(The Cosmic Microwave Background sound is heard for five seconds, as if tuning into a radio station. Then, the sound gradually fades out as the narrator speaks.)
The year is four thousand, three hundred and fifty-one. When recording novels, we write numbers in letters nowadays; we don’t mix mathematics with literature. There won’t be any casual intro either. No one will wake up, put on his slippers and make himself coffee, only for you to gradually realize that his coffee is not a normal coffee but a futuristic one. From the go, I must tell you we live in what you’d call a utopia. Now, if you’re inquisitive, which I’m assuming you are, since you chose to pick this book from all the sensuous activities of your era, you’ve probably already come up with two unavoidable questions: How come I’m addressing an audience from the past? or, from your point of view: How come I’m writing you from the future? And secondly: Does it take more than two thousand years to reach a utopia? For some, it might seem too long of a period the one needed by the world to snap out of its stupidity, while for others it’s a relief to know that humanity survived itself, that we could at last learn to live in harmony.
Answering your first question: There are no parallel universes. I also must apologize if the tone of my writing is paternalistic, but I’m not particularly happy about the task that has been given to me: Retroinstruction. In simple words, it means interfering with the past in a non-invasive way so we can better our present. It’s almost a quixotic idea because too much effort must be put in to get minimal results. Yes, a few atomic catastrophes have been avoided thanks to this method, but there’s almost nothing you could do in your time that our technology can’t fix. Evolution is a power that can’t be contained, and the aim of this novel is simply to show you that. So, the theory of parallel universes is just another mishap of humans having a brain: Sometimes we get too carried away with our imagination. Even logically speaking, there’s no way there are multiple universes, or multiverses, and even if there were, each would be a single universe, disconnected from the rest, which means that, ultimately, it doesn’t matter. We have enough dealing with our reality to burden ourselves with improbable hypotheses that have no influence whatsoever on us. There is no way other universes, if they exist, can connect with ours, and if we happen to find out that there are parallel universes, then they will simply become part of our universe and will stop being universes because the logical concept of a universe is that there is just one. So, enough with that false paradox so popular in your era.
How am I communicating with you? How is a book from the future available in your network? That would take another book to explain, a scientific one that you aren’t able to intellectually grasp for now, but I’ll explain it in a nutshell and then we’ll move on to the novel. The format of a novel was chosen because it’s so popular in your era. You’re in an empathetic evolutionary period, where intellect is continually sabotaged by emotions, so novels are a good way of showing you something relevant in a way that your conditioned feelings won’t sabotage.
So, time is a continuum in which information from our present coexist: sensory observations; what we see, hear and feel right now. There’s also information from our past: records, memories, etc., and information from the future: predictions, and speculations. Now perspective comes into play. The more we approach our present, the less reliable the information is because we have no perspective at all. We’re standing at the epicenter of the event; we’re part of it so we can’t, logically speaking, analyze it, because the mere analysis of it would change its nature, the same as measuring an electron changes its charge. Basically speaking, we can’t trust what we see right now, but we can trust what we saw in the past and what we’ll see in the future. Now, looking into the future is a little trickier. For vision into the past, we only need reliable recording methods, which you already have in your era. Information can be preserved intact forever with your current technology. But for vision into the future, a good observation tool, a reliable speculum, is needed. The most advanced tool we have, even now, is our brain, so we tapped into it. There are sometimes great leaps in mental evolution done by individuals. These evolved thoughts are lost in an unreceptive society; what’s commonly referred to as being ahead of one’s time. In this way, some of your intellectuals unconsciously left feedback outlets in your information network. These feedback have frequencies and amplitudes that we need to sync with if we want to transmit any information, so we simply can’t send whatever information we wish. Language and intention must be respected. We hack into any literary work with the perfect format for our message. In this case, we found this sci-fi novel called Regression, which has some accurate insights into the future, and which I’m basically overwriting. It’s a complex process of synchronization to achieve cohesiveness; kind of like having the chord arrangements of a song and just tampering with the melody. That’s why it was really important to find a good book in the first place. As I mentioned, the novel format is the most efficient one, because it’s ubiquitous in your era and it’s the most intellectually evolved form of expression you have at the moment, so I adapted my message to it.
To clarify how this overwriting process works, I need to remind you that memory is very malleable. Generally, we remember memories of memories, until we can actually change our past through remembering. The words a writer writes take a new meaning once they are on the page. The writer rarely remembers what he wrote during that trance, although he remembers what he wrote about. That’s where I come in. The themes and topics of the writing are the same, but the accuracy of the information is given by me. This is commonly called inspiration, but it’s not to be confused with the divine inspiration of an imagined god. Gods and prophecies were just a deceit performed by people who understood the mechanics of writing and the elusive nature of memory. Maybe I’ll discuss religion further on, but it suffices to say for now that today’s society is one hundred percent agnostic: We don’t know and will never know about things we don’t see, although we can speculate and theorize metaphysically.
The process of overwriting starts at the moment when the writer uploads his or her book to the internet. If any hard copies exist, they remain unchanged. Only digital format can be tampered with, which is another limitation we have when overwriting. If the book is published both online and offline, the versions coexist as different editions of the same book. That is why we don’t alter books whose originals existed massively in written form at the moment of their online publication. The writer can be deceived through this process of retroactive memory and believe to be the author of the book, but we can’t deceive third parties that have interpreted and analyzed the book. Again, this is a matter of perspective: It’s easier to be objective when we watch someone doing something than when we are the ones doing it. In a way, we could say that our whole life is a trance, and we seldom snap out of it to properly analyze it through objective thinking. Generally, we act first and create memories later, while we sleep or reminisce. Today, it is very easy to change someone’s memories by inputting virtual imagery while they sleep. The nature of memory is so intangible, that today’s psychologists consider it to be a mere psychic construct, a trick our minds play on us for the sake of sanity. This trick is similar to a movie, which ends at a certain climatic point instead of playing on forever. Our brains can only cope with neatly defined chunks of reality. Psychologists call this: the glass in the ocean phenomenon. Our brains can only intake small quantities at a time, but they are very powerful and allow us to focus on a glass lying at the bottom of an ocean. We can analyze what’s inside the glass but we can’t fathom the whole ocean. Therefore, we build imaginary glasses wherever we can, so we are able to comprehend what’s inside. This is due to the analytical nature of our brains, which tend towards concentration of thought. Today, however, we propound dissipation of thought as a more valuable tool for understanding the world and ourselves.
Moving on, feedback is just a form of quantum entanglement. Energy and information are narrowly interconnected. There’s basically no way of carrying information without energy. Particles carry information in the same way red blood cells carry oxygen to the brain, only that particles can travel very fast and thus connect two points two thousand years apart in a matter of minutes. In our present time, we’re entangled with our future and thus we double-check all of our projects to the point that we lowered the risk of failure to a zero point zero nine percent. There is still a slight percentage of error left because of the unpredictability of nature and the possible interference we may have while communicating with the future or past. The maximum lapse of time we can communicate with practically no interference is a thousand years, but even a lapse of two thousand years is possible with today’s technology, so I’m positive that you’ll receive this message in good enough condition.
To answer your second question: Humans can’t destroy the world. They can, and they are destroying themselves every day in your era, but the self-destructive instinct overpowers the destructive one. Just look at your laws; they’re harsher towards people who harm their loved ones, which means that there’s a tendency in humans to harm what’s closest to them. There is almost no randomness in violence. People don’t kill for fun unless they’re psychically ill.
In your time, you’re going in the right direction in the treatment of psychiatric illnesses. Early diagnosis is very important, together with hormonal treatment, to make up for natural deficiencies. Hormonal, as well as genetic enhancement, was an important phase in our evolution, and thanks to that, nowadays, we’re a healthy species living in harmony with the world. After having read this novel, you won’t be able to deny the harmony in which we live, but I’m guessing that some of you may now be questioning its ethicality. Is harmony ethical? That’s the whole point of this book. To convince your hearts of the goodness of harmony and why it should be embraced.
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