Entry: September 25th 2293. Priority-A rec.
If you’re reading this then it might not be too late. You might even know just what it is they are planning, and have thought of some way to stop it. You might have uncovered the clues, seen the evidence, seen that I’m not insane.
Maybe you’ve seen them. But I doubt it. Or you might doubt what you’ve seen … because they’re not big on publicity. Anyway, in those rare moments they’d appear before me I found that communication – much less conversation – is futile. Yet I’m sure, even as I dictate these words, they are listening. So I say to them: “If you’re planning to destroy the text-file, you will achieve nothing. I will copy and copy, until I know one copy is safe. So do what you like to my memory. These words will live on.” (Pause)
(Resume) It’s strange to think of things ever being normal. Yet they were before it all started to go wrong three years ago, ever since that first visit to Mars.
To the people back on earth it seemed we were the successful ones; that we should be thankful for no repeat of the catastrophe of those early Earth-based experiments, the horrendous casualties. The utter failure. For us, on a technical level, every safety measure was precisely in place.
We were testing the prototype for a new technology which should allow the transference of information across vast distances of space – essentially a wormhole for communication purposes (though if you believed any of the media reports, it was about much more than that: Wormhole equals space travel). The experiment itself was not a roaring success, not what we hoped for; stability for less than a second. At least we did achieve our first goal – we sent information to some distant part of the galaxy. To where? We didn’t know. The light (information) pulses disappeared from observation. All we had were the calculations based on the early experiments, for power and matter injection levels. So really we could only infer a result.
All I ever wanted was a normal life. When I say normal I don’t mean in the boring sense ... just not completely off-the-scale weird. On that first day of our stay on Mars, the notion of life ever returning to a state of normality was more than a forlorn hope. Others had managed it, got back to their families, lived lives as minor celebrities for a while, until the media moved on to the next big thing. That was my hope, just to settle back down into a comfortable obscurity, working in the background to make the final preparations. But no, They had to ruin it.
They are still with me, every day. I feel their presence. It might only be a stirring of the air around me, or even just a glimpse out the corner of one eye. Like ghosts, you could say – just apparitions that leave no trace that anyone/anything can observe. But they do things to my mind. It’s not something I can explain in any way that would make me sound like a sane person rather than anything less than delusional. I’m sure there are medical/psychological terms more precise. But since I’ve avoided any “help” the diagnosis can be yours, dear reader.
So let me tell you that to date I was made to witness the destruction of my home city at some unspecified time in the future, but there: as I stood on the site. Silver objects shaped like huge raindrops, descending rapidly to destroy tower-blocks. And on the ground biped mechanoids with wide rapidly pumping legs, supporting an oval centre, scanning with dark eye stalks; not merely killing but taking them into its body – screaming children drawn upwards by some levitation field.
But you don’t believe me, do you. Why should you? That’s the thing about the future, no way to verify it. And I doubt one person can change it, at least not me, or can know what action is not part of the tapestry of events leading ineluctably to that feared outcome. Philosopher I R Chuang said, “If time is like a river then we are the fallen leaves carried helplessly in its flow.” But perhaps I’ve defied that flow. I’ve seen – no, experienced the past as well: hundreds, even thousands of years ago; the stuff they don’t tell you in history lessons or in any media form, atrocities people in previous centuries have committed. I shan’t tell you about the pain of being shot, stabbed or executed. You couldn’t even imagine! But for those vicariously I got to be, it was simply a matter of being on the wrong side at the wrong time. Only, for me, not the mercy of death but on to the next life.
Eventually it all became a morass: a millennium of suffering in one hour.
It wasn’t all bad. In the process of being made to feel the worst of humanity, I got the experience to best of how it can be: that mythical utopia which only really exists in fragments – the small scale; tranquillity and happiness, like something I once had, or thought I had, before it was all taken away. So it was not enough just to see these two extremes, they knew I had to feel them.
I’d ask: “What do you want from me? Why are you making me go through all this?” But such simple questions never elicit an answer.
Except they did tell me one clear thing: “The erasure is coming.”