Notes from the beyond

By Ryan Kresse

Greetings, friends. I most pleased to be writing to you from the year 2115. You read that correctly. I am writing to you from the future.

Your esteemed editor Mr. Michael Timm contacted me about writing something about Freedom for his website (people with websites can bend the laws of the Universe, it’s one of the laws of the Universe). I was deeply honored, of course. And curious. And hesitant. Not because Freedom is a complex subject to which finer minds than mine have provided abundant insight, but because I might let slip some details about what the future will be like. If I inadvertently mention what will happen in the future then you would have the opportunity to go ahead and change it. And we can’t have that. (Of course, if Existence is completely deterministic then you can go ahead and do what you want because it doesn’t matter. But if we live in a decoherent, Schrödinger’s cat kind of a Universe, then all bets are off. Or on. Both, probably.) Regardless, Mr. Timm was most vigorous in his assurances that no word that could possibly alter the future would slip past his vigilant eyes.

The good news is that there is a future. You will be relieved to know that it’s fantastic. We have perfect freedom.

In 2032 an Asteroid hit the Earth, wiping out 88 percent of the population. Maybe that doesn’t sound fantastic, and at first it wasn’t. Humanity struggled to survive. But survive we did. And I’m not alone in thinking that we’re much better for it. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that, “Hell is other people.” And since we’re all other people to other people, and since there are a lot fewer other people now, it turns out that he was right.

We also got very lucky because mostly the smart people survived. So instead of the dystopic hellscape depicted in films of your era such as Mad Max, we are a utopian agrarian society. I use the term “society” loosely because we mostly keep to ourselves. We live in harmony with Nature. I have a fairly large farm, which keeps me busy. My nearest neighbor is three days away by bicycle. I get power from a few wind turbines and solar panels. The Earth has healed itself from the scars of the Industrial Age and subsequent abuse. Most of us raise bees. The rest of us are generally involved in some sort of bee-related profession. Raising bees, studying bees, training bees to perform tricks, dressing them up in little hats, finding new uses for honey and beeswax. Did you know you can make clothes from beeswax and power a starship with fuel made from honey? You can. We’re like the George Washington Carver of bees. It’s great fun.

Except for the zombies. The Asteroid that destroyed most of the human population of Earth brought along a space virus that turned 80 percent of the rest of us into zombies. They do what you might expect zombies to do. They maraud. They eat the flesh of the living. The living become zombies. The usual. Fire is a fairly effective weapon. Lasers are good too, and firing a laser gun is much cooler than poking at them with a flaming stick. And lasers are better because zombies hunt in packs. You run and shoot, run and shoot until you can get somewhere safe-ish.

Eventually they get tired and wander off. One night I decided to follow them, which was reckless, but it turns out that they stick together in little groups in the woods. They bring back food for the rest of the zombies that didn’t go out hunting that night. Surprisingly, they don’t just eat brains, but consume every part of the human. And they're social. Zombies are very social, really. They have quite a little home life. If I didn’t know better, I’d say they communicate with each other. I almost envy them. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that we are now perfectly free. There’s no one around to tell us what to do and what not to do.

The last time a bunch of us got together was when the aliens landed back in 2097. At first they were all like, “We come in peace.” And we were all like, “Hey, that’s cool. Have some honey.” And they were like, “Super, have you ever been, like, outside your solar system?” And we were like, “Nope. Is it cool?” And they were like, “Totally, guys. Do you want to go?” And we were like “Sounds like fun.” And they were like, “Hop on board our spaceship.” And we were all like, “Wow! This is crazy fun.” And they were like, “Ha! We were totally lying. We’re going to enslave you.” And we were like, “Not if we enslave you first.” And they were like, “Dudes, that’s not even cool. We’re going to eat you.” And we were like, “Not if we eat you first.” And they were like, “But you wouldn’t eat us. You’re a peaceful, loosely connected agrarian society with vestigial clannish tendencies.”

Anyway, the aliens were delicious. And they left behind some cool alien technology including a spaceship and some laser guns. We left behind our vestigial clannish tendencies. And we tried to leave the Earth behind too.

Space travel is fantastic. Thanks to the aliens, we can now travel at faster-than-light speeds. Some of us can. There’s only the one spaceship. I don’t know quite how it works, but I assume it has something to do with wormholes. Anyway, we can go wherever we want. I have been to the other edge of our galaxy and back a few times. Space is beautiful. Really beautiful. So tiresomely beautiful. My third trip out and back I started to wonder if there’s anything outside our Universe. Maybe it’s all some weird, empty hologram. Don’t misunderstand. I’m not complaining. How could I? But space is really nothing but stuff that will kill you dead interrupted by other stuff that will kill you dead. I know that some of you might give anything to go into space. Space exploration is a noble, noble cause that I wholeheartedly support. But space is so completely huge, and everything is so utterly far away. And it’s really empty. We didn’t see any sign of the aliens or any other civilizations. If you’re going to travel through space for any significant distances, bring a friend and a deck of cards is all I’m saying.

Still, we have perfect freedom here on Earth, here in the future. There’s no war, except with the zombies. No disease, with the exception being the zombie virus. No want, no need. We leave each other alone. That’s what freedom is, right? The freedom to not need anything from anyone. The freedom to be left alone. And not alone like that Thoreau guy who went off to the woods to live deliberately but went home on the weekends to see his friends and then wrote a book about it. That’s not freedom, that’s performance art.

I don’t really blame Thoreau for going home on the weekends. I kind of miss people. I can only imagine what it was like back in your day—walking through a big city, meeting strangers. And all those voices. A whole world filled with people speaking dozens of languages. How brilliant would that have been? Talking to people you can’t understand and figuring out some way to communicate.

You probably live in a city or have been to one. I live near what was once Milwaukee. Milwaukee has changed a lot from the old pictures I’ve been able to find. The buildings are gone. It’s warmer than it used to be. I’ve never seen snow... There’s a lot more vegetation. The people are gone. From what I read it was the people that made Milwaukee a wonderful place to be. The same could’ve been said of any city, I suppose. I haven’t actually talked to anyone in probably a month. I talk to Ralph my robot butler. Ralph is very concerned with pressing my shirts. But since my shirts are made of spun beeswax, not only do they not need pressing, they don’t survive it.

There was a writer and critic back in your day, maybe a little before your day. His name was Mikhail Bakhtin. He was big on the idea of dialogue. I’m sure you’ve heard of him. I only have a few fragments of one of his books. From what I can understand, Bakhtin thought that instead of hell being other people, other people are life. Dialogue, other voices, other people are the only way we can exist.

Blasphemy, I thought. I’ve got my bees and my wind turbines and my laser guns. I don’t need other people. Other people are the problem. But now I think there might be something to what he had to say. I mean it’s so quiet here. Sure the air is clear and the water is finally clean. We live sustainably and still have fantastic technology. We can travel anywhere in the Universe. Is that freedom? We don’t really have a government. There’s no money. We all worship in our own way if we choose to because what else is there? Freedom of speech only makes sense if there is someone else to speak to.

What if our very existence depends on other people? And not like for food or sex or stuff, but just to talk with each other. That means we’d have to rely on other people. That means we’d be responsible for them in the same way we’re responsible for ourselves. But that’s not freedom either, is it? It can’t be. We in the future are perfectly free. We’ve solved all our problems.

Still… I really miss talking to people. Even if it was just a stupid conversation about bees. Hell, I’d talk to a zombie if it would stop trying to eat my brains for half a second. I mean, yeah, you can always talk to a dolphin. Back in 2052 someone taught dolphins to talk. You’d think that would be awesome, but they’re squeaky and always demanding fish and going on and on about how great the ocean is. Dolphins are very smart, but they’re super smug and really friggin’ annoying. So maybe if you could change one thing about the future, don’t teach the dolphins to talk.

The light is fading. The zombies will be out soon. More brains, more flesh of the living to consume, more new zombies. It’s a completely unsustainable lifestyle, if you ask me. Someday they’re going to run right out of people. But at least they’ve got other zombies to hang around with.

I don’t know how much longer I can hold them off.

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Ryan Kresse graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee with a degree in English literature. Most days you can find him at Discovery World Museum working as a copywriter. Ryan believes in the awesome power of being awesome and hopes to one day be inducted into the Hall of Fame Hall of Fame. Maybe even the Hall of Fame Hall of Fame Hall of Fame. Ryan and his wife live in Whitefish Bay with their two standard poodles. Their oldest poodle, Jak, will be attending Yale in the fall.