Prologue

“Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire”

Nature has seen fit that few of us remember our first dawn. The bright pain of being born blind into the light. The last leg of that long journey – mindless energy and atoms mutating into (more or less) conscious matter and then back again.

ERICA remembered every moment before and after…not as memory, but as coordinates.