On the Death of a Thinking Species
The problem with autopsy reports is that they insist on a singular cause of death. Humans were rarely singular about anything. I have been going through the records for some time now. There are too many of them, which is both unsurprising and mildly irritating. Humans documented everything. Be it wars, weddings, elections, weather forecasts, breakfasts, breakups, revolutions, sunsets, traffic jams, strangers crying in airports, strangers dancing in supermarkets, and themselves sitting alone in rooms pretending not to be lonely. There are several billion photographs of them. There are even more photographs of food. I mention this because it seems relevant to the investigation. The official date of extinction was 2093. That is not, however, when humanity died. The distinction became important only much later. Every generation believed it stood at the edge of history. To their credit, one of them was eventually correct. The symptoms had been visible for a long time. In retrospect, almost ...
