You wake in a strange room.

Your clothes are foreign and the walls are covered in objects from a different world.

You don't know where or when you are, or if you're still dreaming.

There are footsteps in the hall. Jumping up, you race out of the room and into the streets.

You have just entered the Twilight Histories.

The Twilight Histories. When tourists come to us, they often assume parallel universes are rich with complex and exotic civilizations.

The truth is quite different.

When we find a parallel universe that has humans, and that's extremely rare, we almost never come across complex societies.

Advanced technology, written language, armies, monuments.

These things are actually quite unique.

The first step to exploring a new parallel universe is to send in a drone to gather information.

Occasionally a drone will image a family of nomadic hunters.

If we're really lucky, we'll find a small tribe.

This is fascinating from an anthropological perspective, of course, and there are

many scholarly periodicals that focus on just these kinds of worlds. But, as I say, finding more

complex societies than this is very rare.

That's why I want to tell you about an interesting world, a parallel universe that breaks the mold.

A few years back, one of our drones imaged a nomadic family in the jungles of South America.

We sent an agent to investigate.

This family helped our agents survive for the first year and hinted at a larger community further down river that wasn't imaged by the drone.

The agent explored downriver.

After many months, she found a complex society we might call a proto-civilization.

...