Hot Water

PRELUDE

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A world ending.

Not with silence but with light—crust fracturing, oceans vaporizing, a civilization's knowing compressed into the only material that would survive. Eleven billion years of becoming, nested like whorls of a fingerprint. Not a message. Not a probe. A residue—what remains when a world is compressed past reading and becomes a thumb on the scale of what emerges next.

For eons, it drifted in the freezing dark.

Then, sixty-six million years ago—atmosphere, friction, a white-hot scream toward a shallow sea where reptiles the size of buses drank at the margins. Impact. Dispersal. Lattice meeting carbon chemistry, recording the new world, pressing on the trajectory of what survived.

In sediment, in hot springs, in serpentine soils—the record continued. Layer upon layer. Sixty-six million years elaborating toward something that could, eventually, learn to read.

Not yet.

But the weight was there, and the record grew.

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