I’ve featured a story from Alexander Jablokov here before, but this one cried out to be shared too. What can I say? I like meta sometimes. It might just be time to give in and pick up his short story collection.

You’re waiting.

You’re waiting for the Awful Thing. Cheery people from the future always have an Awful Thing. That’s what makes them interesting. To you.

We are soulless zombies living a life of manufactured illusion.

Our pleasurable lives depend on the oppression and torture of a small child, or genetically modified subhumans, or cognitively boosted, deeply suffering rodents.

Our lives are meaningless because of their very ease, and we wait for a release of plague, or radiation, or giant carnivorous creatures from another dimension to give them meaning again. We might even be waiting for one of you to time travel to our own time and start murdering us.

Our machines are sad because they want nothing more than to be human, like us, a blessing we withhold.

We are not humans at all, but telepathic insects that are just pretending to be us.
We desperately envy the wonderful vibrant scrappy life of your own era.

Sorry. We think about a lot of things, but how to be interesting to you is not one of them. None of these things is true.

Keep reading.