The universe of available knowledge become too vast for the comprehension of the most knowing. It began to fill books of its own description: an outline of knowledge, descriptions of courses of study, the disappearance of the knowers replaced the books which informed – placed into the memories of magnetic devices, gathered into some sense of an entity which was the curriculum.

The curriculum, like the largest factories making all the material goods in the world, full of descriptions and outlines translated into machines and work and raw materials shaped into things which were humanly interfaceable, user-friendly, so the humanoids-formerly-humans could find their cousins in the buttons and visages, press and be impressed, the boundary between things and us altered finally into a topography of them and us. They became us, we became them: interchangable, replaceable, re-toolable, relocatable…

We did not notice that the search for community was solved until we constructed a certain circuit, a cog which missed itself, gradually discovering that it worried that it did not exist…any longer, any shorter, at all.