Dear Aisling,

I am a scholar, and recently I discovered your website in an Internet archive. I’m studying history, and I was wondering if you could tell me a bit about your life. It has taken me several months to learn your language. Here we speak a Global tongue, which I’ve read is similar to that of your modern day “Chinese.” I am quite interested in how you managed to survive in a world where you do not speak the same language. How is it that you’ve managed to communicate?

I live in the region formerly known as “Alberta, Canada,” which is where you live now. I live on a mountain, and from the West facing window, I can see the ocean. Sometimes, with all of the floods and tsunamis, it threatens to climb up the mountain and wash into the prairies. But it hasn’t yet.

Our government is controlled by one Global council, that was established after the third world war. They mandate pretty much everything. It is an honour to work for the government. I, myself, submit my research to them to help them run the world better.

The main conflict afflicting us these days are terrorist threats by reactionaries. They believe that the assimilation of former culture is wrong, and that we should be preserving the old values of your world. Many of them have been gathered and sent to the part of the world you know as “Africa.” Africa proved to be too much of a challenge for your generation, and by the end of the third world war it had been transformed into a nuclear wasteland. Now it is the site of the largest prison on the planet, and also contains laboratories for experiments comparing the DNA structure of your people to that of ours.

It has changed quite a bit, they’ve reported. Vaccinations were banned shortly after the break out of the war, and our immune systems developed a way of protecting ourselves without that ancient technology. There are still diseases, resembling what you would know as cancer, caused by the rapid changing of our DNA due to exposure to dangerous chemicals used as warfare, but AIDS is no longer a threat. The government took care of that by commanding quarantine in 2076, and waiting for the virus to run its course.

I’d best be wrapping this up now, as too much information about the future can prove to be harmful to less-developed mind of your century. Just a tip- learn to use the extra 90% of your brain, it will be useful in the future.

Sincerely,

A Future Friend

What do you think the future will be like?