E, prologue

Greetings on behalf of the apes who once lived here. For your convenience, this record was painstakingly chiseled into stone in five fundamentally different languages I just invented. I trust you were able to find one similar enough to your own form of communication to decode it.

I'm doing this for myself as much as for you. I am finding it increasingly difficult to concentrate. As the field of possible outcomes for the futre narrows, the equations become so easy my idle mind runs through the likeliest scenario over and over and over. I'll finish writing this, then I will bury the tablets in a cave. Shortly after that, this entire continent will be under water and I will die gasping.

Fortunately for both of us, I can instead occupy my mind with the considerable tasks of creating a series of writing systems that could be translated by an unknown, presumably aquatic, future intelligent species and recalling important details from the entire history of life on Earth.

I'm not going to claim I was there when it started. I wasn't. I remember it as if I had been, though. I'll get to that later. This is probably confusing enough for you, having just deciphered scratchings on a mountain of rocks that predate all your known history. I'll try to keep things in order.

The story starts with a giant ball of goo in the sky.