Heisenberg Certainty Principle

Prompt: Write about this city 1000 years in the future (assigned reading: "In the Year 2889", by Jules Verne)

On September 19, 2006, I received the following email from a person who I've never heard of, with a date 1000 years in the future. The email read:

Tomorrow in Science Fiction class you will get a writing assignment. I already know this because I can see into the future. I am going to email you a story that I want you to use for this assignment. However, it's going to be a week late. I'll explain in the story.

Please forgive me if I axidentally spell something wrong. English has gone through a Spelling Reform since you've recieved this message.

Also please forgive me if I make a grammar error. The grammar in English has been simplify since you've recieved this message.

Please don't forgive me if I make a typo. I'm not typing this. I'll explain later.

Also I don't want you to know my name. I've done something bad and I don't want to get caught. Again, I'll explain.

Sure enough, I did get a writing assignment, and, sure enough, a week after the assignment was due, I received this email:

Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
To: chri d. d. <my old email address>
From: dinoexpert <dinoexpert@xidog.test> (address does not work yet)
Subject: Heisenberg Certainty Principle
Date: Sat, 27 Sep 3006 23:19:23 -0700

Tomorrow I will be sick, and no one will believe that I'm sick. My teachers will all think that I'm faking, but I won't be.

I already know this, and it's not because I am faking and there's something horrible that I want to miss (I already know that no one will assign any homework, and although there will be a pop quiz, it will be on the behavior of dinosaurs, and every kid knows everything about that—especially me). No, it's because I hacked into one of the most important computers (I already know that I'll never get caught in my lifetime!). It traced the movement of every single subatomic particle, every single quantum of energy, and every single photon from the Big Bang to several billion years into the future, when we will all be extinct. This allows humans to observe anything that happens anywhere at any time, in the past, present, or future.

One of the amazing things about this system is that I didn't even have to touch a button to hack into it. It knew that I wanted the information because it had figured out everything about each of the neurons in my brain, effectively reading my mind. It was this technology that the Xidog (or Zaidag, after the Spelling Reform)  audio , the new computer operating system, used, and it was very successful — people everywhere could use a computer without even touching those ancient input devices like the keyboard and mouse; all you had to do was think of what you wanted, and it would give it to you immediately. Speed was no longer an issue; since the computers could see into the future, they could figure out what you wanted and do it just before you wanted it done.

Although when I was younger I wanted to be a scientist and study dinosaurs, I now know that this is no longer possible, since people already know everything about them, and current time-travel technology only works back to when it was invented (it works by looking into the future, seeing if anyone wants to travel to the present, and materializing them if they do). I now know that there are some distant wormholes that allow for time travel of light, but not much else (they're too far away, and people couldn't fit through them anyways). I could tell you something else about them, but that would give away the ending to this email, like the computer gave away the ending to my life.

You see, I'm really depressed. I now know exactly when I will die and what I will die of. I know that my cat will not live another year, and I know that the world will continue fighting wars until the entire species is extinct, and that the next species (which doesn't have a name in our language, or in any human language, because it won't exist until humans are extinct) will underestimate humans the way that humans underestimated the complex civilizations of the dinosaurs. There is no job that I especially want (other than scientist, which is obsolete), so I will end up not having a job. That doesn't mean that I won't have any money — of course, I'll win the lottery a few times. I'll even be called the luckiest person in the world by 695,458,697,947 [695 billion...] people, but they'll all be wrong. After my death, the world will learn what I did, and they'll make a (completely accurate) children's story based off of it.

It was because of this that I decided to warn the past about trying to see into the future. I decided to use the previously mentioned wormhole to send an email to the past. I figured that if I sent an email to what is now a very small town — that is, my hometown — no one now will notice. I'm slightly insulted by having my story considered "Fiction," but that is understandable: nobody from a thousand years ago would believe that that kind of thing was even possible. It's taken me a long time to write this email, since I had to learn Old English and all the complicated spelling rules that existed before the Spelling Reform. I also had to figure out when to send it. Since that wormhole is 3 million light-years away and sends stuff back about 6,001,000 years, I figured that I should send it exactly 1,000 years after the first assignment was due in a science-fiction class in a small school. I was slightly wrong in my calculations, but I couldn't do anything about it because I had already seen when I sent it and I can't change it without causing a small explosion in the space-time continuum (this will happen in the future to some who don't read my biography or don't learn from it). Therefore, I have sent emails to someone in that class telling them that this was coming and they shouldn't make something up before then. That's why this assignment is late.

P.S. This story will be destroyed before I am born.

P.P.S. The teacher will give you a good grade on this story.

P.P.P.S. Mom will get you donuts sometime in the next week.