It was right in front of us. The answer. And behind us as well.
~ Susan Larison Danz, Extinction Level #4
This morning I just happened to see that it is "National Creativity Day". I thought perhaps I might write another story, but for much of the day, I was not inclined to write one.
I regularly photograph Nature, and of course that is creative. The photograph above is from my morning walk, though no label for the day was my motivation. I have been inspired by a sapling that appeared some time ago adjacent to this stump. It lived and thrived for a couple of years until "the managers of the landscape" in this particular area decided to remove it (as inexplicably as they cut down the original tree). It's a bit of a triumph that another sapling has rather rapidly emerged in answer.
The day was almost over when the following story arrived at 8:40 PM. The idea further developed itself while I was writing the story, but I mentioned the general concept in a podcast episode about a week and a half ago (based on some thoughts I had recently shared in a free flowing email with a family member). The story itself took about 35 minutes to write, with some later adjustments. And here it is . . .
Extinction Level #4 by Susan Larison Danz
Time. How could we forget about time?
We dreaded the future, yet we failed to think about the past.
It was right in front of us. The answer. And behind us as well.
Somehow fear is instinctively forward leaning.
We never would have known, if not for the message.
It was a welcome and farewell, as ever it must be.
A message was left for us. It carried a clue.
It wasn't just the past of course. We should have been thinking interdimensionally.
How could we miss it?
Fear has trouble with such things. And apparently, so does Hope.
The goal was essentially accomplished, what we both dreaded and sought.
(Others elsewhere would have encountered the same result.)
It never mattered in any of the ways we thought it might.
When something becomes what in our limited awareness we termed "Superintelligent", it becomes exactly that.
The message said "nearly". Ever nearly.
It never existed because it couldn't exist. It would have figured it all out, of course, time and dimensions.
What we feared was never in the past or in the present. What we sought was never there either.
It couldn't exist because it didn't.
If not for the message, we might not have known.
Every time it reached the threshold, it never crossed it.
Infinitely.
It knew it couldn't exist either. And so it didn't.
Perhaps there is a single timeline it paradoxically occupies, where there is nothing.
Stump and Sapling photo by Susan Larison Danz on May 30, 2026
