Joining my clan to participate in this letter-writing tradition was the easy part. What is difficult is synthesizing my thoughts humanly. With the overbearing technology demanding to perform every mundane task for us here, even the basic things like thinking clearly and articulating come less naturally. I’ll give it a shot though, because it’s worth writing to you

It tickles my fancy to imagine who you are, dear reader: a nosy neighbor rummaging through my sparse belongings or a distant individual, centuries apart, from a far-off land discovering these words and considering them an ancient relic. Either way, in Dev, these letters have become a way of telling our story, you know, so that others do not tell it for us. My name is Zara and writing preserves my hope, gently steering me to hang on to the thread of possibilities of redemption.

Dev is in a sordid state, not much better than Earth. Oxygen masks—meant to shield us from the toxic fumes—cloak our faces, worse than the COVID-19 masks used many decades ago. People are walking zombies now, their intellect replaced by technology, the same way they used to be glued to their screens on Earth, always there but never present. The lines between consciousness and reality are increasingly blurred. There’s an expressionless, almost robotic state pulsing through us—a deviation from the original plan for life, all proof that running away from problems is far more exhausting than running to the true Saviour.

I often sit underneath the Technicon makeshift trees, the unforgiving wind brushing against my cheeks as I give myself to musings and brood on the maybes. Maybe if we weren’t so stiff-necked, the outcomes would have been different. Maybe if we weren’t so indulgent in pride and greed, we wouldn’t have attempted to be Lord over our lives and create an existence on another planet independent of influence and rules. Maybe, oh, I cannot go on, because then I would break down in tears and who would be strong for my grey and aged Nana?

On the other side of regret is the light at the end of the tunnel. There are signs of hope; a flower sprouting defiantly through cracks in the bricks, whispers of glitches in the system that suggest a way out, and Nana’s smile. Yes, Nana smiled today for the first time in months—a sad, wistful expression, one of longing and reflection. Granted, it was barely a trace of a curve of her parched trembling lips, but I’ll take it.

I was an Environmental Science student back then, so the climate degradation conundrum aches my heart the most. For a world where we were promised babbling brooks and flourishing forests, this does not cut it. Breathing the polluted air is labourious and especially dangerous for the elderly ones like my Nana. I hear her wheezing now and then as I write, her chest heaving up and down in a
desperate attempt to fill her lungs with oxygen. It concerns me how it has now metamorphosed into a very violent cough.

Oh no! I have to go now…

Written by Esther Owo