In the Heaven of your imagination, I trail a scent of olibanum as I lead you down the spiral tower stair of blonde stone, geometric in both its construction and its gentle deterioration, to the second floor. On the umber-painted door is a tiny circular frame, imperfectly gilded, presenting a hazy, heady view of a baroque little house. Behind this door is the w’drawing room; there I invite you to sit. We are surrounded by a selection of volumes describing ecumenes from the Register. I have stacked four of them, bone-white, on the oval table between two creaky chairs upholstered in aubergine velvet.

Oh, and this is my first appearance in your Heaven, isn’t it. Forgive me for neglecting to describe myself visually, as your species prefers. Perhaps your experience will be more vivid if I mention my great, heaving spectacles and their slim, lithe chain. Yes. That should do.

As a representative of humanity, I ask, would you prefer tea or coffee? I see. Well, allow me to pour you what is from my perspective a nondenominational hot beverage, and allow you to fill in the gap.

Here I shall introduce to you a selection of further checkboxes from our paperwork for the Register, beyond Just Sort of Declined. I heft the top volume from the stack and present to you another major cause of ecumenes’ end: Danger Fun, a sort of catch-all for when an ecumene invents or discovers a molecule, a meme, a device, a behavior, or some other deceptively simple instrument that rapidly gets the better of them.

There is a basic model that can be applied when such an instrument arrives, which captures the balance between the several variables:

• How fun the instrument is, f,
• How dangerous it is, d, and
• How careful the population is, c.

In the simplest of cases, the product of f and d is so high that it overwhelms c immediately. The Danger Fun is awfully fun and awfully dangerous. The world barely has a chance to recognize what’s happening until it’s almost over.

The ecumene Almandine you refulgent chimera!, low in population to begin with, was forced by an encroaching ice age to migrate almost entirely across to the opposite side of their world, where they found blissfully intoxicating gases being exhaled from the earth. They treated their new homeland as a promised paradise, indulged, and enjoyed the Saturnalia, until discovering too late the gas’s sterilizing effect on their particular physiology. They survived but 2² more generations.

This surely seems sad, as all I have told you of the ecumene’s fate is its reversal of fortune. But they had lived more thoroughly than most: a complex guild system, mapped to the species’ molting schedule, put each individual through sixteen life stages, each oriented around a uniquely necessary job, and gave nearly every member of society sixteen distinct and complementary subjective lifetimes of profound belonging and meaning. Loneliness, aimlessness, despair, and malice as you knew them were, to a first approximation, unknown. The ecumene lived 2⁵ generations, more or less, in this state of equilibrium. Surely its passage, in total, is to be seen as worth honor and laudation.

Please accept my highest regards,

V.F.