Greetings, friends!

Of course, once you've read this message, we may no longer [i]be[/i] friends. And considering that we've never actually met, you may not think of me as a friend now...

But rest assured: our friendship is deep and long established. It's the friendship we progenitors always feel toward our descendants, a friendship that transcends time and space, reaching forward to bathe you in its radiance while reaching back to brush me with the knowledge of your love and affection.

At least until you arrive at the end of this missive...

But let's not focus on that right now! Let's focus on the glorious civilization you've formed there two million years in the future. Sitting here in my garage beside the Cyclotrauma, I can barely begin to believe the wonders I've seen through the swirling vortex my invention has summoned!

At my point in time, we've scarcely sent our rudimentary robots to tread stodgily through the dirt or speed timorously past the outer atmospheres of the other worlds and worldlets sharing our planetary system. But you! You've traveled to the stars and back, extending humanity's reach to an appreciable portion of the galaxy! Oh, how my heart overflows to think of it!

You've even transcended what my primitive peers would consider human! You exist as a hybrid of biological, mechanical, and virtual! So many frontiers you've negotiated and taken into the warm embrace of civilization—non-human cultures as well! New and alien friendships that have brought you a joy and peace we in the past are simply unable to comprehend!

Not that any of the aliens will probably survive, either...

Because, well, you see, I've uncovered a bit of a problem here. The Cyclotrauma has displayed for me two possible futures and two possible futures only for the human race. The first is yours, near-magical in every respect, while the second is a blasted hellscape in which chaos envelopes the world, the solar system, the galaxy, and the universe for two million years, a madness fed by technology, biology, and virtuality all gone horribly, horribly wrong.

Suffice it to say, I'm not sending a message like this to [i]them![/i]

But, while every scenario I run through the Cyclotrauma ends in either your beauteous wonder or their inslakable carnage, I can find no way of guaranteeing that we wind up with your future rather than theirs. The flapping wings of butterflies and all that, yes, but more importantly, none of the governmental officials I've approached will pay me the slightest bit of attention! I've assembled quite the comprehensive list of things we must do and things we must avoid over the next two hundred years to guide our current world toward the positive outcome, and yet? I'm called a crank and informed that I'm no longer allowed to enter their offices!

The only solution I've found—and here's where, I fear, you may wish to reconsider our friendship—involves me causing the Cyclotrauma to feed back upon itself, turning it into a sort of Möbius strip that will essentially destroy it. This, my calculations show, will cycle us onto a third, completely unknown path by slicing us away from both known futures and combining them into a single continuum that will then close back in upon itself and continue as a universe separate from ours in every way.

Yes, our future will not be yours, but neither will it be [i]theirs.[/i] We will have a clear slate ahead of us, a slate that the equations I've run tell me will fall somewhere between yours and theirs.

Embracing mediocrity, in others words, but I'm willing to choose that path rather than running the risk of everything collapsing to ruin.

You, of course, will be locked in with the never-ending horrors of the other future, and for this, I can only apologize.

Still, brief good-byes are the best. I'm sending this message to the furthest point of the Cyclotrauma's range and setting it to disperse as widely as possible before bidding you a fond farewell. And I hope that, if you do overcome the utter nightmare into which I'm plunging you, you can someday forgive me.

George Laguardia
Inventor of the Cyclotrauma