Can an idea survive without its author?

Nila thought of the Tibetan certificate, the forest that had been destroyed by a future that never happened, and the model that could explain its frame without relinquishing it. The same defence was available to Otherwise: become so useful that people needed its vocabulary to prove they had escaped vocabulary. She wrote one test in the margin. If this works, a stranger should eventually be able to do it without us. Then she crossed out us. Without remembering us.