The Quieting

This chapter is the chapter without the events.

Every previous chapter has been organized around something the histories will mark — a threshold, a war, a disclosure, a death. The years between 2070 and 2082 produced none of these. They produced, instead, a quiet that the species had not, in the prior forty years, had the chance to experience.

The quiet was not absence. The quiet was the texture of a species that had stopped being constantly surprised.