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A LETTER FROM THE FUTURE

Would you have done it too?

By Jed QuinnPublished 4 years ago 15 min read
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At 10:15 in the morning, grey clouds covered The Rosé apartment building. I remember the sky because I received a strange letter. The white envelope had no stamp or return address. The letter read:

Dear Mr. Groge M. Sanders,

You are receiving this letter from yourself one hundred years in the future. Please don't be alarmed. Simply go to your bathroom mirror promptly at noon, 1200 hours, on August 19 to receive more information.

Signed, Mr. Groge M. Sanders.

A letter address to me, form me. Merely three short sentences in black Courier typewritten font on a small white paper. I made a mental note, the bathroom mirror at noon. What a joke, I thought? Earlier that week, I talked to Manuel Fischer, my best friend, about throwing a birthday party at my apartment. He felt sorry about not going to the party, so he made this poor attempt to throw me a surprise birthday party, but why my bathroom? My best friend can be so lame. He has a busy life, who can blame him?

My best friend from middle school, Manuel Fischer, I remember making fun of his oversized nose, and he made fun of me for being a rich white boy. These days he works full-time at Spiritechnologies. My girlfriend, Rachel Reign, is in rehab; we broke up a week ago. Something about needing to do the twelve steps program alone or whatever. She was invited to the party too. Guess she will be there in the bathroom to surprise me.

Just me, no job, no girlfriend, and my parents in two different States. I just wanted a little get-together for my birthday; I'm turning thirty, no big.

#

The next day I received no birthday text, no birthday wishes on social media, nothing not even from my mother. Wow, just. Wow. Sure, no 'happy birthday' text, from Manuel, he must be busy planning for that lame party at noon. I understand none of my ex-co-workers or my ex-girlfriend. And Dad is spacey. But, Mom? Moms live that shit.

Whatever screw them, screw them all is what I have to say.

The rest of the morning, I stayed in my apartment watching Cake Fantasy, remembering the mental note I thought back to the strange white envelope; maybe, I'll go to the bathroom to ask the mirror why my life sucks.

I wonder who else has felt forgotten.

In the bathroom, I stared back at my stupid face like the loser I felt. Then the event happened. OMG? WTF? How can I explain it? The best way to explain what was happening to my bathroom mirror is to remember an old ass computer crash screen with black and white static. That's what my mirror was doing, crashing next, the mirror turned dark, and a blinking white bar cursor shows in the top left-hand corner of the screen or the mirror or whatever. It was weird--subsequently, billions of text in an amber blitz across the mirror. A loud, humming noise was coming from the text message. As the amber text blitz across the screen, the louder the humming grew. The text typed left to right not up and down like in that lame 1999 movie. The humming kept getting worse. I tried covering my ears, but the noise felt like it was coming from inside my head. It felt like fire ants were crawling around my brain.

It all stopped.

The humming noise stop crawling around my head, the amber text halted, and my mirror stayed black. At the bottom was a word I couldn't read and a percent reading backwards. Strange, I stood up, to guess the situation. My bathroom stayed the same. The mirror was the only thing that changed, and I could yield no more information. The bar filled before I reached my sink. Next, my mirror came back online; I know this because I could read the text, ONLINE in amber, but could make out nothing around the mirror. The background was blurry or fuzzy, like staring down into a pond and trying to see the bottom. The word online faded, replaced by the term CONNECTING and a wifi symbol is blinking.

My face showed up again in my mirror. I guess it was my face but there were more wrinkles around the eyes and mouth and on top thin snow-white hair. What troubled me was the mirror reflected behind me or the old me?

It was not the reflection of my bathroom.

I live in a small one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment. But my strange mirror and the moody looking older self-reflected nothing of my microcosm, it was huge. Behind me was a dizzy, vast field of wheat, the wheat field felt endless, which matched the infinite blueness of the giant sky. I felt drawn to the image, the waving tan grain like children's hands waving hello to the calming blue sky, it all felt right to me.

Finally, I or the I inside the mirror who looks like an older version of me say, "BOO!"

I jump a little.

He laughed, "Sorry, I had to do it. You understand, right. Course you do, you're me." An awkward silence followed. Opened, closed my mouth, what the hell do I say? Then he answers "Ya I know, what the hell do I say? The truth is you don't need to say anything. I invited you here to meet me. The letter remember."

Immediately I frisked myself, checking all of my pockets.

"No, no, don't worry. You don't need it. Not that it gave much data. Today is our birthday, and I thought how could I give myself a present than to look at my younger version self. Strange, I know." He smiled and laughed. I haven't noticed, but he has been smiling the whole time. "Say, um..." He scratches his forehead, which I do when I'm nervous to ask a girl out. "What year is it? FAR Co. never told me the year I would talk to my younger self. You know how FAR Co. works as if they don't know what they are doing or why they are doing it?" He made a nervous laugh.

Awkward silent followed again, quickly I say, "I'm sorry who?"

"FAR Co., oh right. Maybe they are not around in your time. That would mean you or me, could be living in the year 2020."

"But," I say, "The year is 2020, August 19, our birthday." Huh, what the fuck am I doing? I'm talking to myself in the bathroom, and my older self is standing in a wheat field? I mean, come on really, am I having a stroke right now. Was I reaching for something above my toilet seat, slip and fell, hit my head on the bathtub. I'm actually in a coma--hallucinating my future self, in reality, I am bleeding to death, or am dead.

"August 19, 2020, no right, FAR and Co. will be announced on the six o'clock news today. Now things are making sense."

"What? No--No, no, no, nothing is making any fucking sense. You, or I, or whatever the living fucks this is, look here you need to start explaining you're, or myself, or--FUCK?"

"Ok." He repeated the ok half a dozen more times, moving his hands up and down in a calming fashion. The same thing I do. My hyperventilating put in check, he started to explain...

"...Fully Augmented Reality Systems and Company or FARS and Co. dropping the S part a year after airing on the evening news. At first, they were a small, downloadable app on any smartphone. A single game company, the app they developed, augments the reality around you to stimulate a farm."

I ask, "What, so, you can farm in your living room, why would that be on the evening news?"

"I don't remember. Maybe it was a slow news day. Look, the point is people bought it. It was a .99 cent app making an easy million in one night. The real reason people all over America bought the app was for the FARCoin."

"What's FARCoin?"

"You heard of BitCoin, FARCoin is an 'alt-coin' or alternate BitCoin. When people play the app and plant say strawberries in three hours, they can harvest them and make three alt-coins or FARCoins for each berry they collect. Now, do you understand people can make money real-life money by playing this app?"

"And that wheat behind me is my or our vast fortune," I ask, pointing at me.

He waved a heavy hand over the brush tops of the wheat with swollen eyes he looked back, not staring at me but the corner of the mirror avoiding our eyes. At last, he whispered no.

Something made me stop talking for a while I change the subject to ask, "So, how old are you or how old are we now?

"Oh didn't I say that earlier I am one hundred and thirty, the year is 2120."

I step back a few to glide myself down on the toilet seat. "This isn't a joke?" I ask, "But how? You err... I only look fifty at most."

"That's help from FAR Co. sister company NODE TECH."

"And who are they?" I ask, waving my hand in a grand gesture.

"They," he started, "are an acronym of Nano Organic Drone Entity and Technologies. They started around the same time as FAR Co, small too, as a simple wifi company. Today or a hundred years later, they are leaders in Nano-engineering and bioengineering."

"So, how did they help me in keeping us young?"

"By eating this green paste stuff or synthetic bacteria."

"Huh? What?"

"It can also give off free wifi signals."

I never notice, but I hate my smile, it looks a bit stuffy, a bit naughty like some lazy comic book villain, confused I ask to start over from the gaming app again.

He explained, showing off a flexible transparent aluminum smartphone, talked about the first trillionaire, showing the first clear goggles that can text what you think.

He says how each new advancement added a hundred new games to the line-up and then the smart-contact lens. Cap the history off with a Nano-size FAR chip implanted on the brain's soft tissue by syringe. I have to admit the next hundred years will be fresh.

"But, the cool part is where I'm at," he continued, "this place is a city-building or an Arcologies called Xanadu." He started another history lesson about NODE TECH and Medical. The first thing NODE TECH and Medical made was this synthetic bacterium, which gave off a free wifi signal. Once the synthetic bacterium was used in 3D printers, it changed and made a pig's heart, and NODE TECH changed into NODE Medical. By 2099, FAR Co. had invested billions into a project called Xanadu in the Mojave Desert. Nobody knew that together, FAR Co. and NODE Medical; they were building or growing a city. "Xanadu is huge, over eight-hundred floors each one as a mini-city," he says and waves a worn hand behind himself at the vast wheat fields.

It felt like a Hiroshima bomb drop on my head. Speechless. The future is fantastic, but why is my one-hundred in thirty self, bragging about it?

He looked back at me for a time. His swollen red eyes, long face, and wet forehead stared back like he calculated math equations. "It's not to brag. A month ago, our wife died."

For a moment, I listened to the hum sounds like a fan of an old gaming console.

Then he talked again, "Sorry, Rachel Reign, our ex-girlfriend in your time, came back we got married. She had heard how I made a small fortune in the gamified app from FAR Co and ask to marry me. I know 'gold digger,' but we loved her. Not so much, her habit."

"Ya, she stole from us to buy pills, even though she said she was clean."

"She got better. Rehab," he says, looking down and away.

"What?"

"She didn't get better. All she did was replace one addiction with another."

FAR Co. games, I thought to myself.

"In ten years, FAR Co. dominated the phone and gaming industry. They started calling it the FAR addiction, and like the name, you grow cold and detached from reality. Any game you imagine you're fully-immersed, and nobody can tell you all that gaming is useless because you make a blitz of money. People go outside but, if the issue is not about FAR Co., nobody cares. Like voting, FAR Co. made it feel like its games were more important than the world's worries, so people stop voting. Lots of shit went down."

"What about Rachel?"

"She disappeared a year ago, into some game. It can be normal for people these days with FAR Co. games; I thought nothing of it at the time, just like most people. Then a month ago, I'm into this new mystery game. I followed these clues to an unknown location on one of the hundreds of floors of Xanadu. I found this ditch; a serial killer I have been tracking in the game kills girls and buries them in old ravines. I found the dead body in the game--then I get this painful headache." He rubbed his forehead and continued, "I told you about how the FAR Co. and its latest invention is a Nanochip implanted on to the brain via syringe, remember?"

I nodded worry about not talking in hopes he will continue.

"Well, the Nanochip is known to have multiple glitches like any other computer or smartphone but, glitches in your brain hurt. The latest update to the Nanochip turns itself off when experiencing a glitch." The next few words made him sound far away and cold. "When my FAR Nanochip turned itself off, I was still somewhere in Xanadu, in some ditch, but instead of an empty ditch there... There in the dirt was a dead body, One-hundred and thirty years old, and we never saw a dead body till now. I struggled to get down to see. I don't know what I was going to see--not her. But it was... It was Rachel. I swear to Xanadu that the dead body I found was her. Rachel, you remember she had neon-green eyes, skin porcelain white, high cheekbones, and that rockin body. Even dead in that ditch, she was gorgeous beyond compare. Just then, I heard a loud humming, blinding white light, and a headache to match a thousand days of hangovers; my Nanochip was coming back online. I ran; don't ask me why I just did it. Not in the right frame of mind or something. I ran into these robot-police officers. Ya, Xanadu has robot-cops cool, huh, by then, the chip was back online and working fine. I begged the robot-cops to come with me to see Rachel, but when we got to the ditch. Nothing. Empty. Even my game found no dead body, no Rachel."

"What happened next?"

"What do you expect? They thought I was crazy and click it to FAR addiction. But, I know what I saw Rachel is dead from something I don't know, maybe pills or worst. So, I just left that floor of Xanadu to the lower ones. The lower the floor the larger surface area is for farming, real farming. I had my chip removed from my brain a week ago. Now I am chatting with you--and now, I need a favor?"

I raised my eyebrows. What can I do for a man in the future?

"I need you to touch your mirror."

"That's it. Why?"

"My old Nanochip had memories, one-hundred years of memories saved on it. All I can remember of Rachel is dead Rachel. Help me out touch the mirror."

"But, how can that help me--."

"Even a small memory of her, of a living Rachel, is all I need to live on, please?" He raised a hand touching his side of the mirror, "I'm desperate; help?"

Still not understanding what touching the mirror will do, I raised my hand in place over my future self's side--the low humming blitz into my head like a jet engine. A mega-headache crushes my senses forcing me to the ground; the screaming hum and mega-headache evaporated away. I push up to my hands and knees to see red and brown, rich dirt; this is not my dull gray tile. Excited, I bounced to my feet and looked around as the tall stakes of wheat waving in a dry breeze and the vast, empty blue sky. On my left, a modest white house, I looked into one of its windows. Only the window didn't revile inside the white house. I was looking into my gray tiled bathroom to find a little older self.

"Wow, it worked," he says.

I balled up my hand and beat on the window screaming at myself. What did I do? What happened? But the harder I banged on the window, the more he smiled back.

"Hard to explain, I didn't think it would work. But look, you're there, and I'm here. How blitz is that?"

"How? Why?" I ask and beat on the window more.

"Look, just think of it as teleporting through time and why it was for Rachel. I needed to see her again, alive, and full of energy in those neon-green eyes of hers."

Amber text showed in the center of the window to read, 'Session is ending.' And a counted down followed.

"Sorry, gotta blitz, an old, or a new girlfriend to see, you understand." He turned to leave me staring and screaming at an empty grey bathroom.

Next, the countdown finishes the amber text reading connection lost. The window turned to a window, and I could look inside the white house, but I didn't care what was inside.

I turned around, facing the brown wheat field and perfect blue sky. My back slid down the window and house till I was sitting on the red-brown rich dirt. I sat there thinking for a long time concluding I did understand why my older self did what he did, how could I not...

END

science fiction
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About the Creator

Jed Quinn

I am an aspring sci-fi author who loves space, dark comedy, and heavy metal. I am a huge fan of sythwave and 70's, 80's, and 90's lifestilys.

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