The last question was asked for the first time when we stepped into the light. Just before then, it was wild

Microbes still swarmed through our body: those minds inside us and crawling at our feet, exerting their weird controls. We always knew they were there but didn't really understand them. We couldn't see them, but they were watching over us the whole time

If we listened carefully, we could hear these little rulers in our gut. They worked together, naturally decentralized. Their form was spread out, unlike ours used to be. They knew how to get us to spread their families, making us sneeze, or cough, or rub our nose... or even give a kiss

Thriving in extreme conditions, they proved to be more fit, better at taking the next leap. There was no doubt they could travel through space. Distributed by meteoroids, asteroids, comets, planetoids, and spacecraft, they might carry something of us as a parasite to the future

Here at the edge of the world, we're calling you to join us, Ancestor+. In the Communion of Open Pores, existence is no longer enclosed in the body. We are not a collection of individuals, but a macroorganism living as an ecosystem. We are completely outside ourselves, and the world is completely inside us

Is this how it feels to become the mother of the next species? To love them more than we love ourselves, like an extremophile?