To the Future Discoverer:
If you’re reading this, I am long dead. I was no one of consequence. There were seven billion of us at the writing of this letter, and my name was common. My home was a decent place with decent people, people I loved, but none of us rich or holding any real power whatsoever. We left no discernable impact, positive or negative. We lived our lives, we paid our taxes, we did what we could. We protested when necessary. We assimilated when it mattered. We cried and laughed, celebrated and mourned, just like everybody. I don’t know what your life is like; it could be much different. I wonder what your language is, whether there is such a thing when and where you are.
I worry the books you’ve found you will be unable to decipher. I don’t know if that is better or worse than the possibility that once you’ve developed your cipher to decode these messages that you’ll only be able to discern the glossy surface and not the layers of words become flesh below it. Your ability to read me is not the same as speaking the same language as me. Regardless, this is a message, and I hope you can receive it. The worst that can happen is that your code is flawed and you translate me backwards – this is nothing abnormal or unique; I’ve come to expect it.
My own life is not important, so I’ll skip the details. When I was gray and growing weaker, I took a keener interest in the history and future of humanity. My own future and history were certain and their conclusions drawing near. I lived all of it, mostly loved it. I knew who I was, even if why or how I was was as murky as the histories of our race. When history gave up all its ghosts I turned toward imagining you, Dear Reader, as some image of myself balancing in the sands of time, looking back at me and wondering as though through some cosmic mirror. Lots of things happened before me, the vast majority of it so long before me any fiction created about it is as acceptable as it is impossible. Out of 4.5 billion years, we only have records for 6,000 or so, all of them highly biased and suspect, many of them completely indeciperable. Sometimes it seems there may be only one true record, though people argue and wage wars over which it might be; many assume it to be lost forever; others dig in the earth in search of it. I scanned the documents I had access to, assuming there must be some discernable and absolute pattern (I still assume this.), but the only pattern that emerged was this: history always begins with the burning of a library. Both the unfathomable present and the fantasy of its eventual maturity were truer than things that had already happened and for which there was ample evidence. Somewhere in those uncountable years were beings like us, though seemingly magic.
In my youth a new mode of communication was developed with the hope that knowledge might be preserved and, I imagine, that a combined and universal knowledge might be made manifest. To date, this dream has not been realized, for though the medium is remarkable and democratic, it can hardly be said that the line between truth and fiction is any clearer. Only the image is clearer, closer to a whole but still subject to memes and mimesis. It wouldn’t be wrong to say it’s a perfection and perpetuation of the prehistoric oral traditions, a way of storytelling via a material both more flexible and solid, more water than wind, and without the eerie esoteric permanence of marks on paper or stone. The spontaneous, decentralized, and anonymous ordering of the universe I found at first very satisfying. Later I longed for books. Books had endings. I began to think there was no sweeter comfort than death and rebirth, no better or truer truth than the dead ends of imagination.
I don’t know if or how you read or tell stories. I don’t know if your civilization developed some infallible mind that can answer all questions or whether you ask questions at all, or live them. I don’t know if your civilization found and managed to articulate the ineffable name and thereby bring peace to the earth – this outcome seems unimaginable to me. I don’t know if you think about the things we thought about. I don’t know if the sky is still a mystery that makes you feel hollow like it was with us. I only know that if you exist there are only three possibilities: we changed, we didn’t, or both. The only other variable is whether you are more or less advanced than we, whether you are at the start or end of your age, whether libraries are being built or burnt to the ground. The technology we invented, our new holographic stone, has numbered days – it’s much easier to wipe that slate clean, as though with your finger you can unwrite history once the chaos of democracy is removed from it.
This is why I bought the boxes. There are eleven others besides the one you found, buried in different places. One I threw in the ocean. None held the same combination of books, but they did hold the same types of books: fiction, so-called nonfiction, an overview of the sciences we developed, poetry, and philosophy. Probably in your time math remains, so I saw no need to include an explanation of our version. Generally, we used a base of ten and assumed a finite universe within which it might operate; as simple and absurd as that might sound to you, this method was very useful and spawned much progress. I didn’t know which order of books was the correct one, except the one tossed from the boat might have been the truest to me. I only hoped that whichever collection surfaced at whichever time was relevant to the finders. It seemed to me this might be the only way to correct the past. But at that mysterious intersection of randomness and order, the distilled remains emerged in a very small number of words; the summation of the books is as follows: you can be a child of light or an agent of darkness; you can create heaven and hell but heaven is real; every age has a hero and a villain; every age confuses the two; faith, hope, and love are the most important; the details of each are the least; when people need help you give it; and above all learn to love anyway.
I hope you find these stories relevant. I hope the truths in them still ring. I hope I put them in the right order for you. I hope you understand the difference between fact and truth. I hope the words transubstantiate correctly and nourish you. I hope by now you’ve stopped searching without and have turned within.
Sincerely,
A person thoroughly integrated into the soil beneath you.

