"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?"
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. "Kaelen," a voice vibrated directly into their auditory
"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." Are you still coming
The reference to appears in various literary and technical contexts, most notably within Stephen Baxter’s science fiction novel Coalescent , where it touches on the evolution of humanity and the blurring lines of sexual identity. "About when they were afraid of losing who they were
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.
Kaelen stood up. The old Atlantic was beautiful, but it was a graveyard of a slower, louder time. They closed the digital fragment of p362. The future wasn't a falling plane; it was the quiet, endless flight that came after. A conversation about Life - Coalescent - LiveJournal