We know little about them, now. Only a few fragmentary bits of data survive, and even those are degraded.

We know they took many photographs, capturing many brief instances of life, often with short captions. We have many short captions that do not accompany photographs, perhaps because the photographs were lost.

There are short videos that have been reconstructed, frame by frame, each capturing a bare few moments of the lives they lived. There is much that can be gleaned, of course, but much that is now lost with the failure of the systems that once housed everything.

Based on what is available, we can only estimate how much data has been lost, how many moments were once recorded but are now lost. It is incalculable.

Because of what remains, and what was lost, we know this time as the Age of Instants.

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