More than 200 years had passed since I had that conversation with your grandfather. I was only 8 then, but I was as confident then as I am now. Peace is graspable. I’m not passing on because I am tired of fighting. I’m not dying because I’m resistant to transferring my consciousness. I want to be very clear that I am dying now, because I have accomplished my goal. I looked at the impossible problems of my day and I solved them. It is now time for you to look forward. If you look forward and see destruction, don’t look back; you’ll only find more destruction there. Instead, plow forward; you haven’t looked far enough.
My father — the man who laid the groundwork for immortality, universal resource allocation, and innumerable other underpinnings of our complex modern society — was dead. My father. Quietly, because people so fear death. My sister didn’t come. It just wasn’t her thing. A paper asked for me to record it. How dreadful to record such a thing.
My father was such a private man and yet he had done more to erode the very need for privacy than anyone else on this planet.
My father.
A man to look up to that I now looked down on. Both symbolically and literally. I looked down on him with pity in that quiet room, but I looked down on him with disdain ideologically. To leave us…to leave me. With such burden to bear. I’m sure it was heavy, but to leave and say it was not for lack of fight, rather from lack of purpose. And to do so while imbibing me with his purpose. A final directive. It was so like him.
My father.
He was like a force. A celestial body that you desperately attempted to flee at the speed of light. Because if you didn’t, you’d be sucked into his world. A part of his fanciful idea of how the world ought to be. Except when you were in his world, that’s exactly how the world was. And I was never fast enough.
To see his eyes glitter as he spoke of a time when rockets were young and the changing climate spelled doom. People were going hungry and wars raged. Every single day looked like the end, but the next day it did not end. That’s how he knew there was peace beyond, he would say. Any time you are confronted with an absolute, you have to look for the way beyond it. Perhaps to him death was a beyond. An absolute limit on life that he had bested and now wished to dive into headfirst.
Everything was constructed perfectly to my father’s specifications in his perfect world. And all were welcome. When he first approached the world’s brightest minds to build a place where there was only prosperity, they didn’t ridicule him or even reject him. They just ignored him. But he had a way of not being ignored. And so slowly the greatest builders of his time became increasingly interested in his way of thinking. All egos were cast aside to build a perfect world that shone like heaven on Earth. A place where everyone would want to be. And everyone did want to be there. Everyone did all that they could to go to the one place that promised a way forward where others merely warned of the great wall ahead.
Everyone wanted to go. To Morrow.
