My first piece is up on the rebooted OnlySky. It’s a super-short fiction with a message, in keeping with OnlySky’s new mission of exploring possible futures.
The seed of this story came from an idea: If you could speak to the future, what would you want to ask? Some matters might just be idle curiosity, but others are life and death. If you only got one question, what would you most desperately want to find out?
Well, now you can. It turns out our future is on the phone, and they have important news for us.
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece:
I’m sending you this message for one reason. I know what you really want to ask, and I’m going to answer it.
What you want to know is what people from every era wanted to know: Are we going to be okay? Will humanity make it? What do we have to hope for? Will our children grow up in a better world than we did?
That’s why I’m calling.
Rumiko Takahashi (the creator of Ranma 1/2) has done a number of short stories in manga form over the years as well… and one of them involved time travelers from the middle of a famine in Japan travelling to modern day to try and get some food. The school they ended up at assumed it was one of the historical famines that had happened in Japan’s past based on the ragged clothing of the people involved… but the last page pulls a Twilight Zone twist and shows that the travelers were actually from the future of Japan and that things were halfway down a complete collapse of the food system.
“Is there anybody there?”
Having now read the “message from the future”, I found it very unconvincing.