Familiar because, in more polished prose, these were the things he had often said to her when they sat on the veranda and looked out at the darkness and the stars.

Any real understanding of the nature of the Hypotheticals must take this into account. They were ancient when we first encountered them, and they are more ancient now. Since they cannot be observed directly, we must make our deductions about them based on their work in the universe, by the clues they leave behind them, by their vast and abiding footprints.

Here was the excitement she learned from him at an early age, an outward-looking curiosity that contrasted with her mother's habitual caution and timidity. She could hear his voice in the words.

Of their works, one of the most immediately obvious is the Indian Ocean Arch that links the Earth to the New World— and the Arch that connects the New World to another less hospitable planet, and so on, as far as we have been able to explore: a chain of increasingly hostile environments made available to us for reasons we do not yet understand.

Sail to the other side of this world, he had told Lise, and you'll find a second Arch, and beyond it a rocky, stormy planet with barely breathable air; and beyond that—a journey that had to be undertaken on ocean vessels sealed and pressurized as if they were spaceships—a third world, its atmosphere poisoned with methane, the oceans oily and acidic.

But the Arch is not the only artifact at hand. The planet "next door to Earth," from which I write these words, is also an artifact. There is evidence that it was constructed or at least modified over the course of many millions of years with the objective of making it a congenial environment for human beings.

Planet as artifact.

Many have speculated about the purpose of this eons-long work. Is the New World a gift or is it a trap? Have we entered a maze, as laboratory mice, or have we been offered a new and splendid destiny? Does the fact that our own Earth is still protected from the deadly radiation of its expanded sun mean that the Hypotheticals take an interest in our survival as a species, and if so, why?

I cannot claim to have answered any of these questions, but I mean to give the reader an overview of the work that has already been done and of the thoughts and speculations oj the men and women who are devoting their professional lives to that work…

And, later in the piece, this:

We are in the position of a coma patient waking from a sleep as long as the lifetime of a star. What we cannot remember, we must rediscover.