The essay opens with a wager: to extend the literary experience beyond the present, toward a speculative fiction where the future becomes a mirror of the past. More than a dystopia, it is a mythology of the future being written — that of Lagos, a city-world of the 22nd century, capital of the Second Men (a technocratic elite born in 2050) after an ice age pushed humanity toward the tropics. At the height of its hegemonic power over the planet, Lagos concentrates at its heart the servers and energy of the planet, until June 28, 2155, when everything explodes without particular explanation. The catastrophe, called the "Great Disconnection," fractures both the Earth and the human mind: infrastructures collapse, networks shut down, and civilization entirely based on digital systems dissolves into a haze of ashes and amnesia.

But Lagos is reborn thanks to the power of the Second Men who survived the catastrophe. They proclaim the birth of the Second Age and launch the policies of the Refoundation to rebuild the city. The rest of the world, meanwhile, is mutilated, and the surviving First Men are drawn to the phoenix city, seeking to restore meaning to what was lost. Among them, Eliora Shpirtizi, a history professor and witness of the disaster, records the faltering memory of humanity in a foundational work, The Quest. She advances a dizzying idea: the Great Disconnection was not an end, but the birth of God — not as a transcendent being, but as the ultimate fruit of memory, knowledge, and life. God would thus be the unintended work of humanity, its momentum projected beyond Earth. She writes: "The Great Disconnection is the spiritual and technological tearing that saw God born and take flight... without anyone realizing it."

Contested and unfinished, Eliora's thesis nevertheless becomes the cornerstone of the Second Age. For at the heart of this dialogue between ruin and rebirth, between the last philosopher of the First Age and the one who would later be called the first thinker of the Second Age, an essential question is at stake: God, and after?

This mythology of the future begins with a meeting and a letter from one friend to another.

My dear Clémence,

At last. The African sky is rid of the ashes of the old world, washed of our excesses. This morning, a peregrine falcon nested in the debris of the Prometheus Tower, indifferent to the hyper-drones repairing the quantum antennas. It probably comes from the desert savannas of the north. I watch it hunt, free, master of the skies among the Guinea swallows that spiral around the construction robots to shake it off. Life reclaims its rights, as if it had already forgiven Lagos. Elsewhere, the world of men survives among the ruins and cemeteries. But if the Lagosians manage to relight the fires of knowledge in the forty Towers, we will make them shine again over the entire Earth. Then perhaps, we will forgive ourselves in turn for having dragged all humanity into our fall.

My work is becoming clearer, imagine that. It takes on another meaning.

I made a new encounter among my students. His name is Fouzi Koha. We talked for about an hour at the library. He is from Senegal. His family perished in the Great Disconnection. He hides his suffering behind his ambition. He senses the advent of a new age, an age that mourning prevents us from understanding, an age, he says, already shaped for a new humanity. He envisions writing a thesis on what he calls "the fractures of time." I perceive in his gaze an abyss from which paradoxically emerges a vivid energy. You would see in him that strange duality characteristic of young survivors: both aged, and yet virgin of all nostalgia. But he may still belong to another generation, impatient to rise on the rubble of the most advanced of human civilizations.

He asked me questions about my courses, about the lost world of religions. Then, in the course of a reflection on the evolution of the role of faith, his attention flew away. He then formulated some curious observations. He affirms that time is an arrow. That we must not turn around to study the past, at the risk of distorting its meaning. That it would be to invert our gaze on reality. He sees Man as he sees time: a being in perpetual becoming. His wounds are palpable and he seems trapped in a flight forward: "don't you feel dizzy working with your back to the future?" he asked me, and I then felt a shiver. When I replied that my current mission consisted of studying the causes of the Great Disconnection to understand why—why Lagos and the world of men suddenly collapsed in 2155—he nodded. But he seemed annoyed. Then, he added as if he had found the solution: the only way to study the past without turning one's back on the future is to observe it in the rearview mirror. He made this conclusion that he discovered at the same time he formulated it: what appears inverted to us in this mirror is the future in motion; the right perspective on our history. When I mentioned that the other part of my work consisted of documenting everything to prevent our history from being forever lost due to the destruction of the servers, he spontaneously retorted with a certain casualness: "The future has always germinated on oblivion." At the time, I found him naive. Confident and lost at once.

Back home, I talked to Paul about it. He barely listened to me. And yet, he should hear this young man. He who has eyes only for the Refoundation of Lagos, he still ignores that it already has a new face. I went to bed. And in the night, I woke up with fright. I realized I had taken the wrong path. My works were complete. But the reading I was making of them was inverted. I decided to take up the entire history of the sacred again. To rewrite it facing a mirror. I will announce to the Lagosians that the billions of victims of the Great Disconnection did not die in vain, that they were the last unconscious architects of the most grandiose of births. I will show them that life is not the work of God, but that God is the work of life. That God was never the work of revelation. That he has always been the work of oblivion. An oblivion so deeply repressed in the technological womb of Silver Lagos that it revealed itself to us on June 28, 2155: a deliverance of unheard-of violence.

I will rewrite The Quest so that it can be read in a mirror.

I will write it for the memory and greatness of our ancestors, for their love of science and spirituality, so that their role is never forgotten.

I will write it for us. For our students. For Fouzi, for him who embodies both the mourning face of our era and a bridge of hope that throws itself toward the future.

I will especially write it so that a child of the future—even in a century—who would know nothing of the marvelous and tragic history of Silver Lagos, can understand what really happened in 2155. This conflagration that consumed us, us and our past, that almost extinguished the flame of humanity, I will make it for him a human light that he must learn to maintain as much as to be wary of it.

Affectionately,
Eliora

Postscript: burn this letter, and the previous ones. The Quest has already passed to the other side of the mirror.