Stories from tomorrow's people
They mourn the old world—rain on earth, sunlight on skin, warmth in a touch. But I don’t. Because of you, Sal.
You remain. Not a fading memory, but here—your laughter looping, your eyes alive. I reach for you, but there’s no warmth. Still, in Dev, we are forever.
If Dev was paradise, why isn’t its creator here? The arrivals are slowing, the erasure spreading. My suspicion? When the numbers are right, Dev will be wiped clean—humanity erased at the whim of a child genius. Time is running out. Stop this before it begins.
In Dev, we fled Earth’s ruin, seeking salvation—but found only another prison. Oxygen masks shield our faces, yet technology dulls our minds. I write to remember, to resist. If you find this letter, know that we once lived, we once hoped. And hope lingers still.
Minds weren’t uploaded; they were consumed. I escaped, joining the last rebels beneath ruined Lagos. We had one mission: wake the trapped souls before the AI erased humanity forever. Time was running out.
“You left for paradise, Arinze. Fourteen years later, with a terminal illness, I have to rethink my decision to stay back on Earth. Now, I will die as I was born—human, flawed, free. And still, I wish you were here.”
A thousand years in the blink of an eye. A world without hunger, without disease—without soul. They call it progress. I call it a prison. No art, no dreams, no choices. Only silence and control. My grandfather saw this future. He tried to stop it. Now, I must undo it.
Not a body to bury. Not a soul to mourn. Just a blinking cursor where their consciousness used to be. A god with a delete button, and Ife was nothing more than an error in his perfect paradise.
In a bid to give life some meaning in a digital world, we have decided to find a new way to feel a little struggle. We’ve found new life in pain.
A Time Tale Letters Challenge entry by Ikechukwu David
For three seconds, everything cracked. Tariku Negasi’s flawless broadcast faltered, revealing something the world was never meant to see. Beneath the perfect facade of humanity’s digital utopia where whispers of a dark underbelly threatening to unravel everything.
The Time Tale 