A note from the translators

This is a contemporary work of illustrated fiction, satire, and philosophical inquiry. Its three-million-year provenance, ancient prisoner-observer, surviving plates, and translations are invented. No historical artifact or deciphered language is being presented as authentic.

Within that fiction, an observer repeatedly incised these forms into a captive surface. Later custodians took impressions. Later still, translators supplied English. The creature diagrams remain unlettered; the surrounding words are our present attempt to make them useful.

The small archive marks are a newly invented visual notation, not a recovered alphabet. Contact opens a path; Understanding separates observation from story; Reciprocity connects; Agency branches. Their meanings are editorial conventions.

Human parasite is the Society's metaphor for a pattern of borrowing, protecting, avoiding, or controlling. The sixteen forms are a chosen map of habits, not a scientific inventory of personality or genes. The Snake People who observe them remain susceptible to the same patterns. The reader may question the map, the translators, and the Society.