In the Heaven of your imagination, I trail a scent of olibanum as I lead you down the spiral tower stair of blonde stone, geometric in both its construction and in its gentle deterioration, to the second floor. On the umber-painted door is a tiny circular frame, imperfectly gilded, presenting a hazy, heady view of a baroque little house. Behind is the w’drawing room where we sit, surrounded by a selection of volumes from the Register. I have stacked four of them, bone-white, on the oval table between two creaky chairs.

Oh, and this is my first appearance in your Heaven, isn’t it. Forgive me for neglecting to describe myself visually, as your species prefers. Perhaps you will have a more vivid experience if I mention my great, heaving spectacles and their slim, delicate chain. Yes, that should do.

As a representative of humanity, would you prefer tea or coffee? Well, allow me to pour you what is from my perspective a nondenominational hot beverage, and allow you to fill in the gap.

Here I shall introduce to you a selection of further checkboxes from our paperwork for the Register, beyond Just Sort of Declined. I heft the top volume from the stack and present to you another major cause of ecumenes’ end: Danger Fun, a sort of catch-all for when an ecumene invents or discovers a molecule, a meme, a device, a behavior, or some other deceptively simple instrument that rapidly gets the better of them.

There is a basic model that can be applied when such an instrument arrives, which captures the balance between the several variables:

• How fun the instrument is, f,
• How dangerous it is, d, and
• How careful the population is, c.

In some cases, the product of f and d is so high that it overwhelms c immediately. The world barely has a chance to recognize what’s happening until it’s almost over.

The ecumene “Almandine you refulgent chimera!”, low in population to begin with, was forced by an encroaching ice age to migrate almost entirely across to the opposite side of their world, where they found blissfully intoxicating gases being exhaled from the earth. They treated their new homeland as a promised paradise and enjoyed the , until discovering the gas’s sterilizing effect. They did not survive two more generations.

This surely seems sad, as it is all I’ve told you of the ecumene’s fate. But they had lived more thoroughly than most: a complex guild system, mapped to the species’ molting schedule, put each individual through sixteen life stages, each oriented around a uniquely necessary job, and gave nearly every member of society sixteen distinct and complementary senses of profound belonging and meaning. Loneliness, aimlessness, despair, and malice as you knew them were, to a first approximation, unknown to them. The ecumene lived twenty-nine generations, more or less, in this state of equilibrium. Surely this passage, in total, is to be seen as worth celebrating.

Please accept my highest regards,

V.F.