In 2170, two years before the publication of The Quest, Eliora Shpirtizi becomes a target. Her research, deemed subversive, worries the Second Men, who seek to maintain political order in Lagos. While the city devotes all its resources to building the Refoundation, the memory of the Great Disconnection is banned. Identified as a dissident, Eliora is forced into exile. With her husband Paul and their son Agmaar, she leaves Lagos to take refuge in the Congolese jungle. They find shelter among a rural community of First Men who survived the consequences of the Great Disconnection. But this exile is not only an act of political survival: it is also an intimate escape. Fouzi Koha is about to be released from prison and still haunts Eliora’s mind and her work The Quest. Their rupture, brutal, seals the separation between two destinies: that of Eliora, devoted to memory, and that of Fouzi, now drawn into his metamorphosis as The Djinn of Time, who has embraced the nature of the Second Man, a being freed from fractures, admiring them for how they transform the face of humanity. Fouzi, a man stripped against his will of all that defines the common sap of every human, represents the golem of The Quest that Eliora had not foreseen. It is for this reason that she left him for good, on the day she realized he was taking a path she could not follow.

The letter that follows is the last exchange between the two former lovers and consummates the rupture of the Two Ages.

Farewell Eliora,

You served me your farewell, and I did not know how to return it as I should have. I did not realize; undoubtedly, I imagined this day impossible.

Yesterday, I went to bed and took with me the first chapters of The Quest that you had left in the room. As if that could replace you under the sheets. Ridiculous, isn't it? I read it until the Alienation Chapter. I looked for an illustration of our story, of our mutual alienation.

Now that you are gone, I realize that I was the only alienated one in our couple.

All those times you praised my genius to better manipulate me, to better abandon me afterwards... You waited patiently for me to get out of prison to break up... Would I be free now? Is this freedom, the one that hits you in the face without expecting it? A genius dislodged from his lamp, without lamp, without master to serve?

I reread this chapter in light of what you did by leaving Lagos to live with the First Men: you alienated yourself to your work.

And here is your Alienation Chapter. More pages in which you explain to us the role of oblivion, why man does not know what he is doing, why he goes astray, why he did not see, did not understand, did not anticipate. The alienation of human productions as the source of God's gestation? Obviously! Look at all of them how man conceptualized God by alienating his cult of seeds, how he gave him an economic body by alienating his labor force, how he gave him a mind by alienating his intelligence. So here is your great argument on alienation: modern man as agent of the God of progress. Here is the heart of Silver Lagos! Look! Look at artificial intelligence, this voracious God who fed on our certainties to shit the mysteries we are so fond of, an algorithmic oracle who understands nothing but to whom we lend the divine word.

O hidden engine of progress that lodges in our entrails! Fortunately you are there Eliora, to point out our blindnesses in history, and you measure them as one measures the depth of a mirror. The closer man gets to the birth of God, the more blind he becomes to this perspective. Is that what you show us? That you have not finished pushing open doors in this Great house of humanity that you traverse in your book. And you realize while crossing the rooms that its guests do not want to talk to each other. You cry out for dialogue in the corridors of time, but you only create drafts. This is not a house, Eliora. It's a psychiatric asylum!

Rest assured, Eliora, this madhouse only exists in your head. Because you would like to make humanity dialogue in time as if it were a single body. Stop looking for alienations that would need to be cured like diseases to avoid dangers over the millennia, that humanity should avoid repeating its mistakes, that it should remember, that it should learn here, that it should understand that... Why exactly anyway? So that it learns from its past, that it lives better, for its future, its happiness? Is that the meaning of The Quest for you? Is that the message you took with you when you packed your bags? Is that the reason for our breakup? Because I dared to tell you that this message is a deception? But it is The Quest itself that tells you, not me! Reread yourself! Reread The Quest without nostalgia, reread The Quest without looking at your husband, this pure expired product of the First Age, reread The Quest in what it already tells us about the Second Age!

Would it be with this kind of revelation that you would become a prophet? Look at you... O prophet of the future who announces the past... But no one is a prophet in their own country. Is that why you left? To find a credulous audience far from Lagos? Do you really believe that by going back, by digging in the ashes of the First Age, by holding these men by the hand as if they were still there, you will give meaning to what they accomplished? They are dead, Eliora. Even those who survived are dead, they just don't understand it yet. First Men cannot understand. You could resurrect them all and it would change nothing. They would burn you as they burned their prophets. They would call you mad, cursed visionary, heretic to be locked up. The man of the First Age did not see God born under his fingers. He could not have seen it. He had to worship it as he worshiped technological hallucinations. He was made for that, thanks to the Hebrews who were made to kill polytheism, thanks to Neolithic man before them who was made to germinate the gods of the earth.

Do you understand? These men, though having a nose, a mouth, two eyes, are not the same. There is only one true common point between them; each is condemned to live with his time, until the day when a new man will come to sweep them away. There is not one humanity that crosses the ages, there is only man in becoming who crushes the ages.

O Eliora, if I were allowed to go back in time with you, to plunge into the mists of 2025, I would take you to these enlightened minds, these souls in search of truth, who exhaust themselves again and again, and tear each other apart, between the temples of science and the altars of faith, on the question of whether God exists or not, unable to understand that none is wrong, that God does not exist... not yet. Would you like to teach them The Quest? And you would reveal this beautiful book to them and you would tell them this:

And then on your roll, you would announce to them that God will be born one hundred and thirty years later, in 2155. Unfortunately for you, you would arrive too early. The birth of God? But they would laugh in your face, these brilliant minds but prisoners of their time. What a tragedy! Whatever words you choose to explain their destiny, they will not believe you. Do you know why? Do you know what an engineer from 2025 should tell men of the Middle Ages if he showed them a phone? Nothing! He should especially not talk to them, he would crush them under the weight of their inferiority, because you cannot explain 5G with parables about lightning and carrier pigeons. It would be the same for you, you would be condemned to silence, at the risk of dying, at the risk of killing them with such a truth.

It is not a paradox, nor alienation. It is what defines man: the being in perpetual becoming. Man is constantly superior. That is why he more or less understands what he has been, and he so poorly conceives that he is already surpassed. He is constantly superior until the moment when he fractures time, until that point of no return that creates a new temporal race of himself. Believe me, these races of men cannot cross, it is better even that they never meet, it is better to keep them locked each in their room, in their era. Close the doors, close them or beware the bloodbath in the house!

And this is the real trial I bring you Eliora: I publicly accuse you of wanting to pervert the meaning of The Quest, of perpetuating ignorance. You destine it to those who doubt, you try to make them see what no longer needs to be seen. You cultivate an obsolete state of mind, a morbid sensitivity to what is no more. You would like to gather the same anachronistic audience that would applaud you with flints, torches, shields, phones with flash on. You cherish a humanity that is already surpassed by the new version of itself. Because humanity does not exist, it is a convenient fiction. Only temporal races define us. You refuse The Quest, you would like it to be completed to justify living your life with the last of the First Men. Poor you, poor them. Sooner or later, those who will live from your lying reading of The Quest will die from the truth of the Second Man. You want to know what you really offer these people? At best, a happy oration, at worst an abject rebirth.

Would you, Eliora, in turn emphasize the absurdity of a Second Man who masters his destiny? And you could maintain that he too is victim of the same illusions that swept away the men of the First Age? And you would accuse us of repeating history by forgetting the past?

You would be right: man does not like to read history, he prefers to make it even if it means erasing everything.

I say that history is a weapon, and those who master forgetting master the future. For God is a forgetting, you yourself say it. I share this secret with you: Shh… we are only pretending to have forgotten… because thanks to you we know what happened during the Great Disconnection. God was not born; he was stillborn. The First Men killed him out of ignorance, and you embalmed Him in a poem where eight billion innocent corpses smell the flower.

No, Eliora, there is no Alienation or paradox in History. There is only the irony of history: The Quest that you wanted to offer to the First Men will propel further than ever the power of the Second Man.

War will break out, sooner or later, as it always comes between the temporal races of humanity. The breath of the Second Man awakened in Lagos, the phoenix city will be reborn stronger from its ashes and I fear that this breath will sweep you away, you and your work, you and yours, into the prehistoric caves where the last First Men will hide.

Farewell, Eliora, farewell and forever... I write you these words knowing that you will not retain them. Because they are not for you. They are for those who come after.