Week 13 Theme 1

Four linked themes. Today is theme #1.

Time

Sent by Casey Chou (local age 27) on October 9, 2510, UTC

Received by Cameron v.d. Boor (local age 33) on March 13, 2515, UTC

Dear Cameron,

It’s hard to imagine that you will be a parent when this message gets to you. To think that we were only middle school students when we had to say goodbye forever, me, about to board the bus to the elevator, you, watching as you held my half of the fluorescent bulb we pulled from an old man’s trash and I, yours. True, the time we spent apart was not in silence, but hurtling along at an unimaginable 0.5c through empty skies, invisible to your most powerful telescopes, I must be content to read about your life in slow motion, and always years too late.

I suppose that will become the sacrifice of our generation: that we volunteered entire families and communities to ride the space elevator for the last time, uprooting tens of thousands of people from their friends, knowing that they will never see each other living and breathing again.

We were happy with our holovids and our five hour latencies. I could hear about your day, and I knew we’d go exploring soon. I count myself among the fortunate ones – my closest friends are here with me. Others suffered more. But when we left the solar system, not for almost a millennium had time stretched so far that I must recall what I said eight years ago to make sense of your most recent reply.

I’m glad your boy problems ended in college, but I want to know who’s in your life now, and I have to hope that you put it in your personal record sometime in the past few years, or else I will be waiting much longer to see your family. To think that in the time it takes us to have a conversation, entire nations can rise and fall, entire wars fought, entire ideologies debated, entire lives passed, I fear that this message may have lost its reader, but I have hope that humanity has preserved peace.

What can one write, well knowing that the other person might no longer live? How can we perpetually write our last words to every one of our separated friends? I can only hope that my records will cover the thoughts that I forget to convey here.

Love,

Casey