But I have been getting ahead of myself. I must tell you, if I write with a sense of urgency, it's because it is urgent I speak to you, it's mandatory these words finally reach you across the void of space and time. You don't need to know my name, nor where I am from. Know only that when I am from, things are very different from your own times. Reading on your era, it strikes me as a sort of golden age, though you yourself may not perceive it so. Know that some decades after your demise, a breakthrough in terms of time-travel has been made. A foolhardy scientist, with too much free time in his hands, started radical experiments on his own, with no supervision or oversight. These first few experiments were kept to himself, he made no mention of them to anyone at work, nor to the higher-ups at the corporation he worked for. He thought it best to keep it somewhat controlled. And so, he thought, he held the keys to forever safely in his own hands. And that was that, for a while longer.
Now, Sofia and me, we were happy then. We were the happiest souls alive, or so it seemed to us, and it wasn't long after we'd been living together that accommodations had to be made for a third. We awaited the arrival with eagerness - but with a heavy heart, too, for we knew what kind of world we were living in, and to raise a child in an era so fraught with injustices, with so much rampant misery and unemployment and violence, would be a hardy task. But ours was a commitment that was not merely temporary, ours was a commitment that was forever. And thus, when our daughter was born, we named her so : Forever.
And if only I knew then...
I owe you much, you see. I had been reading your body of work for years on end, and no other author made such an impact on me. Your work inspired me to read up and study so many other things, I devoted myself to learning the sciences because of your books, I felt myself so connected to your characters. I met Sofia, ultimately, because I was reading one of your books. An idea grew inside me, just like a seed had been planted in the depths of my brain, an idea born out of gratitude. I wanted to thank you. I wanted to somehow tell you, 'thank you. for this. for her. for them both. for Sofia. for Forever.'
So I researched, and let me tell you, in my times research is a complicated effort. Much of the information that was once extant was lost in a purge from a few decades back that incurred in the erasure of almost all of the digital records. Knowing that my chances of finding anything pertaining to you were very slim, I took a gamble : I jumped to the time before the erasure, and in the greatest of all stealths, I found something called an e-mail address. Jotting down this precious info in my hardbound ledger, I jumped back to my own era. For a number of weeks, I composed my ideas for the message I intended to write. Two things, then, became readily apparent : on one hand, and knowing that our own technology was far beyond that of your era, I had to find a way to send you an e-mail, from me now to you then. On the other hand I also understood that there could - and probably would - be an issue whereby I could not be able to easily make myself understandable to you. I hope you can understand that by now, our language has changed greatly, and so I undertook some further reading, in order to get acquainted with a number of what are seemingly archaisms to me, but to you is no more than your current speech. So I decided to pursue this avenue for a while, reading up on the times that were - fortunately for us, the purge I spoke of affected only the digital domains, all that was physical record remained intact, and this task I took to with unending delight.
No comments:
Post a Comment