Dear antyphayse

Younger antyphayes, older antyphayes here.

I remember receiving this message but only vaguely. Perhaps an effect of the tablet? More likely I dismissed it, put it down to a prank hatched. It sounds like one of mine but it couldn’t be! Little did I know it was my BEST ever. A message from the future. But of course, I dismissed it! Even worse, I used it. I rolled it into that story I wrote about the future, the one with the terrific uprising, a revolution of trans-dimensional aliens, and the ultimate horror, in which hope gave way to . . .

But you know all this, don’t you?

No, I know all this, you haven’t read it yet. Reading it. Sorry, this is more confusing than I remember. It was so much simpler then. A message appears hovering in the dark, I’m drunk but receptive. I copy down everything, even this rambling preamble. What did it say? Don’t go to the States. Don’t buy those tickets. And of all the things you must not do, the most important: don’t make that speech. A lot of do nots. From where I’m standing the rule of the negative seems best. If I could just stop you from making all those mistakes, maybe you would make other ones, even more resounding failures.

Consider this: One hundred years ago, the US government announced it would develop rockets to lob A-bombs. A few years later that same government started what they called then their “manned spaceflight program”. But this was smokescreen, to cover the profits to be made by the merchants of death as much as the hucksters of life. And they didn’t even have to fake the moon landing! Well, not all of it. Beneath the veil of the white heat of science they built the bombs that never went away, let me tell you. I know your dreams, of runaway climate change and scrabbling for food and medicine.

Well you get that, and nukes too!

Fuck knows we tried to stop them, we marched, we occupied, we even started burning shit. But they started shooting and by the time we got around to finishing it, it was too late. We were finished without too much fuss. The sound of a rocket is deafening if you’re close. The blast though, there is nothing like it but another one! Lucky that, that this storm raged for a few hours and we were done. So much luck.

I’ve mentioned the trans-dimensional aliens, yeah? They turned up about a year later. They apologised for their tardiness, said it had something to do with an unstable temporal-matrix-field around these events. Something to do with the nukes I suspect, but they never made this clear. So, we begged them to help us and they gave us these tablets. They said it probably wouldn’t matter.

And you know what. Just when we got them we began to remember. We all remembered the spooky letters at a distance, bobbing around like so many questions. And still they were the only answer we were offered, ever. Do this. Don’t do that. The diktat of an unwritten future. A coalescing rumour of disaster. There it was. I can’t write anymore, you won’t believe it. I know what happens.