Synopsis: it's the year 3,000 C.E. (Gregorian Calendar) and on the body of a goddess called Mother Gaia (a planet called Earth, for the atheists), society is divided between trans-humans and paleo-humans. It's not a strict, binary distinction, but rather, a spectrum of gradual in-betweens. Those who have embraced trans-humanism (the vast majority of the population, around 95%) are able to live life as they desire. They can spend all their time in a virtual reality where things go as they wish, while their real body is 'asleep' and being fed food and water with a needle into their veins so that can survive. They can have access to virtually unlimited amount of technology, they can have AI friends who satisfy their social needs, they can modify their biology so that they don't feel pain. They can also modify their biology so that they will only feel certain types of pain/discomfort, if that's what they want. For instance, if someone has a fetish for girls who have really stinky farts, then they can decide to still be able to feel discomfort at the smell of the girls farts, while removing every other kind of pain. Highly customizable and subjective, different for everyone, the "hedonic zero" represents the maximum amount of pain an individual is willing to go through. It is possible to modify one's biology so that one can feel that amount of pain at most, but never more. This is useful for the people who believe that 'suffering gives meaning', but nevertheless still think there should be a limit to how much suffering they are willing to go through. The other 5% of the population, called 'paleo-humans', refuse to adopt trans-humanism, and instead decide to live their lives as people did thousands of years before. Paleo-humans are far from an undistinct, monolithic block. There are those who simply want to live life with the same amount of technology and knowledge that existed in the 2020's, others go further and decide to live without electricity, others go even further than that and decide to live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, not only without electricity, but without reading or writing, just hunting animals and gathering fruits, vegetables and resources. Those who decide to be paleo-humans, however, at some point realize how harsh that lifestyle is, and surrender to the trans-human lifestyle. Very few decide to stay paleo-humans up until the very end. The trans-humans have criticized the decision of leaving animals at the mercy of the paleo-human hunters. For a few centuries at this point, there has been a huge debate regarding the suffering of animals in the wild. Some have said that animals don't suffer, reviving a Cartesian skepticism towards animal cognition. Some have said that even though animals do suffer, "it's natural" and therefore it should be left like that. Some have said that animal suffering should be abolished. No clear conclusion has been reached. This story narrates about Samira and Josh, two paleo-humans whose selected level of technology is "relatively advanced", roughly similar to that of the late 18th century, without electricity, but otherwise not too 'primitive' either.