The humans were going around freezing eggs, playing god. They could stop time. They’d invented it after all. The humans wanted to feel they were making the right moves, choosing correctly between premix solutions, between micronutrient customizations. The humans were circling in on themselves, a warring spiral all the way down. They had built environments within their environment that replicated their idea of “environment,” and then they’d trained machines to continue replicating these environments so that they could retreat back along the reflective corridor, their shadows receding even as the hallway continued refracting their image, redacting their presence through reflection upon reflection, until the innermost image was smothered on arrival, like a mirage inside the eyeball of a cow moments before its dissection, or whatever some human might later recall of that sensation of slicing overlayed with the diagrams accompanying such a lesson, long after cows had ceased having eyes, long after “until the cows come home” had come to mean anything to anybody—or this, at least, is the story I was told.