Confession: the Janky Time Machine has a bias. Point it at “the future” and it beelines straight for whichever timeline has the most dramatic lighting. Abandoned malls. Subscription oxygen. You’ve read the posts.
This trip was different, and I’d love to say it was skill, but the temporal ballast tank sprung a leak (again) and we drifted somewhere off the usual doom circuit. No sirens. No ash. Somebody was repairing a wind turbine while arguing about playoff seeding. People were having kids. On purpose. Enthusiastically, even.
While I was looking for duct tape, I found a recording. A father reading a letter to his unborn child. It’s about the century that nearly convinced his entire generation to stop having kids at all, and the people who kept going anyway.
I brought it back. It’s 2 minutes long. Watch it here:
Every questionable future I’ve ever reported from was easy’ish to believe. Dystopia is just the present with the contrast turned up. But this place required something harder: a few billion small decisions to keep showing up. Nobody in that timeline thought they were being optimistic. They just weren’t done yet.
The machine’s leaking coolant into the past again, which the manual insists is “temporally self-cleaning.” I have doubts.
Anyway. Somewhere between here and there, a kid gets told: you’re going to love it here. Wild thing to promise. Wilder thing to build.
P.S. Hand on the temporal regulator: this artifact is mine. THE INHERITANCE is my submission to the #FutureVisionXPRIZE, a competition asking filmmakers to imagine a future actually worth wanting. If it moves you even a little, the most useful thing you can do is watch it on YouTube, give it a like here, a like there, and send it to one person. The judges count numbers. Unlike my chronometer, theirs work.