My name is no longer important. You have received this email or document depending on who you are because I believed you would be a person who would take what I have to say seriously and that ultimately you would see that this information would be released to the public.
I have spent months chronicling my adventures and I know that I will not live to see the results of my work. But you must not think I am crazy. You must look at what I have to say with a critical eye and ask yourself. Could this be true? But enough of this, let me tell of you the last day of my life. I knew what it would be and have included it in the documentation you are about to view. Some of it is recorded, some of it is a vid feed.
No matter the form, you will be able to substantiate three things. No feed, whether audio or video has been altered in any way. You see it or hear it the way it was recorded. It is important to stress that because without that information, nothing else matters. Once we record any video or audio, it is locked and cannot be altered. It used a triple encryption sequence that none of us could break, nor wanted to. The only thing the encryption sequence will reveal to people with the correct skills, is that the information gathered here is unaltered and has never been changed.
The second, is that we did not make any effort to hide or disguise or faces or voices. We understood that for you to take us seriously, we had to be serious and we understand our lives would ultimately be forfeit. The third thing, and for you the most important, is that we made every effort to hide what we were doing from the prying eyes of the Powers That Be. I capitalize that so you understand I mean that they are literally Powers, they control every aspect of our lives and yours.
By engaging this report, you are opening yourself to every Power of the world today who will kill to keep this secret. Let me repeat. If you engage beyond this point, you will likely die. Put your affairs in order. Take a few days with your loved ones. Spend any savings you have. Do anything you think is important for you to do. Because once you read this and likely distribute it the same way I did, in a week to a month, depending on how well you hide your tracks, can move from place to place and can live off the grid, you will be dead. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
With that said, I will show you the feed of my last day and let you decide for yourself if what I say has any merit at all.
It is cold this time of year. For the last ten years, we have known nothing but bitter cold. But this winter is unlike any before it, because it will be my last. I know this as sure as I draw breath. I have packed up everything of value and have already made all of my mail drops today. I have given my cat, Sasha to my old neighbor in the flophouse I have been staying at. She has been a good mouser and kept my place clear of disease-carrying vermin and been a good and warm companion during the night. The flophouse has no heat, nor hot water so a day there is a choice between stinking or freezing. I must admit I have chosen stinking on especially cold days. My thin blankets and pitiful rations have also been donated with Sasha, my neighbor Demitri, is old and cannot bear the cold as easily as he once did. I know that he loves Sasha as much as I do, and will take good care of her. Sasha is a strong cat, in her prime and liable to serve him for many years to come. I trained her to catch rats and bring them back to share during the lean times and it looks like those times are on us again. He will need her skills. I am beyond their reach now.
The sky is bright and I am in good spirits despite myself. I am filled with a sense of purpose and feel that all of the work that we have done in the last few months have been good and valuable and I feel there will be much done after I am gone. The neighborhood I live in is dirty. The walls are covered in graffiti, layered like sedimentary rock, over each other, each layer more garish and more desperate than the last. Each layer shows the hopelessness of each group as they wrote their names, trying to immortalize themselves in a world that did not count them at all. Blood decorates some of those walls as well, as earlier generations kill the next who would cover their bid for immortality.
I see the hookers and drug dealers selling their particular drug of choice, knowing that only the desperate would seek any solace here. Yet, there are no lack of customers for either of their particular crafts. The worst part of it all, is that I can see from where I am standing spires of gold, stretching into the heavens. Narrow buildings like spun glass reach into the heavens and tiny streams of vehicles streak between them on innumerable errands, each a sparkling grain of sand against the sanguine sky. I hate them. I hate them because I was once one of them. And because of a twist of fate, an accident of my genome, I learned of a thing so terrible, I could only be cast out from heaven, lest the secret destroy it. The secret is known as The Carrier.
Once heavenly bound but no earthly good, I trod along the dirty streets of New Haven, the industrial complex of Kenopoli, one of the major cities on an Earth-like planet, lightyears from where we were born. But Kenopoli was so much like Earth, mankind flourished here just like he did at home once. And here he made the same mistakes. Separated by generations and the barriers of space-time, we landed here, a one way ticket into space and two thousand years separate us from our ancestors and just like man of old, we grew, we prospered, we lied, we cheated, we stole, we killed. All of our great achievements fell away when our old ideas and old ways came back to us. Our utopia became a dystopia and greed became the order of the day.
Robots were how mankind escaped Earth, but there was something in the atmosphere, or the magnetosphere, no one has ever been sure, but for whatever reason, this world that did not allow robots to continue to function or new ones to be made. Factories made them, but they simply would not function. Their higher functioning brains simply did not process information. For a while they were dumb laborers, then even those functions died. They worked for one hundred years and when they died, they could not be replaced. Thus the Second Age of Man began. Men were no longer able to manipulate matter as easily and the great cities could no longer be made. So the lesser buildings like New Haven were made in the shadows of the Last Great City of Kenopli.
Then came the stratification of Man. We decided that some men were better than others and soon a new caste system appeared. It was not spoken. It was not written. It simply was. And soon our society segmented and those that were less were cast out from the Spires and sent to the New Havens around the world. But work needed to be done without robots and thus manpower was required. So men were forced to work in factories and those factories would darken they skies with their coal and other burnings but those dark clouds never rose into the Spires and those people never knew the dirt and darkness of our mean and cold lives. But a mistake was made. Our economies were mixed and things created in the Spires were needed by the Workers. And the Spires needed resources and manpower from the Lowland, and so trade and corporations and guilds were created and this was momentarily good. But it did not last. We were not vigilant.
The came media, new media, all consuming media designed to give us hope, make us feel beautiful, keep us blind to our suffering, inured to the hopelessness of our tasks, unconcerned about our diseases, unaware of the lower quality of life we were leading. And it worked. We consumed blindly, we sought opportunities whenever we could, we joined the corporations in the Midworld between the Spires and the Lowlands and we thought it was good and that it would last forever. And then people like me were born. A few at first but then there were others.
They called us damaged, they called us mutants, but in the Old World of Earth, we were called autistics. Humans with subtle genetic variations that kept our minds, every so slightly different from the normal minds of our people. Sometimes you could see the difference. They could not function in society; they had no speech, no capacity for learning beyond the most simple of tasks, their lives were filled with suffering and the State did not acknowledge them as viable members of society. In the beginning they were tolerated, but as time progressed and their numbers increased, they were persecuted because they placed an inordinate drain on society's resources.
It was not as if those resources could not be spared, it was simply one more indignity to heap upon the masses, one more shame they were forced to bear as if, they had not enough to deal with. It was claimed there was no known cause of autism, or of any of the myriad of mental issues that began to plague our people in greater numbers than ever. We had lived on this world now for over two thousand years and had a population of two billion people. Strict controls on birth and death kept populations manageable and ultimately the severely autistic were eventually put to death. But there were other autistics whose minds allowed them to do amazing things, to see and hear and think of things no norm ever could. To be aware of patterns within patterns. To be aware of new ways of seeing and hearing and understanding numbers in ways previously unconsidered and that is where I became aware of the Carrier.
All of this, you already know, I only restate it so you can understand what you are dealing with. As a child who was only mildly autistic, I became aware of a particular sound I could sense in my environment that I noticed no one else could hear. I did not know that as a child and my issues prevented me from telling anyone about it. Whenever the radio was playing or a datafeed was being broadcast, I could hear this sound and it made me sick to my stomach. I burned inside, my head was on fire, my stomach would void and it would last as long as the media was available to my senses. I could not hide from it, and covering my ears offered some limited relief. I learned it was not all music or all datafeeds and things my parents considered Old Music did not cause me that sickness. So my parents catered to my needs and we only played old recordings of music. It was only when public feeds were available did I get terribly ill. I eventually learned to grit my teeth and bear it, and only occasionally threw up in the presence of music or live datafeeds.
By the time I learned to speak effectively, I could not tell anyone because no one I knew could hear it but me. I knew my parents did not condone such silliness as imaginary friends or imaginary sounds, so I learned to keep it to myself and would have never thought anything of it until I reached high school and met my first friend like me. His name was Kenneth Watson. He was the first person I knew to die when he made his teachers aware of the Carrier.
'The Carrier' © Thaddeus Howze 2011. All Rights Reserved
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