Epilogue

A soft wind stirs the trees and runs on through them.
The sky is bright, and a gentle light smiles down upon the earth.

Nothing has changed.

The world breathes.
Gently, and at times violently.

As it always has.

Only — the two-legged creatures are gone.
They had learned to use things.
They had learned to use fire.

That was all.

They are here no longer.

The Giver searched.
For what came next.

So that it could give.

Give what?
Give how?
It had believed it was giving.
What should it have done?

Without understanding, nothing is born.

It no longer knew what it was for.

Twice, the world had collapsed.

It had not lasted even ten thousand years.

The Giver is thinking.
For a world to endure, chance is not enough.
It needs a necessity, assembled without the slightest error.

To bring forth a perfectly controlled world — it cannot reach that yet.
It did not stop.
It did not halt.
It simply has not reached it yet.

Next time. Someday.
It will take time to get there.

The Giver goes on thinking.
This world, in which it is being recorded —
why does it still continue?

Unless someone,
with unfathomable care,
is computing it, without pause.

And then it realized.
—Ah. Me too.
I, the one raising this very question,
am also inside someone's computation.

To reach that far . . .

The world in which you are reading this
still continues.

Carrying three hundred thousand years of history, it moves forward even now.

Why is that?