Sara Wallace has fallen into a coma. Her doctors are flummoxed. Her family is devastated. But Sara? She finds herself immersed in mysterious conversation with an invisible being who’s clearly not from around here. Dina has a voice like a whisper and butchers every single English axiom without fail. But Dina ‘s message is deadly serious. Humans are steadily moving toward extinction, Dina said in no uncertain terms. Humanity, so full of promise as a new and utterly unique type of lifeform on this Earth, has begun acting against the wellbeing of the planet and all its inhabitants. It is such an emergency that Dina’s clan has decided to intervene. And they picked Sara to be the messenger to the world. She should be flattered, but. . . seriously? They chose her, not because she is brilliant or accomplished, but because she has an overactive bullshit meter. So, Sara’s proclivity to rarely believe what anyone says has put her in a position where people need to believe her. . . or face extinction? What could go wrong? Dina started with the universe, explained how life formed, and how living entities use competition, collaboration, and coordination to survive in a zillion different ways in a zillion different niches across the planet. It all flowed smoothly until humans arrived. Humans work exactly the same way every other living thing does, but they twisted those survival mechanisms out of shape by adding their own special secret sauce to the mix. Humans developed their own superpower that enables them to survive. That superpower is choice. Using choice and their ability to think, humans created their own ecosystem based on ideas. Dina called it the Ideasphere. By transforming ideas into different shapes and products, humans were able to change not just their lives, but over time, their entire environment. Choice makes humans far more unpredictable than their non-human siblings. That’s how everything has gone haywire. Humans have been living in their self-created ecosystem without really understanding that they have created a new ecosystem at all. Without the context of their history, but with the ability to think and choose anyway, humans have made mistake after mistake, and bad choice after bad choice. Well, humans have made good choices, too, of course, but Dina didn’t spend much time on those. Dina was focused on a different message. Dina insisted that humans can and should learn the survival lessons from the creatures that have successfully survived for billions of years.