The object received everything. Then it showed us the Earth. Not from space. From the memory of the Earth itself. We saw the forests before the roads. We saw the rivers before the borders. We saw the animals before we divided them into the beautiful, the useful, the dangerous— And made them ours. We saw ourselves— from the perspective of everything that had survived us. There was no accusation. That was the unbearable part. Only an immense, unedited record of what had happened. The object was not an alien. It was the archive returning to its source. The photograph had been looking back, because the moon was never the thing being photographed. We were.
