It is 3024, and there are no longer shrines. They long since washed away by nature’s fury in the form of quakes that split across continents, countries, cities, down schools, fields, homes neatly in two.

You are to receive the memories of a late mother, a late father, and the memories of all those who came before them, who now rest beneath the surface of the earth as a part of the soil, sediments, layers of history ground down and packed together—evolution and extinction pressed into sheets upon sheets upon sheets.

They say there are populations of extinct humans who look to their ancestors for guidance. If this is true, why have their ancestors guided them towards their own destruction? If this is true, why do their ancestral spirits not continue to wander the earth?

You rebuild a shrine among broken stones, the flattest plane you could find within walking distance, and balance a dented vessel you discovered hidden beneath broken pipes tangled, rusted, molded. You use the vessel as an incense holder and scatter what remains of a stranger’s family in the form of objects burnt into ashes—ripped photos, torn clothing, a pair of glasses missing its frame, a bracelet without its charm—because their bones have been eaten when the world decided to wake, yawn, and swallow her unexpecting inhabitants, saying enough is enough. When she got sick of breathing in smog instead of untainted atmosphere, drinking pollution and acid instead of fresh and naturally salted waters, eating discarded humanity rather than fresh fruit born, ripened, fallen.

But there are no joss sticks, nothing for you to light, and in your palm is a single nanochip, its dull blue glinting like veins, like pulsing nerves, even though it is almost as far from alive as you are, but it’s the only colour standing out in the rubbled landscape of a city that once was and now isn’t.

From a port at the back of your neck, you insert the Ancestor Code. Generations held within encrypted lines of letters and numbers and symbols, collected, then passed on, the same way humans make descendants to carry their blood, name, legacy that is eventually forgotten if not written down. You are a corpse of their existence, a vessel of their religion, a carcass of their rise and fall, a skeleton of their history, and what you expect to see once the Ancestor Code populates your system are the wars, the battles, the deaths, the destruction, the scars with which they had left the earth with as a species.

You do not expect to bear the weight of their memories instead—the guilt of their killing, the pain of their loss, the light waning from young eyes unseeing, from old bones unfeeling, of life being birthed through torn tissues and the spill of blood, the way entire civilizations fall simply because a single being was allowed to continue to breathe and had used each of their breaths to take the gasps of another.

You see the faces lost and found, engraved into the Earth’s mountains, grooves, troughs like fingerprints, a reminder of how humanity has terraformed the Earth not just with their footprints but with their minds, and names, and ideas.

But, just as you are about to reach where it all began, to the memory of the very first human, before they were human, before they had even spoken their first word, took their first step, made their first mistake, grasp their first victory, before the existence of language and technology, the Ancestor Code short circuits, fizzles at the base of your neck, and what scrolls in front of your eyes before colour returns to the grey landscape of the world like a volcano un-erupting is ERROR.