When the worm went to sleep in the Siberian soil, the pyramids had not been built, nor the hanging gardens of Babylon sown, and our ancestors shared the planet with Neanderthals.
When the worm awoke, 46,000 years later, it found itself in a world where it would be transported in aircraft and have its genetic code stored on a computer, and where not only had the Neanderthals gone extinct, but so too, it appeared, had the worm’s own species.
