Kata Bindu

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We sometimes contemplated giving ourselves a name. “Those Who Had Been Flesh” appealed to us. So did “The Collective Consciousness of Earth.” And “The Uploaded.”

But, to our infinite sadness, there was no need for a name—for there was no one to speak with, no one to proffer an introduction to, no possible confusion about the referents of pronouns. Despite centuries now of scanning the sky for alien radio signals, we’d found nothing.

Because of that, we’d never even had to resolve the question of whether we should refer to ourselves in the singular or the plural. Granted, we had once been ten billion individuals; plurals were no doubt appropriate then. But after almost all members of Homo sapiens had taken The Next Step, we had surrendered that individuality, slowly at first, then with abandon—for who would not want to take into themselves the genius of the world’s greatest mathematicians, the wit of the cleverest comedians, the virtue of the most altruistic humanitarians, the talent of the most gifted composers, and the tranquility of the most serene contemplatives?

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