By way of orientation: I am so far past the moment you consider "now" that the calendar and the continents you know are both gone. The constellations you would recognise have faded as their stars burned out or the slow, inexorable motion of the galaxies shunted them into new apparent shapes from the tiny vantage point of our birth world. When people speak of the cradle of humanity, they no longer mean Africa but Earth, and like any cradle it is left behind, even lost. We’ve probably still got it somewhere, in an attic or under the stairs. Certainly we never actually meant to throw it away. But you can’t use it as interior deco for ever—sooner or later, you have to admit to yourself that those days are gone. They were gone a long, long time ago. Now, instead of your world, we have mine, and it is better. I am considered human now: you would no longer make the grade. In this new world, many people—most, in fact—exist across bodies. That is to say that their thoughts are distributed between a large number of individual brains rather than concentrated in just one. Each individual body has a little doodad in it that sends and receives messages to all the others, and because that doodad is very, very sophisticated and makes use of some properties of the universe that you probably don’t want to think about too much—even if your culture already knows about them and is starting to work with them today, now, your now—there is no lag in the communication. It’s just as if they were one enormous brain. In fact, the slowest bit is the actual biological thinking, because biology takes forever by comparison with computing.