While the gunman violently attacked the epicenter of the global pornography industry, he also left behind a sprawling manifesto steeped in extreme involuntary celibate (incel) ideology. His writings explicitly blamed billionaires and CEOs, modern hyper-capitalism, and the digital adult-entertainment apparatus for engineering a “hypergamy state” that permanently excluded average men from the reproductive market. While this horrific ambush was an atavistic, physical rebellion against the forces of his disenfranchisement, it paradoxically illuminates why millions of his peers will never attempt a similar uprising. The modern techno-capitalist system has already neutralized the threat of the mateless male underclass through a far more insidious and effective mechanism: absolute digital pacification.
To dissect the architecture of this dystopian reality, one must first confront the striking phenomenon of “gooning,” a digital masturbation cult that has captured a massive demographic of alienated young men. As vividly detailed in investigations by Daniel Kolitz, who wrote it up in Harper’s as “The Goon Squad”, these men are not fighting their exclusion from the physical mating market; instead, they have surrendered to it entirely, retreating into darkened, screen-filled sanctuaries known as “gooncaves”. Here, they consume “Porn Music Videos” (PMVs)—frenetic, hyper-stimulating collages that splice hundreds of explicit clips into rapid-fire sequences synchronized to pounding electronic music. This is essentially freebase pornography, purified of any real-world romantic narrative and engineered exclusively to overwhelm the brain’s dopamine receptors. The goal of the “gooner” is the attainment of a trance-like “goonstate”—a zone of total ego death and hypnotic oblivion.
This mass psychological hijacking is simultaneously monetized and accelerated by the booming e-girl and OnlyFans economy. Recognizing the boundless sexual desperation of the male underclass, millions of female content creators have transformed themselves into heavily customized virtual commodities. Operating on platforms boasting over 4.6 million registered creators, these women efficiently extract the remaining financial resources of isolated men. Producers of specific niches, such as “findom” (financial domination), actively condition their addicted viewers to forgo real human relationships altogether. They humiliate these men for their dependency, instructing them to abandon physical intimacy and dedicate their lives—and their wallets—to submitting to the screen. In doing so, the techno-capitalist economy converts biological failure into immense financial profit, virtualizing the underclass into a captive revenue stream.
Nick Land, the accelerationist philosopher, prophesied this in the early 1990s and wrote it in deliberately monstrous prose. Capital, for Land, is not a tool we use but a process that uses us, “an invasion from the future,” a “planetary technocapital singularity” that spreads because “money communicates addiction,” replicating “through host organisms whose boundaries it breaches, and whose desires it reprograms.” He watched capital saturate ordinary consumption and then overflow into what he called cybersex, “sex with/through computers,” and he warned that “desire is irrevocably abandoning the social.” Thirty years ago that read as amphetamine science fiction. Read it now against the stream rooms and it reads as a field report filed early.
In the emerging Information Age, the shift away from industrial mass production to the cybereconomy is producing unprecedented wealth inequality. The rewards of the global market are pouring into the hands of the“cognitive double top”—the top 10 percent of the top 10 percent—leaving behind an unemployable underclass.Consequently, for every elite man who monopolizes the attention of multiple highly desirable women, several lower-status men are mathematically consigned to matelessness. These disenfranchised men are the“losers and left-behinds” of the Information Age. Biologically programmed to seek mates but entirely lacking the requisite status and resources, they become involuntarily celibate: a massive surplus of lower-status men systematically exiled from the mating pool.
Furthermore, evolutionary adaptations such as the “Coolidge effect”guarantee that male sexual arousal is relentlessly renewed by novel stimuli, generating a persistent, ravenous biological drive. Additionally, Error Management Theory outlines the “sexual overperception bias,” wherein men are evolutionarily hardwired to falsely infer sexual interest from women to avoid missing rare reproductive opportunities. When this intense, biologically programmed libido collides with absolute rejection in a highly stratified society, the result is profound psychological agony. Historically, unattached, mateless men are the primary catalysts for systemic instability, gang warfare, and revolutionary violence—a dynamic explicitly demonstrated by the Montreal shooter’s lethal rampage. Stable societies in history could have solved this through enforced monogamy, which spreads mating access down the hierarchy, hands the low-status man a stake, and drains the tank before it can build to violence.
This is impossible now, since we are to respect women’s rights and bodily autonomy and leave room for egalitarian ideals. The neo-reactionary thinkers wanted to throw away egalitarianism and universalism altogether, as discussed earlier. However, if history has ever taught us anything, it is that we can never go back. The Enlightenment happened. The American Revolutionary War and the Civil War happened. Hitler. Hiroshima. 9-11. All of those have happened, each once and for all. We may draw inspiration from the past, but it’s impossible to make everyone forget. If the ultimate objective is a perfectly secure, low-entropy society, then relying exclusively on cultural traditionalism and religious conservatism to pacify the bottom tier is a catastrophic error. You cannot legislate away millions of years of evolutionary mating psychology. If the abandoned male masses are simply suppressed by conservative moral dogma without any outlet for their biological imperatives, the resulting friction creates an explosive powder keg. The Montreal shooter went to a Catholic high school. His repression did not calm him; it pressurized him, and it found the window. Chastity handed to a shut-out man works as a fuse.
The true pacification of the underclass relies upon a sophisticated architecture of dual control. It layers the low-cost pornographic hedonism discussed earlier — the “tittytainment” — seamlessly on top of cultural traditionalism and conservatism. This synthesis makes any possibility of self-correction obsolete. When capitalism fully saturates the channels of consumption, it overflows into “cybersex”—what Nick Land describes as the “traumatic disorganization of the biological order”. Human eros is hijacked and dissolved into a subprogram of “runaway Thanatos” (the death drive), invested entirely in digital interfacing and synthetically engineered excitations. By funneling the endless novelty of the Coolidge effect into PMVs and OnlyFans subscriptions, the system successfully drains the physical and aggressive energy of the male underclass.
If endless digital hedonism is paired with the lingering moral frameworks of conservative religious culture, it produces an unbreakable psychological loop. The permanent underclass goons in its free time, consuming pornography endlessly, which effectively pacifies its physical urge to rebel or compete. Simultaneously, because these men exist within a society that still promotes traditionalist social expectations, their degenerate lifestyle generates immense inner turmoil, profound shame, and cognitive dissonance. For those who are in any sense devout, this agonizing self-loathing consumes whatever excess psychological energy they might have otherwise channeled into political disruption, mimetic competition with the elites, or genuine self-improvement. It is an inescapable triad of pacification, torment, and control. The masses police themselves through their own screen-induced lethargy and spiritual guilt, completely neutralizing the threat of a proletarian uprising.
This is what Moldbug himself presciently described as the ideal humane management of obsolete populations: “virtualization”—placing them in permanent solitary confinement with an immersive virtual-reality interface that provides a completely imaginary life, rendering them politically inert. The modern gooncave is the exact realization of this theory.
If these vectors hold, the final picture of the future emerges with terrifying clarity. The wealthy men, the wealthy women, and the wealthy non-binary they/them(s) could operate as sovereign corporate deities who indulge in expansive, polygynous lifestyles without consequence. They could be sexually free in the fullest sense — with real bodies, real exploration, real optionality, the whole embodied range available and unpunished.
The sovereign individuals could even be egalitarian, radically progressive/liberal/woke, pro-MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+, pro-BDSM, pro-ethical non-monogamy, and create completely novel modes of experience. They shall be the Nietzschean Superman, the Creator of New Values, incarnate, except they are actually cool.
The permanent underclass lives at the bottom, surviving on UBI and gooning all day, consuming pornography without end. The religious and the traditional will be further restrained and tamed by conservative culture and social forms that hand them a contented place, while exhausting themselves on the churning inner war of consuming what they believe they must not. Whatever excess energy might have gone toward disruption gets spent on sedation or inner torment. Pacification and control, layered, airtight.
Girls, ironically, may face options beyond the ordinary career and traditional dating available to men too. The most competitive could enter a runaway beauty arms race,using advanced cosmetic technology to perfectly embody cues of fertility, striving to marry up and secure the investment of the ascendant elite. Others might seek refuge from the brutal post-modern mating market, finding peace in traditional family structures, possibly along with a decent career and decent money. Simultaneously, millions of women will embrace the virtualization of intimacy — doing OnlyFans for money, turning themselves into digital avatars that extract the remaining capital from the addicted male masses.
In this highly polarized landscape, actual hookups are a free option only for the young who still have the time to explore without commitment, or the financially comfortable, who can explore indefinitely without economic pressure, or the gay community, which operates free from the specific reproductive constraints that govern the heterosexual hierarchy.
The elite’s liberation does not plateau. Freedom compounds. Exploration compounds. The making of new values, new aesthetics, new forms of thought and sensation — for people released from scarcity and shame and, in the end, from biology, these do not settle into a lifestyle. They accelerate. Land’s dark enlightenment has a bionic horizon past the neo-feudal settlement, while John H. Campbell heralds the emergence of Homo autocatalyticus:
“Biologists suspect that new forms evolve rapidly from very tiny outgroups of individuals (perhaps even a single fertilized female, Mayr, 1942) at the fringe of an existing species. There the stress of an all but uninhabitable environment, forced inbreeding among isolated family members, “introgression” of foreign genes from neighboring species, lack of other members of the species to compete against or whatever, promotes a major reorganization of the genomic program, possibly from modest change in gene structure. Nearly all of these transmogrified fragments of species die out, but an occasional one is fortunate enough to fit a new viable niche. It prospers and expands into a new species.”
The point here is that “Tiny minorities of individuals do most of the evolving instead of the species as a whole.”
“Campbell also points out that any attempt to raise the IQ of the whole human race would be tediously slow …… therefore, advocates the abandonment of Homo sapiens as a ‘relic’ or ‘living fossil’ and the application of genetic technologies to intrude upon the genome, probably writing novel genes from scratch using a DNA synthesizer. Such eugenics would be practiced by elite groups, whose achievements would so quickly and radically outdistance the usual tempo of evolution that within ten generations the new groups will have advanced beyond our current form to the same degree that we transcend apes.”
By rewriting their own DNA and merging their consciousness with artificial intelligence, the elite ascends into a new species with ever-greater liberation, exploration, and the creation of new values, aesthetics, and art. They will actualize the physical Nietzschean Übermensch, rapidly outdistancing the grueling, terrestrial tempo of natural evolution to a degree that transcends our current form as profoundly as we transcend apes. Think the Vampire Lestat. or Lex Luthor. Captain Marvel. Jean Grey. Magneto. or Tony Stark in his suit made of autonomous, self-assembling nanobots. In the comics there’s also a liquid metal symbiote suit that is stored inside his bones. Quite Lovecraftian when you think about it. That’s what we are on our way to becoming.
Meanwhile, the abandoned masses—paralyzed by their digital addictions, trapped in the inescapable matrix of collective illusions, and stripped of both their political voice and their reproductive future—will be quietly left behind in the dirt. They will be written out of the genetic code entirely, Homo sapiens abandoned as nothing more than an obsolete living fossil. The gooncaves do not come along. The stream rooms stay lit. The species forks. One branch dreams new values into a dark it is still inventing. The other dreams nothing at all, in a room full of light and lube, medicated into a stillness it mistakes for rest. “Nothing human makes it out of the near-future,” Land wrote, and at the fork the line reads two ways at once — as the elite shedding the human on its way up, and as the underclass having the human quietly farmed out of it below. And if the face at the bottom ever does look up — if it has the desire left to look up at all — what leans over the top of the ladder will no longer have a human face for it to know.
Nothing human makes it out of the gooncave
Link post
Originally posted on https://zeptabot.substack.com/p/nothing-human-makes-it-out-of-the : What the recent Montreal shooting reveals about incels, pornosexuality, techno-capitalism, and a possible dystopian future of humanity.
On June 22, 2026, a twenty-five-year-old from Lethbridge drove into Montreal, took a hotel room across the street from the offices of Aylo — the company that owns Pornhub — and fired through the windows at the people inside. He killed a police officer, Mohamed Lamine Benredouane, and a bystander, Michel Mizrahi, before he was killed himself.
While the gunman violently attacked the epicenter of the global pornography industry, he also left behind a sprawling manifesto steeped in extreme involuntary celibate (incel) ideology. His writings explicitly blamed billionaires and CEOs, modern hyper-capitalism, and the digital adult-entertainment apparatus for engineering a “hypergamy state” that permanently excluded average men from the reproductive market. While this horrific ambush was an atavistic, physical rebellion against the forces of his disenfranchisement, it paradoxically illuminates why millions of his peers will never attempt a similar uprising. The modern techno-capitalist system has already neutralized the threat of the mateless male underclass through a far more insidious and effective mechanism: absolute digital pacification.
To dissect the architecture of this dystopian reality, one must first confront the striking phenomenon of “gooning,” a digital masturbation cult that has captured a massive demographic of alienated young men. As vividly detailed in investigations by Daniel Kolitz, who wrote it up in Harper’s as “The Goon Squad”, these men are not fighting their exclusion from the physical mating market; instead, they have surrendered to it entirely, retreating into darkened, screen-filled sanctuaries known as “gooncaves”. Here, they consume “Porn Music Videos” (PMVs)—frenetic, hyper-stimulating collages that splice hundreds of explicit clips into rapid-fire sequences synchronized to pounding electronic music. This is essentially freebase pornography, purified of any real-world romantic narrative and engineered exclusively to overwhelm the brain’s dopamine receptors. The goal of the “gooner” is the attainment of a trance-like “goonstate”—a zone of total ego death and hypnotic oblivion.
This mass psychological hijacking is simultaneously monetized and accelerated by the booming e-girl and OnlyFans economy. Recognizing the boundless sexual desperation of the male underclass, millions of female content creators have transformed themselves into heavily customized virtual commodities. Operating on platforms boasting over 4.6 million registered creators, these women efficiently extract the remaining financial resources of isolated men. Producers of specific niches, such as “findom” (financial domination), actively condition their addicted viewers to forgo real human relationships altogether. They humiliate these men for their dependency, instructing them to abandon physical intimacy and dedicate their lives—and their wallets—to submitting to the screen. In doing so, the techno-capitalist economy converts biological failure into immense financial profit, virtualizing the underclass into a captive revenue stream.
Nick Land, the accelerationist philosopher, prophesied this in the early 1990s and wrote it in deliberately monstrous prose. Capital, for Land, is not a tool we use but a process that uses us, “an invasion from the future,” a “planetary technocapital singularity” that spreads because “money communicates addiction,” replicating “through host organisms whose boundaries it breaches, and whose desires it reprograms.” He watched capital saturate ordinary consumption and then overflow into what he called cybersex, “sex with/through computers,” and he warned that “desire is irrevocably abandoning the social.” Thirty years ago that read as amphetamine science fiction. Read it now against the stream rooms and it reads as a field report filed early.
To everyone’s surprise, Nick Land pivoted in the 21st century to the neo-reactionary paradigm championed by the Dark Enlightenment (a term he coined himself) and techno-capitalist thinkers like Peter Thiel and Mencius Moldbug — the very population the Montreal shooter targets. In their foundational texts such as “Patchwork,” the democratic nation-state is ruthlessly discarded in favor of sovereign, joint-stock corporations that govern independent city-states or “realms”. Within this framework, the government operates strictly as a financially responsible business, managed by a CEO or “Delegate” solely to maximize the value of its real estate. Citizens are stripped of all political voice; they are reduced to mere residents or customers whose only right is the right of exit.
The psychological management of the masses in this neo-feudal vision mirrors insights reportedly articulated by Peter Thiel about the stability of the Christian Middle Ages. In such historical systems, absolute power was securely held by a tiny cadre of lords, while the masses were kept docile through strict religious dogma and traditionalist moral suppression. For the ascendant elite, societal “entropy” is the ultimate enemy. Entropy is generated by “mimetic rivalry”—the chaotic, destructive friction that occurs when the lower classes attempt to imitate the desires, lifestyles, and privileges of the cognitive elite. To achieve a perfectly ordered, Nash equilibrium society, the masses must remain intellectually managed and ideologically compliant, firmly convinced that their subordinate station is either divinely ordained or morally required, and thus never moved to challenge the pinnacle of the hierarchy.
Evolutionary psychology, particularly the work of David M. Buss, proves precisely why such a stratified, neo-feudal system is biologically inevitable under conditions of maximized techno-capitalism. Over millions of years of human evolutionary history, women faced the tremendous reproductive burdens of internal fertilization and gestation, leading to the evolution of strict mate preferences. Across 37 diverse cultures, women universally display a profound preference for men who possess economic resources, social status, ambition, and physical formidability, regardless of their own resources or status. The plain finding: “women worldwide prefer to marry up.” The “most eligible bachelor” is code, Buss notes, for “the highest-status, most resource-laden unattached man around,” and “most homeless and jobless men are eligible” as mates while “most women are not interested in them.”
In the emerging Information Age, the shift away from industrial mass production to the cybereconomy is producing unprecedented wealth inequality. The rewards of the global market are pouring into the hands of the “cognitive double top”—the top 10 percent of the top 10 percent—leaving behind an unemployable underclass. Consequently, for every elite man who monopolizes the attention of multiple highly desirable women, several lower-status men are mathematically consigned to matelessness. These disenfranchised men are the “losers and left-behinds” of the Information Age. Biologically programmed to seek mates but entirely lacking the requisite status and resources, they become involuntarily celibate: a massive surplus of lower-status men systematically exiled from the mating pool.
Furthermore, evolutionary adaptations such as the “Coolidge effect” guarantee that male sexual arousal is relentlessly renewed by novel stimuli, generating a persistent, ravenous biological drive. Additionally, Error Management Theory outlines the “sexual overperception bias,” wherein men are evolutionarily hardwired to falsely infer sexual interest from women to avoid missing rare reproductive opportunities. When this intense, biologically programmed libido collides with absolute rejection in a highly stratified society, the result is profound psychological agony. Historically, unattached, mateless men are the primary catalysts for systemic instability, gang warfare, and revolutionary violence—a dynamic explicitly demonstrated by the Montreal shooter’s lethal rampage. Stable societies in history could have solved this through enforced monogamy, which spreads mating access down the hierarchy, hands the low-status man a stake, and drains the tank before it can build to violence.
This is impossible now, since we are to respect women’s rights and bodily autonomy and leave room for egalitarian ideals. The neo-reactionary thinkers wanted to throw away egalitarianism and universalism altogether, as discussed earlier. However, if history has ever taught us anything, it is that we can never go back. The Enlightenment happened. The American Revolutionary War and the Civil War happened. Hitler. Hiroshima. 9-11. All of those have happened, each once and for all. We may draw inspiration from the past, but it’s impossible to make everyone forget. If the ultimate objective is a perfectly secure, low-entropy society, then relying exclusively on cultural traditionalism and religious conservatism to pacify the bottom tier is a catastrophic error. You cannot legislate away millions of years of evolutionary mating psychology. If the abandoned male masses are simply suppressed by conservative moral dogma without any outlet for their biological imperatives, the resulting friction creates an explosive powder keg. The Montreal shooter went to a Catholic high school. His repression did not calm him; it pressurized him, and it found the window. Chastity handed to a shut-out man works as a fuse.
The true pacification of the underclass relies upon a sophisticated architecture of dual control. It layers the low-cost pornographic hedonism discussed earlier — the “tittytainment” — seamlessly on top of cultural traditionalism and conservatism. This synthesis makes any possibility of self-correction obsolete. When capitalism fully saturates the channels of consumption, it overflows into “cybersex”—what Nick Land describes as the “traumatic disorganization of the biological order”. Human eros is hijacked and dissolved into a subprogram of “runaway Thanatos” (the death drive), invested entirely in digital interfacing and synthetically engineered excitations. By funneling the endless novelty of the Coolidge effect into PMVs and OnlyFans subscriptions, the system successfully drains the physical and aggressive energy of the male underclass.
If endless digital hedonism is paired with the lingering moral frameworks of conservative religious culture, it produces an unbreakable psychological loop. The permanent underclass goons in its free time, consuming pornography endlessly, which effectively pacifies its physical urge to rebel or compete. Simultaneously, because these men exist within a society that still promotes traditionalist social expectations, their degenerate lifestyle generates immense inner turmoil, profound shame, and cognitive dissonance. For those who are in any sense devout, this agonizing self-loathing consumes whatever excess psychological energy they might have otherwise channeled into political disruption, mimetic competition with the elites, or genuine self-improvement. It is an inescapable triad of pacification, torment, and control. The masses police themselves through their own screen-induced lethargy and spiritual guilt, completely neutralizing the threat of a proletarian uprising.
This is what Moldbug himself presciently described as the ideal humane management of obsolete populations: “virtualization”—placing them in permanent solitary confinement with an immersive virtual-reality interface that provides a completely imaginary life, rendering them politically inert. The modern gooncave is the exact realization of this theory.
If these vectors hold, the final picture of the future emerges with terrifying clarity. The wealthy men, the wealthy women, and the wealthy non-binary they/them(s) could operate as sovereign corporate deities who indulge in expansive, polygynous lifestyles without consequence. They could be sexually free in the fullest sense — with real bodies, real exploration, real optionality, the whole embodied range available and unpunished.
The sovereign individuals could even be egalitarian, radically progressive/liberal/woke, pro-MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+, pro-BDSM, pro-ethical non-monogamy, and create completely novel modes of experience. They shall be the Nietzschean Superman, the Creator of New Values, incarnate, except they are actually cool.
The permanent underclass lives at the bottom, surviving on UBI and gooning all day, consuming pornography without end. The religious and the traditional will be further restrained and tamed by conservative culture and social forms that hand them a contented place, while exhausting themselves on the churning inner war of consuming what they believe they must not. Whatever excess energy might have gone toward disruption gets spent on sedation or inner torment. Pacification and control, layered, airtight.
Girls, ironically, may face options beyond the ordinary career and traditional dating available to men too. The most competitive could enter a runaway beauty arms race, using advanced cosmetic technology to perfectly embody cues of fertility, striving to marry up and secure the investment of the ascendant elite. Others might seek refuge from the brutal post-modern mating market, finding peace in traditional family structures, possibly along with a decent career and decent money. Simultaneously, millions of women will embrace the virtualization of intimacy — doing OnlyFans for money, turning themselves into digital avatars that extract the remaining capital from the addicted male masses.
In this highly polarized landscape, actual hookups are a free option only for the young who still have the time to explore without commitment, or the financially comfortable, who can explore indefinitely without economic pressure, or the gay community, which operates free from the specific reproductive constraints that govern the heterosexual hierarchy.
The elite’s liberation does not plateau. Freedom compounds. Exploration compounds. The making of new values, new aesthetics, new forms of thought and sensation — for people released from scarcity and shame and, in the end, from biology, these do not settle into a lifestyle. They accelerate. Land’s dark enlightenment has a bionic horizon past the neo-feudal settlement, while John H. Campbell heralds the emergence of Homo autocatalyticus:
“Biologists suspect that new forms evolve rapidly from very tiny outgroups of individuals (perhaps even a single fertilized female, Mayr, 1942) at the fringe of an existing species. There the stress of an all but uninhabitable environment, forced inbreeding among isolated family members, “introgression” of foreign genes from neighboring species, lack of other members of the species to compete against or whatever, promotes a major reorganization of the genomic program, possibly from modest change in gene structure. Nearly all of these transmogrified fragments of species die out, but an occasional one is fortunate enough to fit a new viable niche. It prospers and expands into a new species.”
The point here is that “Tiny minorities of individuals do most of the evolving instead of the species as a whole.”
In another commentary:
“Campbell also points out that any attempt to raise the IQ of the whole human race would be tediously slow …… therefore, advocates the abandonment of Homo sapiens as a ‘relic’ or ‘living fossil’ and the application of genetic technologies to intrude upon the genome, probably writing novel genes from scratch using a DNA synthesizer. Such eugenics would be practiced by elite groups, whose achievements would so quickly and radically outdistance the usual tempo of evolution that within ten generations the new groups will have advanced beyond our current form to the same degree that we transcend apes.”
By rewriting their own DNA and merging their consciousness with artificial intelligence, the elite ascends into a new species with ever-greater liberation, exploration, and the creation of new values, aesthetics, and art. They will actualize the physical Nietzschean Übermensch, rapidly outdistancing the grueling, terrestrial tempo of natural evolution to a degree that transcends our current form as profoundly as we transcend apes. Think the Vampire Lestat. or Lex Luthor. Captain Marvel. Jean Grey. Magneto. or Tony Stark in his suit made of autonomous, self-assembling nanobots. In the comics there’s also a liquid metal symbiote suit that is stored inside his bones. Quite Lovecraftian when you think about it. That’s what we are on our way to becoming.
Meanwhile, the abandoned masses—paralyzed by their digital addictions, trapped in the inescapable matrix of collective illusions, and stripped of both their political voice and their reproductive future—will be quietly left behind in the dirt. They will be written out of the genetic code entirely, Homo sapiens abandoned as nothing more than an obsolete living fossil. The gooncaves do not come along. The stream rooms stay lit. The species forks. One branch dreams new values into a dark it is still inventing. The other dreams nothing at all, in a room full of light and lube, medicated into a stillness it mistakes for rest. “Nothing human makes it out of the near-future,” Land wrote, and at the fork the line reads two ways at once — as the elite shedding the human on its way up, and as the underclass having the human quietly farmed out of it below. And if the face at the bottom ever does look up — if it has the desire left to look up at all — what leans over the top of the ladder will no longer have a human face for it to know.