Bruno Lacombe continues his email lecture, dismantling the conventional narrative of human migration. He argues that humans did not settle the earth through arduous trekking like refugees with backpacks; rather, migration occurred incrementally through ordinary living—people gradually relocating in response to seasonal changes, depleted hunting, shifting waters, or following animal herds, with these small movements compounding across tens of thousands of years.

Bruno acknowledges that transoceanic migration over the past half-million years remains poorly understood, noting that Polynesians crossed oceans long before Europeans dared. He pivots to assert that Neanderthals in Europe and Asia smoked tobacco, and that even earlier, Homo erectus—whom Bruno calls Rectus—was the first to play with fire and therefore the first smoker.

Bruno reinterprets the myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus. After Epimetheus distributed positive traits to all animals, his sack was empty when he reached humans, so Prometheus stole fire from the gods. Bruno argues fire is not a trait but a technology—a crutch compensating for humanity's lack of an inherent quality, condemning man to ingenuity and deviousness.

Bruno frames this myth as accurate, explaining how fire's destructive use coincides with the disappearance of Neanderthals and the rise of Homo sapiens, an "interglacial bully" who shaped the present world. He concludes that humanity is hurtling toward extinction in a "shiny, driverless car," asking how we might exit.

The narrator responds privately, picturing a Top Fuel dragster driver's flameproof tuck-and-roll escape. She then questions Bruno's metaphor: if everyone on Earth is inside this driverless car, exiting it means exiting reality itself—tumbling into a void.