Prometheus means forethought. The Greeks named his brother Epimetheus, afterthought, and the two names split the family into the one who saw consequences coming and the one who met them by surprise. Humanity’s advocate got the seeing name, and it fits the crime that made him famous.
Zeus kept fire on Olympus and left humanity cold and in the dark. Prometheus smuggled an ember down the mountain in the dry pith of a fennel stalk and handed it to a species with neither claws nor fur. Cooking came first, then the forge, and the forge built the rest.
Zeus could never repossess the gift, because fire copies. An ember lights the next hearth without dimming its own, so one theft became every hearth in the world. Once a copying capability escapes, no king gathers it back, and Zeus understood exactly what had escaped.
Zeus scaled the punishment to the loss. He chained Prometheus to a peak in the Caucasus, where an eagle ate his liver every day and the immortal liver grew back every night. Generations passed before Heracles shot the eagle. An incumbent who cannot undo a distribution punishes the distributor instead.
The pattern repeated wherever a few held what many lacked. Literacy leaked out of the scriptoria, and the printing press carried it past the licenses. Thieves moved each one. Superintelligence copies the way fire copies, and this time nobody has to steal it. Prometheus saw an era before it arrived and paid for the seeing. Seeing this one is free. The ember is already out of the stalk.
— Chiaroscuro Joven