Dear Anyone,
“What is love but a parasite that expends you for the benefit of another?” Bireh sighed as he wrung the neck of a wild fowl. “It should have ran.” He looked pitifully at the ground nest it had died protecting, white eggs bare to the elements. “What a waste. Now we will have both eggs and meat.” He bent down to pick the eggs.
“What is love?” I asked, finding my memory blank on the subject.
This was days before I started writing to you.
He waved an arm at me, not looking in my direction. “Love is a product of hormones which you gratefully lack. Before the Collapse, it was a big deal. People killed and died for it! Just like this fowl. You are lucky. You don’t have such defect.” He turned the eggs into his basket. Holding the mother in the other hand, he trotted off as if his survival did not depend on his proximity to me. The dead bird stared back at me with empty, black eyes, beating against Bireh’s hastening legs.
Yours sincerely,
Lan
Dear Anyone,
Today makes it a week since we found some white, fluffy sheets bound together in the old ruins. Bireh called each sheet ‘paper’ and the whole thing a ‘book.’ He said people used to write in it long before the Collapse. Write? What does that mean? He said it was like speaking with signs. He drew characters on the ground that he called ‘the alphabet’ that when combined in various ways formed ‘words.’ He spelt Bireh and even my name, ‘Lan.’ Bireh gave me a pen. It is like a stick that makes marks on paper. We found it close to the papers. I mastered the characters in a day or two. After an alignment with Bireh, I could write many sentences from his memory.
“You are an odd child,” he said, giving me the book.
“What should I do with it?”
“I don’t know, write letters or anything.” He shrugged.
So I am writing letters. I know letters were how people communicated with their loved ones many years ago before the Collapse, but I don’t have loved ones. Who do I write to?
Bireh said I was a very odd child and went back to relieving himself in some bush. “Write to Anyone,” he groaned, shitting.
“Who is Anyone?” He never answered. I guess Anyone was who people who didn’t have loved ones wrote to in the past. So that is how I started writing you, Anyone.
Yours truly,
Lan
Dear Anyone,
“The rain was acidic again”. We took shelter in a ruin that still had a roof. Grey plants had grown over the mossed pillars straining for the never coming sun. They had died, turning to rock, like the stones they clung to.
Outside, the rain was killing the soil, killing anything that still lived in a dying world.
Bireh sighed. “I remember a time when we used to complain about bad weather. I would take those bad weathers over this.” He laughed dryly.
Bireh seldom talked about his old life. I couldn’t access those memories in our alignments. He had sealed them off from me. I knew he must have been an important person before the Collapse. Only important people had children. Only important people could afford the luxury of living.
The rain didn’t stop all night. The biting cold came with the dark. Bireh crumbled without warning. We had not aligned in two days. I reached out for Bireh. A slight touch on his shoulder was enough to align. Waves from weakening body, his confused organs and malfunctioning neurons, flooded me. I let him in, patterning his system to the rhythm of mine. His organs saw mine heave with life and replicated it. His heart matched mine and his breathing steadied, as my warmth flowed into him.
Yours patiently,
Lan
Dear Anyone,
We found other people.
Bireh was not pleased.
They were a couple, with children. They made no attempt to shoo the flies buzzing around them. Hopefully, the smears on their coats were just mud. There was a wildness in their eyes that made me think of danger.
Bireh frowned until it seemed like his jaw could tighten no more. “They are mad. Even children can’t stop a mind collapsing upon itself.”
I reached for the children’s minds. I met stone. They stood still, empty as the dead bird’s eye, as children were designed to be. Bireh says my free thought is an aberration, that my maker must have injected the wrong hormones. Still, he didn’t return me to the nursery.
“Go away. Find somewhere else to die,” he growled at them.
“Drugs, drugs?!” the man begged, his hands quivering. “Do you have drugs?”
Bireh hissed. “You have lived long enough. I don’t have any drugs. They are gone, forever, gone!”
The woman yelled and attacked Bireh. Her husband clawed for his bag.
A big mistake. It was over in seconds. Bireh swung his strapped gun around.
Bang! Bang!
He returned the gun to its holster as they crumbled.
He went through their ragged belongings, cursing at their poverty. “Fools. Let’s go.”
“The children?” I looked at the stony figures that had barely flinched at the death of their owners.
“They have lost their hosts. They will not survive.”
Sometimes, I remember those children. I place them beside the dead bird’s eye. How did they look when they died?
Yours hopefully,
Lan
Dear Anyone,
Bireh was in a good mood today. We found another bird nest. The mother was nowhere to be found but there were eggs.
Bireh says soon there will be no birds and no eggs unless they can adapt to the mess this world has become. “They will adapt, I am sure. Nature has its ways. Humans will be long gone before the birds are gone.”
“What caused the Collapse?” I asked as he cracked eggs into the pan.
“Human greed, nothing more. We had been pushing at nature for a very long time. It is no surprise that it pushed back.”
I learnt at the nursery that we the children were created because of the Collapse, to help humans survive. To give them the facilities their evolved bodies no longer could. The Collapse was the reason I was born. It was also the reason humans died. It is the reason, they still die.
“Nothing in nature lives forever. It is a universal law. But man has never been good at respecting nature or its laws. 200 years ago, we were at the height of advancement., We conquered nature—even death. New advances in medicine meant that humans could virtually live forever with routine dosages of a drug called viah. We were immortal.” He grinned, looking through the steam of the frying eggs. “Nobody knew it at the time, but the side effect of viah was the worldwide sterility of humans. We lost the ability to have children, But what did children matter if you could live forever?! Of course, the price of viah shot through the roof. The deposits of certain components needed to make the drug were limited. Only the rich could afford to live forever. Every other thing stayed the same. Despite living forever, people were still people. Nations went to war against nations for deposits of viah, found in the ground. Then everything really went to shit. They blew up the world, the deposits, everything, and here we are. The rest of the humanity that didn’t take the drugs, were already thinning due to ridiculous cost of living that viah wars pressed on the economy, those who weren’t destroyed in the annihilation of countries, perished from the horrors of climate.
I could tell the rest from here. Without viah to supplement the human bodies that have long outlived their time, people simply broke down like worn-out machines. Some survived—or rather, did not die immediately. They are the ones with children.
Bireh says he hates the idea of living machines called children, beings designed to sustain the dying humans. “In the past, parents lived to save their children. Now,” he chuckled sadly, “it is the reverse.”
Yours uncertainly.
Lan
Dear Anyone,
Bireh is dying; we are dying. His cells are beginning to reject my attempts at alignment. I try what I can. I don’t know how longer we have. I have not told him. I will not tell him. I know he will call this foolishness, an odd emotion for a child to have, but I want him to grumble, chuckle, and curse at the flies. I want him full of life every day. I want? A child should never want. I am nearly out of paper. What will we do?
Yours sadly,
Lan
Dear Anyone,
We found a patch of green plants in the shell of the old ruins. Bireh is surprised that there are still green plants. Most have taken the shade of ash since the bombing. “The Earth is healing!” he shouted excitedly before coughing. “The sun is returning.” He wheezed. He had once told me of this big yellow ball in the sky that burns in the sky brighter than a thousand camp fires. “It is somewhere behind the ash clouds. Somewhere.” He had sighed wistfully.
Yours joyfully,
Lan
Dear Anyone,
Today, Bireh could barely walk. We are taking shelter from the acid rain. His body is fully dependent on mine now. I secrete commands to his organs to keep functioning. They barely recognize me and painfully function. He could be well by morning or not. I do not know.
Yours hurtfully,
Lan
Dear Anyone,
This is the last page and final entry. I realize that I am supposed to send out my letters if I am ever going to get a response, but there are no more post offices! So, I will leave this book here inside a rusty bin, among discarded computers. If you ever reply, this is the place you must keep it. I might come back here.
Bireh is strong enough to stand this morning. He says we must go look at the green plants, if they survived the rains. I hope they did.
I asked Bireh, what do plants eat. He said dirt.
“When we die, we become dirt and plants eat dirt.”
I imagine what it is like becoming plant food. We will become one with the plant and one day, maybe one day, we will rise in its leaves, basking in the sun, a father and daughter.
Yours, now and forever,
Lan
