Why did Gaspery-Jacques get sent to Ohio where he happened to run into Mirella? It wasn’t his decision, was it? Why would the Time Institute want to do that? Was it an accident? It seems too unlikely to be an accident…
I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.