Tales From Talimara

Korin's Letter

Korin Bryor is a precocious young fellow whose ancestors hailed from the stars. He is proud of his Colonial heritage, but happily enjoys his home among native Terrans all the same. He's part of the Pals From the Past letter-writing initiative.

Hello there, reader. Name's Korin. Last name's Bryor. It sounds weird to you, I know. That's because it came from another planet.

I live in Mauriten, a bright city in what was once the southwestern United States. That's what they used to call this place, however. Now it's the state of Janneg in present-day Talimara. Again, I know that sounds weird to you. But when our teacher asked for volunteers to write letters to "pals from the past" as part of some scientific time-travel experiment, I knew two things. First, that it would be fun. There's something vaguely interesting about writing a letter to someone you either haven't met or probably won't read what you've written. Second, I knew that if I wrote to someone from the past, I would have to explain as much as I could about how strange our world must sound to you. But here they have records for that kind of thing.

Right now we're in the two hundred and forty-first year of the Talimaran Age of Transcendence, or over four thousand years in your future. They picked the twenty-first century for our letter-writing, and they told us that our letters could go to anyone. Students, college kids, lawyers, doctors, soldiers, people on holiday, even farmers and space tourists. That really tickled me. It seemed funny to write back to a period where it cost a family-raising fortune to go into space for a week or something. In my time, where I come from, it's still pretty pricey, but let me put it this way- you could head to the restaurants in space for a birthday lunch and be back in your living room for the present-unwrapping.

I suppose I should tell you more about this, huh? During the Age of Ascension many centuries ago, we first headed into space en masse. Dozens of scientists and engineers were followed by hundreds, and then thousands of tourists. We built bigger and bigger space stations and eventually installations so large we were able to make little countries of them. I think your scientists called them "space habitats." These days we still call them that very often, but they're actually Talimaran states in space. You can see them in the sky at all times, like another moon. Imagine how that would be like. It must seem impossible for you. But the impossible for you is everyday life for us. We take it for granted, actually. Now I'm not showing off. You deserve to show off, being able to get by without all our technology. In a way, I quite like your old lifestyle. History is my favorite subject. Every year on History Day, all the kids in school dress up in a costume from the distant past. This year my best friend went as a Pilgrim girl. She looked very pretty. Now I can show off about that!

Every time I look out the window I think about history and about your people. Mauriten is like the country-city that we commonly associate with the past. I imagine, thousands of years ago in your time, it might have very well been just like that. In a way it still is. Out here in rural Talimara the land is so flat that you can watch every single minute of the sunrise and the sunset. The multiways- they're like interstate highways but also commute air travel- stretch to the ends of the horizon. And in the middle of this land sits Mauriten, another bustling Talimaran metropolis built in the ages of time. This part of Talimara is very harmonious. We built our cities with the environment, and the water features and vegetation are blissfully lovely. There's a lot of old-style traditions here. There is a marketplace district where you can buy all sorts of interesting things like handmade pouches, bars of soap carved in the shapes of dawnbirds and books handwritten and bound in the ancient way. It's nice to get your hands on this kind of tangible history.

Time to better introduce myself, I suppose. You already know my name's Korin Bryor. I don't come from a House. There are fewer Houses in Mauriten than there are in other cities, and they're all real rich people with the most popular kids in school. I'm twelve biocycles old, or I will be next January. I like doing digital hand-drawing and walking through the lush city-gardens. You'd normally think that this region is an odd place to build an enviro-city, but during the Age of Ascension we transformed all the deserts in the world into fruitful, green landscapes. I figure the only places you'll find sand on Earth are on the beaches, in the oceans- and in the sandboxes, of course. Oooh! That reminds me! You'll love the playgrounds of the future. We've still got the swings and the monkey bars and the slides, although everything is much bigger and powered by antigravity. And we've also got stuff that you can't even begin to imagine!

Okay, showing off again and getting off-topic. I don't know anything about you, reader, but I'd happily share more. My parents say that I'm a good kid. My little sister's ten biocycles old and I love her more than anything. Her name's Wiley and she's the most fun person you'll get to meet. We had one older brother called Dimmick. He was a soldier in Talimara's Celestial Armed Forces. He died in a space accident above Dantar. We still can visit bits of his consciousness in the digital continuum but it's definitely not the same.

Sorry. I know people in your time had it worse than me, so I shouldn't complain. Where I come from, war is becoming a thing of the past. Mankind hasn't fought a war in centuries. Why, then, did Dimmick become a soldier? Wars aren't only fought by soldiers. These days they are also fought by machines. We are often told stories about the Purging of Charon, when our forces were accompanied by android units as they fought the Ravagers. Oh yes, in case you didn't know, here in the future we discovered alien life right in our very own Solar System. They destroyed the first colony on Charon and since we needed to colonize the moon we couldn't bombard the surface. So we sent armies there, and after many years, we destroyed them. Now Charon is a bright, sunny garden world with lakes and snowy mountains, and the only living aliens are kept in a highly-guarded facility even further away. 

'Course, Charonians weren't the only aliens we found. During the Interstellar Age we met aliens from another civilized system. We called them the First Ones. Original, eh? That's because they have no real name for themselves. Like we call ourselves humans, for example. We became great galactic buddies and now First Ones walk our streets. They say we get along well, but I've heard stories that say otherwise.

Don't get me wrong, though. I'm still in school and I know some great First Ones. I'll see if I can get them to write letters to the past too! Now that'll really tickle me. Bye!

Korin Bryor

Covar District, Mauriten, Janneg, 241 A-TR