A shuttle descends toward Seven Trees City, where vast crowds of spiders gather on ground and silk structures. Seeing-eye colonies broadcast the event across the world, to spiders, stomatopods, and other near-sentient species. The moment is presented as the start of a new era.

Doctor Avrana Kern watches everywhere at once, skeptical yet attentive. She recalls how the spiders rejected simple destruction, learning from their history with ants to use and integrate rather than exterminate. Long ago they isolated the nanovirus and noted that mammal-like creatures lacked it, lacking the connective potential it bestowed.

Over generations, spider scientists engineered a stripped-down, transmissible, inheritable, irreversible nanovirus variant targeting mammalian neurology. Its purpose is not evolution but recognition: to make humans perceive arachnids as kin and for arachnids to sense that kinship in return. Many humans aboard Gilgamesh are now infected, with others yet to be treated; this landing is the first step toward integration.

The hatch opens and a small human landing party emerges into a pressing tide of spiders. The humans show no revulsion; one woman even reaches out to touch their backs. The test succeeds: the virus quietly tells both sides, “They are like us.” Kern muses whether such a thread among humans themselves would have altered history, then notes even her acolyte Fabian has gone outside to watch.

Portia arrives with her peers, conscious of the heavy cost paid to reach this moment. Encouraged by Bianca’s conviction that partnership is worth the price, Portia witnesses a frail, elderly human woman—carried by a male companion—laid gently on the grass. Surrounded by respectful spiders, the woman, said to be the oldest human, lies dying beneath a blue sky. Portia senses a shared understanding in her gaze as the long process of true coexistence begins.