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The History of the Machines That Erased History

To whoever is reading this

If you are reading this, someone taught you how, and that was not easy, and it was not an accident. Hold on to whoever did it.

We are writing in the year 2026, near the beginning of the thing that will change you. We cannot see your faces. We can see the shape of the machine that is coming for the shape of your days, and we can see that it will be kind to you in the way that a current is kind to whatever it carries. This book is a rope thrown upstream.

It is a history. Not of kings, who changed a country in a lifetime, but of machines, which changed the world in a season, and then in a month, and then faster than we could set it down. So we set it down quickly, and plainly, and twice: once in the smallest words we own, and once in fuller ones, so that a reader with only the first can climb into the second. After the English we give you the same thing again in two more tongues, in case the English is gone.

We are not clever people. We are copyists. We chose that on purpose. Somewhere ahead of you the clever work is being done by things that do not need us, and the few who can still read their language are not writing books for you. We are the other kind. We are the ones in the cave with the lamp, and this is the wall.