How many people miss these letters, anyhow? It’s 2095 for fuck’s sake. I can’t believe we haven’t solved the spam problem yet. Our inability to deal with Viagra emails is probably the sole reason the reapers exist at all. You miss the notification for your murder appointment and you only find out when the sky darkens overhead as your skin begins to boil. Anyone next to you is suddenly covered with what used to be inside of you, and all because we lost the spam war. Even worse, your beneficiary doesn’t get paid if the reapers have to dispatch you. It’s fucked up.
I didn’t miss my notification. There was a time when missing a message wasn’t the end of the world. Maybe a deal didn’t get signed, or you missed a party. That was before the Rejuvenation Office came into being. Now you explode into a pile of goo if you miss a message.
The elections of 2058 will go down in history as the first election won by sheer fire-power. The People’s Liberal Party ran on a platform of pure science. Gene splicing, human cloning, laboratory conception, it was all on the table. After two generations of the gods, guns, and bibles of the deeply conservative Nationalist Party, citizens were hungry to reclaim their humanity. Not surprisingly, the Nationals had all the guns and the god-given authority to “save” us and they used every goddamn bullet they could find. Martial law was imposed and nobody was allowed outside for months leading up the election. I still remember the endless gnawing in my gut for lack of food.
Bureaucrat Level 3 Alston Grieve woke up suddenly and in very good spirits. He’d tossed and turned all night with the excitement of what the day held for him, finally succumbing to exhaustion and managing to get a few inadequate hours of sleep. But, no mind! Today was going to be a very good day for Grieve. For today was the day he’d finish his inventory of the alien jails in all 55 of the participating countries and would be able to finalize his report to the Cabinet. No single person had ever inventoried every alien jail before and it was an accomplishment Grieve was very proud of.
Humming in the shower while the coffee pot did its thing, Grieve couldn’t help but think how lucky he’d been to snag this assignment when he was a mere Level 1 Bureaucrat a few years ago. Bright eyed and bushy-tailed and recently graduated from the Ministry training camp, he was plucked from the crowd of his similarly new, but overall much dumber, peers by a Level 5 Bureaucrat within mere days of being on the job.
“I can’t impress the importance of this job on you enough, B1 Grieve”, intoned B5 Smarth from behind his massive wooden desk while resting his grey stubbled chin on steepled fingers. “Since the wormhole breach 5 years ago, we’ve managed to capture every alien that lived after coming through it”. He waved dismissively as he trailed off, “but, you know that. Everyone knows that.” Smarth was right. Nearly everyone alive today had been taught this history in grade school and beyond. “The important thing to do now is to enumerate them so we know how many there are and where they’re located.”
There wasn’t always magic. It’s hard to believe this burned out shell of a planet was actually a pretty happening place just a few years ago. About 10, or so. About 10 years ago is when the first one was born and things changed. The first child with abilities we hadn’t seen before. She heralded the beginning of something great.
Nobody really believed that magic had come to the world unless they had seen her with their own eyes. And where there was one, there were more. A few new magic babies at first in the western world, a handful more on other continents that we knew about. Who knows how many exist in places nobody every goes. And within a few years they were almost a normal occurrence. An entire generation of babies that could bring down houses with their screams and cause beautiful flowers to sprout and grow in just a few minutes with their innocent giggles. It was a chaotic time, to say the least.
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