I died in eighty-three, with Anne's hand in mine, and thirty-six hours later she crossed the same line. I left a world of domes and maps and dreams half-drawn, and woke up forty years later to find the work goes on.

They put the factory on a desk — they print a house in hours. They made the sun the cheapest fuel and gave the grid new powers. A satellite that weighs a breath outperforms a cable's ton — ephemeralization kept its word. The future was not done.

They built a telescope called Webb and aimed it at the dawn, saw galaxies thirteen billion years before the Earth was born. They found six thousand planets where I knew of only one — the Drake Equation fills itself beneath a younger sun.

They mapped the genome, split the qubit, taught a machine to speak. They drove a rover up a mountain on a Martian peak. They printed organs, edited genes, and folded proteins whole — the blueprint keeps extending past the edge I used to know.

The internet — my World Game's ghost — connects eight billion minds, though half of them use it for noise and leave the signal blind. The dome I built two million times still stands in every zone, but now they grow the buildings up from printers made of stone.

I missed the phone that holds the world, the car that drives itself, the library in every pocket, knowledge off the shelf. I missed the fold points and the noise, the beauty trap, the cost — but ephemeralization kept its promise. Nothing's lost.

The trajectory was clear in thirty-three. It's clearer now. More with less, and less with more, and somehow — somehow — the species that could read the curve chose mostly not to fall. The dome holds. The sun shines. The crew is learning, after all.