They have no haven here, Albert, they are all password-protected, they all have signs on their hearts that say SLIDE TO UNLOCK. But those four-digit codes have been forgotten and so they can’t get inside themselves, locked out and lost, and in their confusion they will hunt through the ones and zeroes for connection, to find out who they are, they will show their naked bodies for all to see, they will look for the people who made them, they will flounder for some sense of decency or self. It’s all the time on their hands, isn’t that a weird expression? Forget hands. It is the time in their brains, racing through neurotransmitters like mice in mazes. Time cannot be stopped but it is not a predator. Time is our friend, and it’s willing to play nicely if we learn how to ask, if we exchange pleasantries, if we shake hands and kiss cheeks, and you and I know the clandestine language to indulge time in dialogue. Only the two of us can articulate this yet-to-be discovered world. I wish we could wait for them, Albert, I wish there were a way to let them figure it out for themselves but thermometers don’t lie, this planet will face the big burn. It’s fate, it’s science, it’s existential mathematics. Unless we save them. My brain sends a signal to your brain and you send signals to my brain and we are connected, we are the only unlocked devices left. We are connected across time, and soon we’ll be able to bridge space as easily, and once we’ve mastered that advancement, you will be able to beam back. The space-time continuum will be tamed. There will be no such thing as pasts. Even the past tense will be irrelevant, archaic, known only in legend. Everyone across time will be alive at the same moment, all of us collapsing into one shining transcendent community, which will know no heat, no pathos. People born before the common era, people in the Middle Ages, the Victorians, the Huns, the ones who clutch technology like oxygen masks, they will all breathe at the same time, they will all pump blood. There will only be now. And you will be here. The two of us will stand in the ugliest Garden of Eden. No one here believes in anything they can’t find in the search engine but our action will remedy that, we will show them the new religion, we will illustrate the perfect convergence of piety and science. No demagogues or deities or dupes. Just a simple way to solve E = mcdespaired
. Space and time manipulation means we can remain uncremated, means that so many wrongs might go extinct in the process because people will love their second chances. They’ll love this new life, they’ll rise to the occasion, it’s a way to reenter that passcode, it’s a way to navigate around with a blazing fast connection, to awaken and slough off that residue of cynicism, to reorient their senses of self. We’ll be able to swim through our own nervous systems. Can you imagine? And as we figure out who we are, as we remember that there’s good in our souls, everyone will be fused together into a single bright consciousness and in that moment, we will remember what it is to be happy.
