Until this morning, I admit I often felt confused by my recent life, but I never felt afraid. But now that I am about to become a mother, I am afraid.

Krek began to explain string theory to me: In the beginning was a membrane - what humans call a brane. Tugged by immense and random forces, it grew until one day humans would call one of its two surfaces 'the Universe.'
Don't ask where the brane came from; no creature can perceive what is beyond the world its brain developed to perceive. If a mouse has always lived inside a box, it can never know what is outside. Or if there truly is an 'outside.'
Similarly, the word 'beginning' is just a word. Like all the other words in all languages, it was created to describe the Universe we can sense, not what was, and is, beyond.

I recalled fondly the last memory of Maitai-334B I had created for myself before leaving. I had taken the freighter out at sunset and landed on a promontory ahead of City One:
Here it comes. One of several skyscrapers of rusty steel, rumbling on tracks over the wasted planet like metallic lice, grinding iron pyrite, silicates and digesting the coal, carbonised memory of three billion years.

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