7385
The year 7385 is about five thousand years in our future, about as far in the future as our oldest written history is in the past. By that time, our descendants will have moved around so much, and had relationships in so many different places, that we could trace our bloodlines to every family on that future Earth. We can look to that far year and imagine that for each of us, our personal choices will have impacted the lives of every human being on the planet.

In this story, there are a few futures in which the human species is happy and well, living for centuries and traveling the stars, able to talk to animals and the spirit world, and magnificently creative. There are also many futures in which we have destroyed ourselves, or where we live short, miserable existences as slaves or in a toxic wasteland left to us by our distant ancestors. In one of the better futures, people known as 'the Alchemists' discover how to travel in time and between parallel realities. They devote themselves to helping the people of every Earth choose an amazing future. In this story, IU is actually a front for the benevolent 'Alchemists', a cross-time organization helping people in this time and place choose magnificence for themselves and their descendants.