Tandem Vir

Dear you,
                  I have been wondering how I would ever start this conversation. It is difficult to write a letter when you do not know whom you are writing it to. Since writing is the last thing I can do in my life right now, I have decided to go with it. I will imagine that you are Erika or Senacaus, Perhaps someone who lived in the same generation as George Saunders, Someone ancient. I hope this letter goes that far back in time. I wish on all my stars that it reaches you around the dawn of 21st century when the magical number for life expectancy was indeed, a century.

I often wondered if language was any different in your generation. The videos that you left us with, the photos that we see in our media museums, tell us how grand and trouble free lives you had lived. However, I found it easier to write in English since it had only 26 characters, unlike the unicode we use to communicate (It has about a million characters or so they say).  I find myself lying in bed and thinking about the different kinds of foods that you might have had, the drinks you might have tasted. It is a luxury I cannot afford. Every day I wake up and have a choice of three pills to taste and by now, I cannot tell the difference between them. I can swear on my Hyperbot that one of them was a substitute for apple.  

The only question that keeps coming back to me is very haunting to say the least. Why is that we didn’t have much time but you have it? Yes. Time. I thought it was not fair for us to suffer this way but I guess I have nobody to blame because it was not climate change or running out of resources or air pollution or any alien invasion that you had predicted at that time. I must admit that in my withering days, I spent my time predicting the best time to be on planet earth and I happen to stumble across many theories from your generation that predicted our future. I can only marvel at your creativity and premature science which was way advanced for your time. 

Of coarse we met aliens, we call them Sentients, for the lack of a better word. There have been four types of Sentients who had landed on earth so far and by landed I mean, crashed. They started off as microbes who thrived in excess oxygen and we categorized them based on their ability to process oxygen. Yes, they became fully grown animals who would photosynthesis. This was a long long time ago. They were mostly dormant, like trees but they moved. I have seen people have Sentients as their pets and post them on social media, I guess they must have been rich enough to afford a Sentient. As you can guess, we bred them like cattle and made them clean up our atmosphere that we had been littering for God knows how many years. 

Coming back to my question, What is it like to have so many years in your life? I mean, what do you do everyday? Do you think about death often? Is it a part of your life or You only worry about it when the time comes? I wish I had your time. I would love to have twenty five years to find a job, I would love to wait at least thirty years to get married. I would love to live as long as I can without any restrictions on my biological clock. 

After the Sentients became a common thing, which people often thought was gift from God, We invented God. Hyper Intelligence if you will. Earth was becoming fresh again. It is crazy to think that Hyper intelligence was only 700 TB of data. It was the Frankenstein’s monster which started embedding into the planet. Changing rivers and controlling weather.  However, it did no good. It controlled the weather as it deemed necessary. Some people rallied against it, some didn’t. Those who did were called Vectors. I am not sure if I can brag about my long bloodline but I am a Vector. 

The difficult thing about Hyper Intelligence is that it is everywhere and nowhere, yet it started out as a computer program. After three weeks in existence, Hyper Intelligence would make it to the ecosystem, the first man-made creature to fully integrate itself to a planet. My family had a file written by our ancestor that stated how shockingly Hyper Intelligence would manifest itself. It would suddenly pop up in their eye-coms and tell them happy birthday or ask if the water in their place was good. Scientist figured that Hyper intelligence was a freak of nature born into the world in the form of Tetraks which in your words, millions of tiny particles that made one Tachyon. Since data was 1 and 0, which was basically electricity, made full of electrons. It was possible to create a being which was born out of a computer. But as you wondered how sodium doesn’t have life but Amoeba does, we wondered how the artificial intelligence we created could never have as much life as hyper intelligence has. 

There were many years that went past like bullets marveling at this creation, this being which made trees grow faster, made them bear strong yet malleable leaves which were comparable to the domestic steal, yet bio degradable. We had enough of everything. At one point it was reported that only three people in the entire world were starving at any given time of the day. It was a miracle that Hyper Intelligence was not a monster, but a giant who did what it liked the most, growing things out of nothing. I have a Hyperbot because buying a pet is expensive. Dad said I could get one when I am twenty one and see if I can outlive my dog, just like every damn person in the world. I wish I got my puppy before that. 

We tried to colonize other planets but once we solve a problem, a bigger one seemed to appear. We made the first space prison. I think they called it the Colosseum , because it looked like a droid from here. Crime rates lowered eventually, nobody wanted to go of our planet. It is painful to step on the other planet and go inside a house and seeing the blue dot in the distance and knowing that you aren’t home. That is far greater than any death penalty. Of coarse you didn’t need any one to maintain it. Hyper intelligence had terra-formed Mars too. 

But our lives didn’t change much from the one you are currently living in, until we discovered we suffered from  Centum canceras. A form of mutation. This was three hundred years ago. It was not a disease or our tissues misunderstanding each other, it was much worse than that. It traced back to the 21st century, the one that you are currently in. Human beings were subjected to extreme stress levels in the 21st century that  Cortisol or the stress hormone was secreted in large quantities in every individual due to economic crisis and other issues that I frankly cannot understand. Thousands of years later, The human body evolves the stress hormone as mandatory hormone which starts secreting ever since we were born. Cortisol weakens the bones, speeds up aging.  We were living in an age where the air was fresh, the land was free of litter yet we didn’t have time.

The average life expectancy dipped to 27.  The first trillionaire was Yuman chekov, who owned an anti-stress medical company which sold drugs to suppress cortisol levels. But no matter how much you took those drugs or bathed in milk or had a Unimex massage your back, you wouldn’t last more than 30 years. We were told this truth at the age of 5. We finish college at 10 and then get married at 15 and by 21 or so you get a child of your own. And trust me, giving birth to your child is mandatory. Either the man or the woman can volunteer for that. That is when we get the dog. We have a good ten years to live. 

I often wonder what would you do with all that time in your life. I looked up and I was shocked to see that people can live as long as 70 years. That is a long time to be alive. I wish I had that freedom of not being rushed. Not having to find a job before 14. Although I did find a Job, I worked at the Odyssey which pioneered in Tachyon. A particle that can go back in time, they had mentioned it as fiction back in your days. there wasn’t that much of competition since you probably would last only ten or so years at the company so there is always someone who is willing to hire. My brother worked in a company called Corpsum, which was a multi-billion dollar company which looks after the disposal of dead bodies. It is so cool to design your Bio metric print that would be made of you ashes that would either be printed on the ocean floor or on the bark of a tree. Bark of the tree is quite expensive though I want mine to be on it. 

I met my wife at the Odyssey. We were happy for quite sometime until it was her time. Next to go was our dog Taylor. I don’t regret it but I wish I hadn’t lost both the people whom I loved the most to have disappeared before my 22nd birthday. I waited for my turn but it never came. My cortisol gene showed extremely low secretion levels, they said I am differently-abled, a Handicap with unusual hormone level which made me outlast them. Odyssey sent people back in time but never saw them again. We soon realized it was a one way trip. Soon enough, many people started dying sooner when I hit my thirties, The planet went on Auto pilot. 

In the last ten years, there was only one human per every 100 kilometers. I refused to be with anyone else. I spent most of my time in the libraries. Combing through the Primitive ARC net, seeing glimpses of your world. Then I realized I want to be immortal. I don’t want to die without leaving something behind. So I started writing this long letter. 

I get anxious when I think about the person who would be reading my words. If they would listen to my words, If they would stay with me until the last line. Will they care about me. I am the CEO of odyssey now, perhaps the richest man on earth because I also bought Corpsum from Yuman three weeks before he passed away.  I own every company, every thing that I can possibly think of yet I do not have my wife or my dog. I am confident I am also the last man on earth (my name makes more sense now). I don’t feel different waking up each day thinking that my Eye-com will announce itself at the demise my neighbor in Australia.  I spend my days planting tomatos, walking on the shoreline and brushing my hands on the flower petals which made me miss her a lot. 

I failed in sending myself back in time in a greedy attempt to see her again but I couldn’t. I didn’t study science so it was particularly hard. However, I figured I can send the micro file across. A tiny file, perhaps a document, back in time. I had broken the Time stance on different occasions so I am not confident if it would work another time.

This is the last chance I have to send out a part of me that will stay here forever. If you are reading this, then I urge you to live all of your years with grace and humanity. Because in the end that is all you would be left with. I don’t mean to preach but I am very emotional right now. I wish we all had more time. 

Take care of yourselves and have a great day ahead,
This is me, 
Tandem Vir