If this letter reaches anyone at all, it means I am either gone, lost, or perhaps worse, forgotten. My name is Raia, and I was born in a time that no longer exists. The year was 2025 when I first began my journey, but I am writing this in the year 3025. A thousand years have passed, but for me, it feels like only yesterday.

I suppose I should start at the beginning. I was always different, quiet, observant, lost in the world of books and numbers. While other kids made friends, I found companionship in the pages of scientific journals, theories about time and space, and the questions of the universe no one could answer. I never needed friends, or at least, that’s what I told myself. Science was the comfort I needed.

Then there was my grandfather. He was a genius, one the world never truly recognized. He was the kind of man who saw things others couldn’t, who spoke of possibilities no one dared to dream of. When I was ten, he disappeared. No warning, no trace,just gone. My parents grieved, the world moved on, but I never did.

Years later, I found his journal hidden beneath the floorboards of his study. The pages were worn, filled with scribbled equations and frantic notes about a machine, one that could supposedly glimpse into the future. “The Future is never what we expect,” he had written in bold, almost desperate strokes. But his final entry was incomplete. He had failed. Or at least, that’s what it looked like.

I couldn’t let it go. I had to know what he was trying to build, why he vanished, what he saw. So I spent months decoding his formulas, understanding his theories, and piecing together his vision. Slowly, the machine took shape in my grandfather’s old workshop. I improved on his work, corrected his calculations, and finally, after what felt like an eternity, it was ready.

The moment I activated it, everything changed. The machine roared to life, glowing with an eerie blue light. I remember feeling a pull, as if the universe itself had taken hold of me. Then, silence. Darkness. And then:

I was here.

The year 3025. A thousand years had passed in the blink of an eye, and I had been thrown into a world I barely recognized.

At first, it was everything I had imagined. Towering skyscrapers reached beyond the clouds, floating highways carried vehicles that defied gravity, and the air buzzed with the hum of technology. There were no diseases, no hunger, no pollution. Everything was efficient, automated, perfect. Or so it seemed.

But perfection is a lie.

Beneath the shimmering lights and sleek machines, they were cracks. Humans were different, cold, detached. They no longer spoke as we did; conversations were rare, replaced by silent communication through neural interfaces. People no longer dreamed, no longer created. Art, music, literature, all were obsolete, deemed unnecessary by the algorithms that governed their lives. Emotions were regarded as things of the past.

And then there were the ones who didn’t fit. The ones who rejected the system. They were few but they were there as the rejects. They lived in the shadows, disconnected from the grand networks, struggling to survive. They told me the truth: technology had solved every problem except the one that mattered most, human nature.

Loneliness still existed. Inequality had only changed forms. People were controlled, not by rulers, but by the very technology meant to free them. The world was no longer run by governments, but by artificial intelligence too advanced for humans to challenge. Decisions were no longer made by people, but by calculations that determined what was “best” for the collective.

I realized then that my grandfather had known. He had seen this future and tried to warn us. But no one listened. And now, I was trapped in it.

I don’t know if I will ever find a way back. My machine was destroyed in the journey, scattered into the very fabric of time itself. But I will try. If my grandfather could glimpse into the future, maybe I can find a way to bend time once more and change the sickening fate that awaits humanity.

Until then, I write this letter, hoping someone will find it, Hoping someone will understand.

The future is not what we expect. It never was.

Raia.

Written by Rasheedat Aguda