Message in a Bottle from 2087

I found it at a flea market.  That is about the quickest way I can begin this story. 

That’s part of the flea market allure, not knowing what you might find and making sure you’ve looked with the intensity and patience of an archaeologist.

Then, just like that, I found it. It was a bottle of sort – a cylindrical glass about two and a half inches in diameter uniformly from bottom to top, not your typical bottle indeed, and about ten inches tall with a flared rim at the mouth plugged by a glass stopper sealed by some kind of epoxy material.  It may have belonged in a laboratory or some chemistry department from some high school. Inside were rolled up pages of paper, yellowed or off-white as seen through the transparent glass.  The young seller with a ponytail joked about what I might find inside while pretending to ignore my half-hearted haggling.

It was two months later on a lazy rainy afternoon, after a boring football playoff on TV, when I decided to open the bottle. I cut it open near the bottom end with a diamond cutter. 

I was sort of disappointed that it was not parchment paper or even yellowed in color once outside the bottle, to indicate age.  There was a blank page on the outer roll that obscured the type-written documents on the inside pages of ordinary 8-1/2 by 11 inches bond paper.  The papers were way too modern though and the type set had to have come from a high end printer in clear, easy to read fonts. It established without a doubt that I was definitely suckered into a piece of junk and a not-so-funny hoax.

I unfolded several pages and began to read. It was addressed to no one in particular, not even a “to whom this may concern”…

So the message begins.

Whoever you are, wherever you are now, and whenever in the future you are, I hope you are well and found this bottle at a better time than when I wrote this message.  I am thirteen years old and I’m a girl.  Today is the year 2087, October. I cannot wait to fast-forward from these troubled times and I hope that since you found this message you are at a better time and place in the future, better than the present where I am now.

(Wait a minute!  What is this girl talking about?  Today is just 2024, January.  What is going on?)

I continued reading.

My father is a physicist at a super-secret lab here in the state of California nearby where we live.  My dad practically raised me by himself since I can remember from when my mom became sick.

My country – I do not know where you are from – is in big trouble.  The world has changed so much and is changing ever more.  Why do I worry about these when I should be having fun like all the boys and girls I know.  Well, truth be told, I just know them but we’re not friends.  Actually, there are just a handful of them (literally in one hand) I consider friends.

There are three USAs today as I will explain below but this USA, my USA, is not number one any more, although I really don’t know what that meant, except when my dad’s old friends would talk about it.  Our country was always number one in the Olympics, they’d say, for example.  I only read about it but the Olympics are no longer.  There has not been one held anywhere for years before I was born. 

My USA is not number one anymore.  I read that neither is Russia or any part of Europe. China had a good run but fizzled after more of its billion people had enough of its government. The million people protest in every major city from week to week crippled its manufacturing economy and today China is turning into agriculture just to feed its people. India tried to fill the void but its own exploding population was a drag to its development.  These were not trivial changes, so when these countries kind of failed, I am told, the Olympics that cost billions to host became frivolous and went out of style, my dad’s friends would say.

I may just be thirteen but I understand world politics better than I knew what teenagers love or talk about these days.  I wanted to grow fast and grow old, ever fearful of my mother’s fate.  I worry like no teenager should.  I worry about the future but my dad and his friends talk about the past as much as they talk about their project – the big project - which is about the future.  So I learned history so I can keep up with them.  But trust me I knew too about what they were working on.

History told me that Japan was written off five decades ago as a nation of any significance due to many setbacks in its past.  Just after I was born I was told that Japan came back like it had never before.  It formed a group of nations, a United Southeast Asia (USA) that is now the economic and military power in the region. It achieved what the EU (European Union) never did or could. Almost 90% of Japanese brands are manufactured outside of Japan, now deeply rooted all over Asia; over half of Japanese born from two generations ago were either born outside of Japan or are now living or working around the region.  For the first time one currency and borderless economy (even across open seas) has worked. An island nation of Japan and across a vast region from Thailand to Tibet is one unstoppable power.  

The other is the United Sovereign Alliance (also USA) – not exactly a nation or group of nations but rather an international entity with no specific national identity.  That much I understood about the new balance of power.  Asia and an ideology of people are the two other powerful USAs. Asia, I understood because numbers like gross domestic product, import/export ratios, currency values, etc. are expressed in numbers and I knew and loved numbers.  Ideology, I did not care much about because they were mostly words with very little numbers although this entity of people were in all governments and they wielded power in more secretive ways that I never took the time to understand.  All I know is that my USA is in trouble. 

How you got this message in a bottle is perhaps my USA’s last contribution to science and technology.  By the time you read this, you will have understood how it was done and you may even know what happened to me and my dad and his friends.  Or, perhaps this may not make much sense to you at all.  It is also impossible for me to know when in the future my message had gone to or where geographically.  Meanwhile, let me take you back to my time and explain as best as I can.  

She went to explain but it was way too complicated for anyone, like me, with 2024 knowledge of technology and zero understanding of  a yet to be discovered branch of physics 

There was a lengthy, very technical story behind how the message was sent by the thirteen-year-old girl.  She thought she was leaving a note for someone to read in the future. which would have been no different from how historians read leftover manuscripts from long ago in ancient ruins. 

Unbeknownst to the young girl, she thought she was sending her message to the future in a machine that was being developed by a government entity headed by her dad. The idea was to develop a technology that can establish contact with the future to solicit help in solving problems at the present time.  Money ran out and the project was about to shut down.  The young girl, worried for what was happening, convinced her dad to let her try to send the first test message, even though the machine was not fully tested to work. But then the funding ran out.

The message did not make it to the future.  Instead, it was transported back to the past - her past - and to the 2023-2024 present.  It is still a long story as to how, but here we are with one wild cautionary tale.  Farfetched, you say?  Is it not that history, from which we have not learned very much, simply kept repeating itself?

Back to me now. I can't quite explain why and how I came to write the sort of fantasy fable of a story above but it is not so outlandish if indeed we found something written by someone, say, from the city of Thebes at the height of the Egyptian Empire; or Athens or Rome; or by some scribe from Angkor Wat at its peak during the time of the Khmer Empire; or by a young student from sometime between 1368 to 1644 at the zenith of the Ming Dynasty, and so on and on.  The one big difference, of course, is that we could be reading them all from the perspective of history, messages from the past about each writer's concern for what was happening to the once powerful homeland they grew up in.

What we have here is merely a "future" history that is about just as repetitive as every history we know about so well.  A once and future cautionary tale about another repetition, just another historical stage play with different actors and players, different scenes and locations but the plot is the same.