Status Updates From Our Dried Voices

Plot twist...

XXV

"...You woke up in a bed that was cleaned and remade for you each night, ate food that was prepared for you by mysterious machines, spent the day in a lush, green meadow where it rained just enough to keep the plants alive and thriving and no more. There was no need to think. And so little by little, one by one, people ceased to do so."

“...And so humans stopped thinking. It didn’t happen all at once of course. I wasn’t alive to see the beginnings. But I have heard it started soon after your colony was completed. Its creators designed everything to function perfectly without any further human input. Life suddenly became very easy...

...They neglected their minds, they willfully surrendered the greatest gift they possessed by virtue of being human, because thought became unnecessary for their survival; it became an excess—and a weighty one at that—an act considered too hard, too confusing, too burdensome to bear any longer...

...But after some time, Earth grew too small and too fragile for humans, and so some of them travelled across the sky to this planet. They called it Pearl back then. Yet by now they had solved all their problems and Pearl was still a very big place to them. They no longer had any use for their minds. Slowly but surely, they became like the people you know today...

We did not always live in this place. Once, many hundreds of years ago, humans lived on a planet called Earth, a place far beyond the reaches of the stars. There were many more of our kind then, and they faced many more difficulties than we know today. Yet they also possessed a wealth of ingenuity, and by the power of their minds they contrived to solve every test placed before them...