A Letter from the Future
Frances Koziar
Dear Frances,
This is our third attempt to send letters back through the newest (4th) model of the transporter. Once again, I am writing to you, even if this letter will probably not arrive. But one of these days we’ll get it. I’m your descendant, hundreds of years from your time. Just had my 24th birthday. I admit these letters are the only time I can remember writing a page without emojis, but only straight letters will get through if anything does, so I will write the way people used to when you were young. And here I would put in a teasing winking emoji but alas, I doth write like the ancients.
Sometimes people ask what decade or century we wish we could have lived in in the past, but I can’t imagine living in your time or how you held onto hope through it. Today is our national day of rememberance for our history of injustice, and I wish I could show you how much better things will be: that it’ll be okay. We have so far to go still in my time; I don’t know how you survived yours, but I am here because you did, and I am so grateful for that even as my heart breaks.
I was taught in school about how disabled people like you were left behind once, how people told you you were worthless, and no one even cared that social assistance wasn’t enough to feed you. No one is ever worthless.
You lived at the beginning of the climatocolypse, and I wish you could have seen the end of it too. To see our vertical farms and how beautiful they look in the morning sunshine as they tower over Toronto, and the relief it is to have sea water desalinating technology widely available, and pacemakers in the oceans to keep the currents steady, and the tariffs that force companies to pay for green waste management of their own packaging, and how clean the oceans are after all those years of cleanup efforts and revitalization. It is a relief, too, to have established some sort of precarious peace between the countries of the world, even if we all have so much further to go to be able to live in this world community with so many different beliefs and opinions of what is and could be.
What I want to tell you most is that your people will be okay, and that most of the things you fought for did indeed happen, even if they happened generations too late for you, and so many other things I think you would have loved but never even imagined. Who can ever really imagine where technology will go?
Even reading your published work it is hard to see how you held onto hope. Your dreams were stronger than any of mine, strong enough to keep you going when there was no reason to believe things would ever change enough. I hope a dream is never the only thing keeping me alive. I wish yours hadn’t been either. I can’t imagine living in fear, with the privileged pitted against the underprivileged as if we don’t all have the same goals of love and peace and life. As if we aren’t all one, as you said so many times in your stories. Stories that inspire me still, and yet fill me with such grief for what you went through.
I wish I could tell you that women are safe now, that disabled people are valued, and that people are so much more okay with being different from one another, even though I can’t say that there isn’t still so much pain and trauma. I don’t think life can exist without those. But that’s also why therapy is covered for all now, because a couple generations ago people finally realized that when people have support than they are kinder and more powerful, and the whole community, the whole world, is better for it.
I’m so sorry that money mattered so much for you, that you had to do without our basic coverage of therapy and a studio apartment and food; it’s what frees me up to fight for what I believe in, to fight for change and new technologies to make life better for everyone, and to allow people to follow the pursuits they love no matter how niche they may be.
We’ve phased out individual cars without a permit since your time, so your daughter would probably have never died in that crash. We have transit instead that goes to rural areas and all the places your poverty stopped you from going, the places I wish I could take you. You didn’t even have online security yet, and the amount of misinformation back then is horrifying to me still: it’s a joke they still show us in elementary school, how those early deepfakes and AI news were like compared to reality, before they explain seriously that that’s why those early changes were so important. Even your food is confusing to me. Most people are vegetarian these days—climate action was the main drive of that change in your time, but the animal rights laws and the creation of the Person’s List that recognized the rights of personhood of certain species changed a lot too. Very few people use drugs like alcohol and tobacco, and so many of my favourite dishes didn’t even exist for you yet! We will have to figure out how to send meals back next.
I hope this letter reaches you. I rambled more this time. But this time I just feel so sad, and wanted to make you happy. I guess I just want to tell you, if you ever see this, that you inspire me still, hundreds of years later. When I feel hopeless, I think of how much worse what you survived was, and remember that I am living proof that you did survive, and so I must be able to too. We made it. Your descendants by blood and love and admiration are here. You did it. And I wish you could know that. I wish you could see the great things they have done, that they did because you lived. We made it because of you, and all those other people from your time who never stopped fighting even though I think I would have. Because how was hope ever enough? How did you manage living in fear of men, in fear of homelessness, in fear of it all being pointless? How did you get up every morning and fight one more day so that things would be better for us now?
I’m so sorry. There is nothing I can do but be part of these experiments, and keep writing letters that one of these days we’ll actually manage to get through the transporter. There is nothing I can do but remember you, and hope for you too in a sense, even though of course you made it, and I know how your story ends. But your story is beautiful, and it’s my story too. Everyone’s story really, because when people fall through the cracks, when people are crushed the way the world crushed you, everyone suffers.
Keep fighting. There is reason to hope. Things will get better, even if some of those changes are long after you are gone. I want you to know that they do happen. I want you to know that you do matter, and all the things you doubted were enough really did help get us here. I wish I could give you more. I wish I could save you, but I can only save my descendants I suppose, which are yours too. I can only pick up your torch and keep running, keep believing, keep striving for a better world, a world full of love and beauty. A world that hardly remembers what once kept you up at night.
That is all I have to give.
All my love, and all my faith,
Mohammix
