21st Century

21st Century functions in the narrative as a vanished human age whose surviving traces force the characters to reconsider what humanity was, where it came from, and how much of its history has been lost. Lisa belongs to this period, but encounters its aftermath from a distant future in which human identity has become an archaeological question rather than an ordinary social fact.

Historical Identity and Temporal Distance

Lisa and Zon search for remains from the era Lisa calculates as most likely to correspond to the 1900s and 2000s. Very few remains have survived from that period, and the memorial crypt presents bone fragments behind glass alongside genetic reconstructions of what the dead may have looked like. In rare cases, complete skulls allow more accurate reconstruction; in even rarer cases, salvaged computer records and documents provide names or fragments of personal information. The 21st Century therefore appears not as a continuous historical foundation but as a damaged archive assembled from physical remnants, hypotheses, and incomplete records.

The memorial displays mostly blue-skinned individuals because that coloration is common among later species. Lisa notices that the reconstructions with human-colored skin are unusual and immediately recognizes that the supposed human images are wrong. Her objection is more than a disagreement over museum accuracy: it marks the gap between lived memory and institutional reconstruction. Lisa remains a surviving witness from the period under examination, while the memorial can offer only material clues and probabilistic guesses.

Human Knowledge and Its Survivals

The period’s scientific inheritance remains visible even after its society has disappeared. Lisa knows enough about embryology to recognize that the strange projected form in her uterus is an embryo, although it looks to her like a mixture of a tadpole and a dinosaur. The future medical technology that produces a three-dimensional holographic image is unfamiliar, but the biological process itself belongs to knowledge Lisa carries from the 21st Century. Her recognition allows her to interpret the scan when Zon still wonders whether she might be carrying a parasite.

The contrast reveals an uneven survival of the past. Human scientific concepts persist, but their original cultural context does not. Lisa can understand pregnancy while standing inside a technological civilization that has transformed diagnosis, reproduction, and species classification. The 21st Century thus survives through practical knowledge even when its people, institutions, and visual record have largely disappeared.

Bodies, Species, and Inheritance

The period also remains embedded in the biology of later populations. Shay explains that Stlozyn ancestors were human people taken from Earth several hundred years earlier. Their descendants were not simply redesigned into a new species; particular genes were made more pronounced, additional DNA strands were introduced, and the resulting genetic system enabled shape-shifting. Scales, human skin, and the ability to change bodily form consequently become evidence of a shared ancestry reaching back to Earth and to the human populations of the 21st Century.

This account destabilizes any strict boundary between human and nonhuman. Later beings may differ in appearance, inherited DNA, and physical capacities, yet their history can lead back to the same terrestrial source. The period is therefore not merely a calendar designation. It is a biological ancestor, preserved in bodies that no longer resemble the humans who lived during it.

Memory, Ruins, and Uncertainty

The narrative repeatedly makes the 21st Century legible through fragments rather than a complete chronology. Lisa searches for recognizable faces but finds a memorial culture built around incomplete skulls, reconstructed appearances, and records salvaged from dead computers. The future’s understanding of the past depends on interpretation, and Lisa’s personal testimony exposes the limits of that interpretation without restoring the lost world in full.

Other investigations in the wider narrative use the same tension between evidence and uncertainty. Oskar learns that David Fezioni was killed by a blow from something like a baseball bat and thrown into a river, while Melody hears rumors that Fezioni’s ghost walks downtown with devil wolves and that Betty Easthope was seen entering his bedroom and is now pregnant. Roland confronts Melissa’s murder through blood, police photographs, and the physical fact of her body in his bed; forensic testing later finds unexplained concentrations of mifepristone and misoprostol, drugs used for abortions, in her blood, at levels high enough to kill her. These later mysteries are not direct events of the 21st Century, but they echo its memorial logic: bodies and objects preserve clues, while testimony and interpretation remain unstable.

The period’s decisive significance lies in this mixture of persistence and erasure. Its science can be recognized in an embryo, its ancestry can be traced through altered DNA, and its people can be sought among reconstructed faces, yet its human identity has become difficult to recover with confidence. The 21st Century is consequently remembered as both origin and ruin: the source of later life and knowledge, but also a historical world that survives only through scattered remains, contested readings, and the testimony of someone like Lisa who still remembers what the reconstructions cannot show.