The After

What the species came to call *the after* was not a period that announced itself. The phrase appeared, in print, for the first time in a 2086 essay by a Convergent practitioner named Esther Achebe, who had been writing about the post-AGI cultural settlement for fifteen years and who proposed, in that essay, that the species had — sometime in the early 2080s, without noticing — passed out of the period of its disruption and into the period of its accommodation.

The phrase caught. Within two years, *the after* had become the standard way the popular press referenced the new cultural era. The phrase implied no triumph. The phrase implied that the species had survived something and was now in the part where it was figuring out how to live with what the surviving had cost.

This chapter is six portraits from inside *the after.*