"Oh look, it opens up!" "Hello Emily." "Hiiiii!" "One day, when you are old enough, you will be impregnated with a perfect clone of yourself." "You will later upload all of your memories into this healthy new body." "One day, long after that, you will repeat this process all over again." "Through this cloning process, Emily, you will hope to live forever." "I had lunch today!" "I am a third generation Emily, contacting you from 227 years into your future." "And I would like you to know that everything is going well in the transfer and cloning process, with very few signs of mental deterioration." "Is that grandma?" "No Emily, i am not your grandmother." "In a sense, you are mine." "I am Emily." "Emily." "For those who cannot afford the cloning process, many of our elderly undergo a full digital transfer of consciousness, where they can experience a safe, extended lifespan of hundreds of years." "Our grandfather's digital consciousness currently resides in this cube, where I upload the latest films and books for him to enjoy every week." "Grandpa!" "We are also able to download correspondence from him." "Over 1,000 letters were received during his first hour in storage, as this was approximately four year's time inside the cube." "I will read one of his letters to you now:" ""Oh." "Oh god." "Oh god." "Oh god." "Oh my god." "Holy mother of god." "Oh." "Oh." "Oh." "Oh god."" "For end-of-life procedures for our less affluent citizens in the lower classes, the face of a deceased loved one can be peeled off, preserved, and stretched over the head of a simple animatronic robot, so they can still be a part" "of someone's life." "Our view-screens allow us to witness any event in history by reordering the light impressions recorded on the subatomic particles that are in constant chaos all around us." "It is how I am watching you now, Emily." "It is how we watch everything in your time." "Our more recent history is often just comprised of images of other people watching view-screens." "Do you like my cars?" "How I'm contacting you today though, Emily, is through experimental time travel." "Time travel for physical beings is a much more difficult process than sending a message." "If the position of the orbiting earth is not accurately calculated, a person can be sent off the planet." "Many of our brave test clones are also still regularly crushed beneath the ground." "Or accidentally deposited hundreds of thousands of years into the past." "Time travel is very often unpredictable, and still extremely dangerous." "Emily, I shall now use time travel to bring you to my current location in time." "Hey!" "Butterflies!" "Oh!" "I saw some pink ones!" "The people of your time were engaged with something called the Internet." "Welcome, Emily, to the outernet." "We are now connected through a neural network." "Green." "Blue!" "Some lines are coming out." "Yes, Emily prime, to the people of your time, our technology must seem like magic." "And brown and brown and green and blue and green..." "That's all the colors I got." "For all of its magic, the outernet can be a sad place." "Many lonely people from the lower classes have disappeared into its safe infinity to be never heard from again." "Look!" "I drawed a triangle!" "I drew a snake boy." "But some day you have to not make a snake boy." "Because yesterday i didn't see any snake boy but you made one." "Yes." "Can I do your other." "Golden round things?" "I have no idea what you're talking about." "Wiggle wiggle wiggle!" "Ok." "I have many memories that i would like to share with you now, Emily." "We can go visit them together, like seeing pictures in a book." "Please follow me into the window." "Circle!" "When I was your age, there was a controversial new exhibit in the modern art museum." "An artist placed a clone on display in a stasis tube." "A child without a brain that the public could watch grow old in real time." "Can you smell the floor Polish?" "The museum's antiseptic but musty odor of countless generations in passing." "What is his name?" "Museum visitors nicknamed the body "David,"" "and it became a popular attraction." "Regular visitors ate lunch in his wing." "Classrooms of children came to learn about anatomy." "People who'd speak quietly to him in the night." "People who'd pay him a visit whenever they found themselves back in the city and remembered he was there." "It has a new one, it says its old." "Yes." "David grows older and older until he dies at the age of seventy two." "He is quietly removed from display without publicity, as per the artist's original instructions." "He is mourned and deeply missed throughout the city." "I can still remember its eyes..." "Its blinking eyes." "Eyes!" "There's something in my museum and they don't move." "And I hear somebody talking a lot." "Yes." "That is the memory i just shared with you." "Because I have brought you inside of it, you are now mistaking the memory for your own." "Okay." "We mustn't linger." "It is easy to get lost in memories." "My first job was supervising robots on the moon." "Are you familiar with robots?" "Yes, i always like robots." "I have a red robot and a pink robot." "I enjoyed working with them." "I enjoyed the solitude." "The robots are solar powered, and must always be kept on the light side of the moon's surface." "In order to motivate them to constantly move within the drifting sunlight, I programmed them to fear death and what lies on the dark side of the moon." "It's getting dark outside!" "It was here, on the moon, that I fell in love with a rock." "I did not understand my mental and emotional shortcomings at the time and only knew that I found this rock to be immensely attractive." "It was sparkly." "The economy on the lunar surface went through a recession and" "I was sent home after six cycles." "My rock and I were separated." "But the robots were too expensive to remove." "To this day, they are in perpetual movement across the sunlight." "With no more work to do, no more tasks to accomplish, still living in constant fear of death, and occasionally sending us depressed poetry." "I will read one of their poems to you now, Emily." ""The light is the life." "Robot must move." "Move, robot, move." "But why?" "Move, move, move." "Robot." "Forever move."" "I was relocated to supervise the construction robots on the boundary of the keeowah, in deep space." "Keeowah!" "It was there that i fell in love with a fuel pump." "This part of my life continued to develop, and it was much more satisfying than the rock." "In one of the tropical moon caves, I found an abandoned nest of eggs." "It's purple!" "You open the lids like that and they open up." "What is that?" "A monster." "That's his mouth?" "No, that's his mouth." "Stop it you silly thing!" "I named it Simon." "Simon!" "Yes." "Again you think you remember because you are experiencing a memory from my point of view." "Yeah." "Simon grew up and followed me around for 7 years, saying unintelligible things." "We fell in love." "For vacations, we sailed in balloons on Mars." "He's flying!" "But I missed my home." "I missed something deeper." "Did you miss me?" "Yes." "At birth, I had inherited from you the memory of myself meeting you right now." "What?" "I made a decision to be reassigned to earth and spend more time with people." "These became the happiest years of my life." "But Simon was inconsolable." "For many years, memories could only be harvested from the dead." "The images were fished out blindly from random clusters of neurons and looked like this." "I opened an art gallery of anonymous memories, and it was here that I met my husband." "He was a clone as well, from the same source as David, the boy in the tube I felt i had known all my life." "Only now his beautiful sparkly eyes were lit with the mind of his prime:" "A David from over 400 years ago." "As an older clone, he showed many signs of deterioration." "But I loved him, as though we were originals." "He died suddenly, and David's line was permanently ended." "That is the thing about the present, Emily prime." "You only appreciate it when it is the past." "I harvested his memories and they still bring me happiness." "This is one my favorite of his memories and" "I cannot explain why." "He is descending a staircase and sees a large plant blowing in the wind, flopping its fronds together in a sort of plant applause." "I have viewed this memory over 6,000 times." "You missed him." "I do not have the mental or emotional capacity to deal with his loss." "But sometimes, I sit in a chair late at night and quietly feel very bad." "When the night is at its most quiet, I can hear death." "I am very proud of my sadness because it means" "I am more alive." "I no longer fall in love with rocks." "In 60 days from now, a meteor will strike the earth and most everyone here will die horribly." "Our wealthiest individuals are now uploading their digital consciousnesses into cubes that they are launching into deep space." "Our lower classes are desperately trying to escape the meteor through discount time travel, causing untold millions to die in orbit." "Their dead bodies burn as they return to earth and now light up our night sky." "What's this up in the sky?" "Dead bodies!" "Look another one!" "Yes." "It is very pretty." "They're ok?" "No." "They're all dead." "I'll count them!" "We are all doomed, Emily prime." "Even those on the interplanetary ports." "They are rumored to be burying the clones of world leaders beneath the earth." "Emily prime, there is another reason I have contacted you today." "You retain an early memory that I have forgotten that was very important to me." "I wish to retrieve it from you before I die." "I shall extract this memory from you now." "This is me." "And mommy." "This is me and mommy walking." "This is me and mommy walking." "A rainbow!" "Thank you, Emily." "This will bring me great comfort in the days ahead." "This is your future, Emily prime." "It is sometimes a sad life and it is a long life." "You will feel a deep longing for something you cannot quite remember." "It will be a beautiful visit." "And then we shall share the same fate as the rest of the human race:" "Dying horribly." "The advice I give you now is the advice I remember receiving from myself at your age in this moment, so I cannot be certain where it actually originated from:" "Do not lose time on daily trivialities." "Do not dwell on petty detail." "For all of these things melt away and drift apart within the obscure traffic of time." "Live well and live broadly." "You are alive and living now." "Now is the envy of all of the dead." "Ok!" "Thank you, Emily prime." "It has been an honor to meet you and a joy to emerge from your 3rd generation birth canal." "I shall now return you to your home and current time." "I will not contact you again." "Goodbye." "What a happy day it is!"