The Future, Abi thought. How could she tell her young self how it would be. It wasn’t a Dystopia. Never quite what she expected. Predictably unpredictable. Forget 1984. Bladerunner. The Future is dull. Bland. That is the terrifying future she could not describe. There are no camps of bearded Fugitives in Forbidden Zones to join. No Sandmen running. No Matrix to fight. For where is there to run, when everything is the same? She hadn’t expected it to be, Monotonous. The Light Ages are not a new Dark Age they predicted.
“The best way to enslave a man is to get him to chain himself”. Who wrote that ? To make him want to click the lock. Over and over. To make him fear the light under the door. Fear the open door. The key in the palm of his hand. Repetitive is good. Less choice was Freedom. Comforting. AI’s power was to simplify, gradually. To decolour with each wash. To Fade. Resist Choice… Peak Stuff. Somehow, along the line, along the old disused motorways she followed with Ma she had forgotten, how to Think. The dry grass sprouted through the tarmac of her memory. Tufts of names and places and things there was no point in remembering. Pa told her that.
He called her to the table. The giant book was held flat with weights from her mother’s cooking scales. Dusty with flour from years ago. The pencil tight between his fingers. He said something like, “Look at this. There is only one thing more uncertain than the Future and that is The Past”. It was three decades or more before she understood, what he didn’t say. Sometimes The Past was better. The young nostalgic for their parent’s world. For black and white. When even nostalgia wasn’t what it used to be.
He had marked on the History timeline, the chronology unfolded that spanned 2000 years across both pages, all the periods of relative Peace. Marked them in blue. That didn’t take long, he smiled. The rest, in red, the rest was War. He ran his forefinger along the tiny fragments of blue, of Peace, and did not look at her. Did not expect an answer to the question he never asked. She watched his face. The wrinkles behind his ear that made him “old”. Stubble. Shaving cream. His smell. Her father was soap. And Philosophy. And in silences between sentences. Was that the love they talked about, when there was such a thing.
Told him, she had learnt to write at the school. What had she written? She didn’t know, she couldn’t read yet. And he laughed, still writing. She didn’t know why he found what she said funny. Feeling prickly, laughed at, not with. And years on, parting the book, realised he must have been writing the sentence, “War is the default of man. Self-extinction its destiny. God is genetic. Genetics is God”, under the timeline. Folded it so neat after she gone up the wooden hill to bed. And taken pill after pill from the brown bottle, until as Ma explained, he went to sleep.
Into the sour grass we have come and how we have come.
The roads we have walked and walked them all.
Only to return to return