The itch was always forward. A straining of the neck, a squint against the sun, trying to make out the bend in the road where tomorrow lay coiled. It lies within us like a constant hum beneath the skin, a prickle in the eyes gazing at the horizon. What waited there? Riches? Ruins? A longer shadow, or the sudden snuffing out of light? Fortunes whispered in tea leaves, stars mapped like a gambler’s odds, the entrails of birds read for the shape of what was to come. The wise ones, the prophets, and now even the algorithms spat out probabilities that all fed this hunger for the yet-to-be. A desperate plea against the chaos, a need to feel the rails of fate beneath our trembling fingers. It’s inside of us. A primal hunger, this wanting to know the script before the curtain rose. Survival, they called it, the brain a cold calculator charting paths through the tall grass, the rustle in the leaves. But the real hook, the barb that sank deep and held, wasn't the hazy promise of what might be. It was the grit and bone of what was.

  Look at the caves. The primal ochre handprints on the wall, a child’s small palm pressed against the dark throat of time. The shards of pottery unearthed from the dust, the flint tools worn smooth by forgotten hands. Not blueprints for a brighter future, but whispers from a past we could almost taste. A bison hunt, a mother’s lullaby, the shadow of a fear in a time before names were carved on stone. We told stories then, huddled, the darkness pressing in, the crackle of the flames mirroring the flicker in our eyes as the old ones spoke. Tales of courage and betrayal, of gods both benevolent and cruel, of the long journey that brought us to that flickering circle of warmth. Who were we? What storms did they weather? Where did the wonder in our minds come from? The wind carried the names of the dead, and we breathed it in, held them close, trying to piece together the broken vessel of the past.

  Kings and queens, their gilded cages and bloody tantrums, weren’t just curiosities. They were threads in the tapestry, knots in the rope that stretched back, back to the first spark. The rise and fall of empires. Their triumphs and their failures, writ large in stone and song, were lessons whispered across the millennia spoke of the intricate dance of power and its inevitable decay—these weren't just stories of long-dead strangers, they were mirrors reflecting the enduring flaws and aspirations of the human spirit. We devoured their triumphs and tragedies not for the glitter, but for the familiarity. We sought out the patterns of their lives to understand the cyclical nature of our own desires and foolishness that sat within us and laid our human heart bare. We consumed their histories not for escapism, but for a grim recognition of our shared inheritance. This is how power tastes. This is how it corrupts. This is how empires crumble.

  The books, the archives, the endless streams of data preserving the echoes of the past – they weren't built to predict the stock market or the next pandemic. They were about holding onto the faces in the fading photographs, the voices lost to the oblivion that threatened to swallow us whole. They held the laughter of children long since turned to dust, the wisdom of elders whose bones now mingled with the earth, the fury of battles fought and lost on fields now green and silent. They were a testament to the enduring human need to leave a mark, to say I was here, even when the “here” had vanished into the relentless march of time.

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  Evolution, they say, a slow, grinding process of adaptation and selection. But somewhere in that long climb from the past, a new hunger bloomed. Not just for food or shelter, but for meaning. We didn't just want to live; we wanted to understand why we lived, where we came from. And the future, for all its tantalizing mystery, gave no answers to these questions. There was no meaning in the void ahead. The past, however fragmented and incomplete, held the clues. It clung to the residue of lives lived, the weight of generations pressing down. The past was the soil from which we sprang, the tangled roots of cause and effect that shaped who we were, however precariously. We looked forward with a nervous anticipation, yes, but we turned back with a deep, abiding need. To trace the contours of our origins. To hear the echoes of the voices in our blood. To finally understand the long, winding story of how we came to be standing here, on this sliver of now, forever tethered to the ghosts of our past.

  . . .

  In 2033 the past within us awakened. The boffins, heads bent over microscopes, chasing the ghost in the machine beneath the hum of conscious clatter. Like gutting a fish to see how it swims, they went at the human subconscious, slicing and dicing theories.

  One of them, a twitchy bastard with ink-stained fingers, had a notion. The subconscious, he scribbled on a napkin greasy with yesterday’s fries, a code—maybe strung along the DNA ladder. It was one thing, part of the whole messy, miraculous engine of the body. And this thing, he figured, was a recorder. A goddamn black box of a life. Dad’s story, birth to cumshot. Mom’s, birth to the snip of the cord. Two lives of feeling the sun, tasting the rain, thinking the thoughts, all jammed into their kids. And inside them, their folks. And inside them, theirs. Like a Russian doll of the dead.

  Then, they found the thing. Not a solid lump you could hold pluck out of the strand. It was woven into the fabric, the sticky mess holding the cells together. The whole damn alphabet soup of cellular goo. But even goo had layers, and the deeper they drilled, the more they unearthed. Hereditary Environment Records, they said. HER. It was there, recording it all, the laughter and the screams, the hunger and the fear, passing it down like a worn-out instruction manual for a world that never stayed the same. Evolution, the Salk mouthpiece droned, like it explained a damn thing.

  Anyway, like it always does, a decade crawled by, and the research companies did what they always did. Plunked down cash for cold meat—heaps of it. Then, the little scavengers in lab coats, poked and prodded at the stiff husks of the recently departed, trying to unlock our last private secrets. And the money men, the ones who smelled profit in a corpse, they funded it. That’s the dance. Always has been. Want to jump the line, see what’s behind the curtain? You’ve got to pay your way through. Bribe your way in. And to rise to the top? You gotta get your hands dirty, do the things they don’t slap on a billboard or put in the T’s & C’s. You gotta break the rules or be a rich enough bastard so you can make them. So they exactly what they did. They built their empires on the backs of the dead, owned the companies that owned the companies that owned the DNA blueprints of a nation’s soul. And then they really knew. This is how power tastes. And we really understood. This is how it corrupts. And we all saw. This is how empires crumble.