spend but time itself.

  Was time really something to be kept or to flow? Was it not simply something that existed? In the dimension of dimensions, perhaps—but even practically, was it not the same? People once made clocks merely to farm, to commute, to coordinate. To seize time, to control it through plans. But was it not an illusion to believe that crafting a clock meant one could truly keep time, build something reliably within it? Had humanity gone mad believing it could manipulate time at will? Had everything not already existed, already occurred? What the minute hand signified—humanity’s ascent from ape to human, from angel to fallen being expelled from a self-made paradise—was that all? Or was everything else all?

  He thought thoughts that others might recall with embarrassment years after adolescence, yet he felt no shame. He had no mentor who felt like a friend, no friend who felt like a mentor—indeed, no friends at all. His thoughts had long been caught in a wheel, repeating endlessly, returning to this same point again and again. Perhaps his algorithmized memories themselves were his friends, his teachers. Still, he ignored them again. The notion that people once felt omnipotent about time felt disturbingly close to the time of this shore. He could not measure time accurately, so he regarded it as merely something that had happened long ago. He had stopped counting sunrises and sunsets long before. There was no device left to distinguish yesterday from today, today from tomorrow. Only when the height of the waves visibly changed did he sense that a few hours had passed. Contrary to his perception, a week or even ten days might pass. Unspeakable fatigue sometimes crushed him, while at other times an inexplicable fullness overwhelmed him to the point of shock.

  Inside the capsule, he had done nothing, expending little energy. Even then, he often ate only days after his previous meal. Time, then as now, barely registered. Yet moments that no one could halt were sliding steeply toward the present again. He felt memories approaching faster than the glass bottle could absorb and release light. The massive glass bottle pressed its mouth against the ground, and in the instant when reflected flashes alternated, he saw a human shape beyond the light. It looked as though it carried wings. He squeezed his eyes shut, spread his body to disperse energy, and opened them again after his blood had made a full circuit. There was nothing.

  At neither too early nor too late an hour, the sun rises or sets along the horizon. The first and last moment of the day always arrives. But where exactly is its boundary? A seemingly infinite repetition of days, wholly contingent. Infinite recurrence and the witnessing of a slice. And the accumulation of witnessing. Whenever the faint boundary between day and night passed in clusters, he felt a belated chill in some corner of his heart. Each time, instinctively, he closed his eyes and adjusted his posture. Unable to lower his head, he blocked his ears with his thumbs and his nose with his middle fingers. He felt his ears fold inward, then slip away slickly. Without time to be startled, he opened his mouth as wide as possible, braced his elbows against the ground, assuming a posture like a plank. Without knowing why, he screamed as if dying. In a moment when even his usual curses failed him, fear itself felt starved. The flash came to him not as light, but as a rhythm that had stripped everything away. A feeling that he had to do this, or else. He screamed steadily to protect his organs—and then the wheel returned. He was already being pulled, with painful clarity, into the far side of memory.