Kaelen ran a hand through their hair, which felt more like fine optic fibers than protein. For Kaelen, the ancient worries about "men" and "women" felt like worrying about which side of a coin was up when the coin had long since melted into a single sphere.
They checked their personal log. It was the year 3062—exactly a millennium since the "Great Shift" had begun. On their screen, an old digital fragment flickered: a scanned page labeled . It was a relic from the early 21st century, a conversation between two long-dead thinkers speculating on a time when "sexual difference is in the individual, not a case of belonging to one half of the species or the other". Kaelen ran a hand through their hair, which
"I was just thinking about the Old World," Kaelen sent back, the thought-pulse tinged with a melancholy Jara wouldn't quite understand. "About when they were afraid of losing who they were." It was the year 3062—exactly a millennium since
Kaelen sat on the edge of the glass-walled observation deck, looking down at what used to be called the Atlantic. From this height, the ocean didn’t look like water; it looked like a shimmering sheet of liquid metal, reflecting a sky that no longer held any clouds. "I was just thinking about the Old World,"
"Kaelen," a voice vibrated directly into their auditory cortex. It was Jara, or at least the consciousness that currently occupied the Jara-unit. "The transport to the Central Asian colony is departing. Are you still coming?"
"We didn't lose who we were," Jara replied, appearing as a soft glow beside them. "We just stopped being parts and started being the whole."