Shut It Down

Hi! My name is Claire and this is my time capsule.

If you're reading this that means we made it another 50 years, congrats!
I wrote this on December 27th, 2039, I'm 20, she/her, and let me tell you about my world.

I'm a Panda, a pandemic baby, from the first big pandemic (that'd be Covid-19, which started this whole mess).

I don't remember a lot of the next decade of course, I was a baby for most of it, but my parents said it was pretty shitty.

We call 2020 to 2030 the Apocalypses. I'm sure you know more about what happened than we do! I hope so at least, we're still confused ten years later.

Or, maybe, you had your own Apocalypses to deal with and all this is new to you? Bummer if so. Good luck on your end.

The Apocs started in 2020, with a pandemic called Covid-19. It killed a few million of us, but through willpower alone, we ignored it enough and it eventually went away. It also left about 50 million people who would die unexpectedly years later because of the damage it did while sick. That's still happening to this day, they're the Long Covids, or Longs. You probably still have a few of them around in your time, huh?

When Covid started to finally go away, Climate Instability kicked into high-gear and we started to get storms that were as big as the United States (that still exists, yea? If not, I'm sure you know what it was at least). I've read that the climate is like a spinning top. Once it starts to wobble it just gets worse and worse until it falls on its side and spins out of control.

Some idiot space tycoon had the idea that he could fix the climate super quick by disrupting the entire mining industry and off-planeting it all.
He then found some metal rich asteroid and mined it, crashing the entire metals market worldwide. Turns out, that was a bad idea, and the worst global financial crisis ever kicked off, and we're still paying for that!

In the end, that caused more deaths than all the pandemics combined.
Nations ended, multiple 2 and 3 day wars kicked off, and turns out, economies are important. Idiots shouldn't be able to manipulate them.

In one of these wars, the Russian Federation was balkanized. A dozen new angry countries were suddenly nuclear powers. Moscow was obliterated and half the Ural mountains became radioactive glass within the year.

The mini nuclear winter messed with climate instability a bit and actually calmed things down a little on that front. We still had continental scale famines though. A couple billion died, mainly the poor and in the densely populated areas.

Here is where it gets weird, reality broke soon after this.

We split in two...more accurately, two dimensions? We're still figuring it out, tons of papers every day theorizing about it. But, half of life went into dimension A, the other half into dimension B. Earth, houses, planes, trains, and automobiles, existed in both. The complexity of life seemed to be unique enough to get a 50/50 chance on existing in one or the other dimension.

This lasted for about a year. A billion or so on each side died.
After a year reality rejoined, but both sides made some new friends.

Freaking aliens went to B, introducing themselves and saying that “yea, these splits happen – crossing dimensions is pretty easy compared to traveling super fast” – they actually helped rejoin it all. Dimension A had no idea though, we got ...no shitting, Vampires and other off-humans.

This is nothing new to you 50 years in the future of course, but to us it was mind blowing. How can these things from stories exist for really real?

Turns out, they always did. They just got really good at hiding, fitting in.
Vampires aren't like in the stories, they don't have magical hypnotic powers, they don't burst into flames in the sun, they're not brutal, murdering, animals. They're people...that need blood.

When the population halved, billions died, and their entire supply chain got messed up...so, they decided to come out and ask for help. The new medical advances with mRNA tech for the pandemics could help them, right? (Pandemics, plural, did I mention a couple more pandemics happened during all this? No? Well, they did, it sucked.)

Werewolves, “were people”, don't change into manimal wolves at every full moon, their body takes a month or so and changes into some sort of protohuman(?), then slowly changes back. It's some cellular cycle that “is in all of us, but only active for some” – not sure if I agree with that, but not my job.

Speaking of job, I'm an AR ad “engineer”. I walk around the augmented reality world and in the various metaverses and place digital ads where I think they'll get the most views. It's not great work, and people would hate me if they knew what I did, but it pays the bill.

The aliens from B mentioned that time travel is possible, but we have to figure out the Laws ourselves, have we done that yet? If so, I'd love if you came back and said hi! I'm wondering how we did after the dust settled from the Apocs in fifty years.

I know that this message was supposed to tell you about life in the 2030's, so that you in the 2080's could laugh and see how simple we were, but honestly, most of this decade has been isolating, fearing for random storms, reality breaking days, or waiting for existential threats. So, not a lot of fun stuff to share.

I can summarize our day-to-day as “work like nothing happened” and losing ourselves in the meta worlds.

I hope I'm still alive when you get this! If so, please look me up, I've attached a dozen different accounts to this, hopefully one is still around when you get this.

May your luck have been better than ours!
-Claire

“Whatcha got there John?”

John looks up from reading the physical print, “oh, a time capsule some kid put together.”

“I haven't heard of those for years! How old is it?”

Crumpling and tossing the paper to the side, John shrugs, “Just a couple months. Let's keep digging.”