POSTED. 26 August, 2075.
RECEIVED. 5 July, 2022.
I am dying…
Hello. You don’t know me. But I’m going to die soon.
Relax, it’s no tragedy. I’m not sick, I’m not scheduled for lethal injection. What I am, is ninety-nine years old.
How many years have I got left? No-one except the guy upstairs really knows. I’d say fewer than the total number of Transformers movies but more than the number of good Transformers movies. Look at me, remembering temporally appropriate references!
The best thing about extreme old age is the same thing that’s great about extreme youth. At 9 or 99, people don’t get awkward when you start singing Frosty the Snowman.
You get a nod, a playful smile and an ‘Isn’t that cute?’.
It’s just that when you’re ninety-nine, sometimes what’s actually playing is Silent Night.
Who am I?
They say I’m one of the last people alive who remembers what life was before computers.
I tell children this and they look at me as if I’d just told them that back in the 20th, people didn’t have faces and drew new ones on every day.1 (←←← Seriously, read the footnotes)
In 1985, eighty-eight years ago, my father bought me my first computer from Maxwell’s Computer Centre in Abbotsford. It was a Commodore 64.
Cutting edge, yet still a staggeringly primitive form of what it would eventually become, it was the greatest thing I had ever laid my young eyes on. I would sit in our living room agog; wondering what wondrous technologies would exist by the time I was an old man.
Well here I am. And I can honestly say that even my innocent pre-internet imagination (I’ve had sexual fantasies using just memories and thoughts) could not have conceived of the ability to send information back in time.
Everyone calling it future blogging, then flogging. And that sticking? I would have given long odds on that too.
I certainly couldn’t have imagined that it would be achieved by using a mirrored stream of tachyons to orbit the information in quantum superposition around the event horizon of a stable, self-contained black hole the width of a banana.
That’s a joke. I have no idea how it works. I’m just quoting Star Trek.
Don’t judge me. You don’t even know how your iPhone works, and that’s a shitty little baby’s toy to me!2 (←←← If you are not reading these you are missing quality gags.)
Glib disses aside, do you want to know who I am?
I’m an old man. I’m from the future. And I know shit you’d betray your second favourite parent to hear.
I post these flogs on a device beyond your imagining, possibly telepathically.
Look, I already know which of you will click this button. But causation is screwier than you think it is. So I still have to ask.
And I will be posting here until Scotty beams me up...
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