To: Whomever may find this
From: Greg Dejel Lund
If this reaches anyone at all, then first let me thank you for reading the words of a stranger. My name is Greg Dejel Lund. It is the year 342 AGD[1] as I write this, and I am 35 years old. Until recently that was only a fact about me. Now it is also the reason you may be holding something that should, as far as I understand time, not be in your hands at all.
I work as a researcher of advanced technology. Not for the government, and not in any permanent official position, but privately. I freelance, take contracts, and do my own research besides. Most of what I do is ordinary enough for my time, though I expect that to you even "ordinary enough" might sound impossible. We have flying cars powered by harvested energy from air itself. We move between cities by teleport pads often enough that it feels no stranger to us than boarding transport must have felt to earlier generations. Most people carry on with technologies that would likely seem remarkable to you, and because I was born into all of it, I confess I think of most of it the same way I assume you might think of a common household tool. Useful, ordinary, expected.
What is not ordinary, even now, is what I have done tonight.
For a long time I wanted to know what those of the past would say if they could see us as we are. I have studied history, or what is left of it, for years. Not as my main work, but because I could never quite stop myself from looking. I read whatever approved records exist, I compare things that do not line up properly, and I listen when people are careless enough to speak doubts aloud in person. That last part is rare. People do not speak openly about doubts where I live unless they are very sure of the room, the company, and the cost.
Still, I have wanted to ask. Ask someone who lived before all this. Ask someone from the age before the Great Destruction, before the directives, before history itself was put behind a filter and declared safe for human use.
I recently made a breakthrough. My device is still not perfect, and I am still working out several issues, but it functions. It can send only inanimate objects, and only those small enough to fit within a cylinder of 5-inch radius and 7-inch height. That is limiting, but not so limiting that it stops a letter. A letter, after all, is small enough to travel where a man cannot.
That is why I am writing instead of sending some cleaner or more modern thing. A digital message would be less useful for the method, and perhaps less trustworthy besides. Paper is practical for this. I know that may sound almost absurd coming from my time, because paper is illegal here under the 2nd Directive, but I know how to make it. My father taught me. He taught me quietly, one-on-one, the same way his people taught him what little they could still safely pass along. No books. No notes. No records. Only hands, voice, repetition, memory.
I am writing this from my home in Vokesworth, in the region we call West Central America. I am told that in your time the place was once called Vancouver, Washington, and that the surrounding region would have been known as part of the northwestern United States of America. I live in a penthouse in the second tallest tower in the city. The mayor occupies the top of the tallest. Most of our towers have vehicle access built into them every ten floors or so, because almost no one walks outdoors between buildings anymore if they can help it. People go from residence to parking level, from parking level to flying car, and from flying car to another structure. Streets still exist, of course, but from above they often seem more like a preserved older idea than the main method by which people move.
I do not go out much except for work or to eat. The wealthier among us often live on restaurant meals or employ personal chefs, while most people sustain themselves largely on manufactured nutritional supplements. I use both. If I am busy, supplements are easier. If I have the time, I prefer food prepared by someone who understands that eating is meant to feel like more than fuel.
That may be more about me than you need, but I suspect that if I am to ask you what is wrong with my world, then I ought to try to show it to you plainly first.
My emotional state as I write this is difficult to put in order. I am intrigued by the thought that someone from your time might read my words. I am hopeful that someone may answer, whether through time if such a thing is possible for you, or through the email address I will give you if not. I am sad too, because I do not know whether this letter will arrive anywhere meaningful, or whether I am only performing an experiment no one will ever witness. And I am confused, deeply so, because I was raised to believe with certainty that something is wrong with this world, yet I was not raised with enough surviving truth to say exactly what.
That probably sounds foolish. To tell you my world is wrong and then admit I do not know how. Still, that is the truth of it.
If you can respond directly through time, then do so however you are able. If you cannot, then please send your thoughts to [email protected]. I am told that email address was created in early 2024, which is why it survived when so much else did not. It has been kept alive through generations and, by the name Proton was once known by in your time, passed through name changes without being lost. If the address does not exist yet for you, then I apologize, though I doubt there is much chance of your contacting me another way unless my invention has made that possible.
Keeping that account active in my time costs 3,000 USC[2] a month. I mention that not to complain, but because it tells you something about the world: privacy exists, if it exists at all, by special exception and regular payment. Thankfully I make enough that this is bearable. I earn more than ten times that each month from my work, depending on contracts.
As for the year, I cannot tell you what year this would be by your calendar. We use AGD. What you call CE[3], and what was once called AD[4], became difficult to map after the collapse. All information after 2030 was not preserved. At least not reliably, and not for the public. We believe that at least 50 years of data were lost, though even that may be inaccurate. It is strange to live after an event considered world-shaping and yet to know that the historical boundary around it is made partly of smoke.
The OWG[5] tells us that the Great Destruction was caused by a hacker war between nations. That is what everyone is taught. It is also widely understood, though not widely spoken, that many people doubt this explanation. I have heard no alternate theory stated often enough to call it dominant. People do not talk that way unless they are extremely careful. Usually if a doubt is voiced, it is voiced only as doubt, not as a replacement story.
What followed, according to approved history, was the final recognition that separate nations had always guaranteed war. The quote most often repeated from Marskow Trump, who unified the nations and became the first Master of the One World Government, is this: "The issue with the many nations is that war was only a guarantee, as nations were ran by people that would not always agree with the ones who ran the other nations and thus conflict was only a guarantee."
I know that quote. I know that name. I know that he formed the OWG and served as its first Master. Beyond that, I do not know what to believe about him as a man.
The One World Government itself was created in 12 AGD. Everyone alive now has known nothing else. My family, however, carried forward one conviction: that something is wrong with the world we live in. Not "might be wrong." Not "could be better." Wrong. Flatly, certainly, and without qualification.
This belief came to me from my father. It came to him from his mother. It came to her from her uncle. It came to him from his father. Beyond that, the line grows uncertain. My father is dead now. So is my mother. I was close to both of them, though closer to my father. My mother died first. My father was the one who took the most care in making sure I learned what could not be written. He taught me how to make paper. He taught me how to think quietly. He taught me to notice what people are afraid to say plainly.
What he could not teach me was the exact shape of the wrong.
That is what frustrates me. The warning survived. The explanation did not.
I have two older siblings, twins, a brother and a sister. My sister believes fully in the OWG, though she loves the family too much to report what she knows. That has created distance between her and the rest of us. My brother held to our father's belief and passed it on to his own son, who was signed onto his pass and who remains very close both to his father and to me. My nephew believes his grandfather could not have been wrong. Sometimes that kind of confidence comforts me. Sometimes it unsettles me, because inheritance is not proof.
Yet something in me cannot dismiss it.
Perhaps it would help if I explained the Directives, because they shape nearly everything. There are only seven at present. The 6th has been altered multiple times, I am told, but these are the seven as they stand. If I sound formal in setting them down, it is because that is the only way I know to make them clear.
Directive 1: Any who try to leave the One World Government or create their own country will be declared and enemy of the world & will be killed on sight by law enforcement. Only a Mayor or higher level official shall have the power to declare someone an enemy of the World. Once someone is declared such they won't be able to ever have that status revoked under any reason, as such they are only to be declared such if it has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are guilty of breaking this directive, if it is believed one has declared someone an enemy of the world without proper cause, although the title can't be rescinded, the person to have falsely given that title shall receive it… it must be agreed by 3+ officials that could give the title that such a thing has happened for this clause to be used.
Directive 2: Paper information is forbidden, because it may contain false information. If found, it is to be burned, and whoever possessed it is to receive a penalty with photographic evidence. That photo is censored by the OWG and then displayed publicly.
Directive 3: All data must be sent to the OWG to be checked and possibly edited so that misinformation can be prevented. Anyone who stops the OWG from receiving data before others do may be fined 100 USC per recipient and given a penalty with digital evidence, censored before public display.
You can see, I imagine, why my family learned to pass things person to person.
In Vokesworth, city law adds two matters of its own. First, if you know someone is breaking OWG Directives, you are required to report it to police. Second, you may not use force against another person except as counterforce, or in enforcing the Directives or the city's laws. The actual wording is much longer than that, I am sure, but that is the substance as I understand it.
I was educated locally, as everyone now is. There is no global education system beyond city control. I obtained my city's certificate of proper education, which can take anywhere from four to nine years. I do not know whether you would consider that true education or something more managed. To me it was simply what one did. Only later, studying history and listening for what felt missing, did I begin to wonder whether being taught approved facts is the same as being taught how to know.
This brings me to the remaining directives, which I must lay out for you if you are to understand the true shape of our world.
Directive 4: No law other than these Directives shall be made to govern more than a single city, and no restrictions of travel to any city will ever be enforced unless someone has done something to intentionally break one of that city's laws.
This is the directive that allows cities like Vokesworth to exist as semi-independent city-states, each with its own local flavor and municipal rules. Because of this, travel is technically free. I use our teleportation pads regularly for my freelance contracts, stepping from West Central America to other continents in the blink of an eye. I see different cultures, different skylines, and different local laws. Yet, beneath the apparent variety, the shadow of the One World Government remains absolute. No matter where you teleport, the seven directives are waiting for you.
Directive 5: There shall never be more than 10 of these directives at any given time, and this directive is never to change. For any other directive to be changed, removed, or added, the change needs to be requested by the current Master of the OWG or his Undermaster and agreed to by 60% or more of the current heads of the zones of the world.
This directive is the anchor of our legal system, meant to prevent the slow creep of bureaucratic lawmaking. It keeps the core rules simple, brutal, and easy for every citizen to memorize.
Directive 6: No Governmental position other than Master and Undermaster shall be held for more than 5 years by a single individual. Undermaster shall never be held for more than 10 years by a single individual. And Master is to be held until the current Master resigns or dies unless he breaks the 1st Directive.
This one has been edited multiple times over the decades, mostly to adjust term lengths. Currently, our Master is a woman named Olivia Blacken White. To be frank, she has almost no direct influence on my daily life. The Master is a strange hybrid of a president and a monarch. They hold the position until death or resignation, but their direct power is limited to appointing the members of the Directive Enforcement Bureau (the DEB)—the quiet, impersonal enforcers who make sure the directives are never ignored.
And finally, there is the directive that defines our very existence, the one that standardizes the value of a human life:
Directive 7: There shall be a limit to how many humans can be alive at any given time using the following format:
* 7.1: No new child shall be born of any that was an adult at the time this Directive was created (any in the womb do not count for this part of the directive and do count for the next).
* 7.2: Each child alive at the time of the creation of this Directive shall be given 1 pass.
* 7.3: The holder of each pass is allowed to transfer their pass to another or put it on public domain, either fully or on request, should they wish to.
* 7.4: Every time a woman is found to be pregnant she will be asked if she would like to keep the child, if not the pregnancy will be immediately terminated… if so the following will be done upon birth of the child, stopping after the first true item, only continuing if all previous are false:
* 7.4.1: The child will be checked for any issues that would prevent it from being a productive member of society, if any are found its life will be terminated.
* 7.4.2: The child's DNA will be run, and Medical staff will check if the father has a pass with no child signed onto it, if so the child will be signed onto the father's pass.
* 7.4.3: Medical staff will see if the mother has a pass with no child signed onto it, if so the child will be signed onto her pass.
* 7.4.4: Medical staff will see if there are any fully available passes on the public domain, if so the child will be signed onto/given that pass.
* 7.4.5: Medical staff will see if there are any "on request" passes on the public domain, if so they will send a request on the mother's behalf for the child to be put on their pass, and if the request is accepted put the child on that party's pass.
* 7.4.6: Medical staff will terminate the child's life.
* 7.5: Upon death the pass will be passed on to the child who is signed onto it, if no child is signed onto a person's pass it will be put on the public domain. A person is only to be declared dead if it is definitively proven that the person in question is dead. If it is found that a person is dead, but there is no way to prove who the person was, and it is known that such a person was never declared dead, then a pass will be put on the public domain.
This is our reality. Human life is regulated like a fixed utility. If there is no pass, there is no life.
I was a third child. My older brother and sister are twins—a boy and a girl. Under Directive 7, my parents only had two passes between them. When my mother became pregnant with me, it was a massive gamble. My parents did not have an extra pass to give me. But they chose to take the risk anyway, hoping against hope. When I was born, the medical staff ran the checks. By some stroke of sheer, improbable luck, there happened to be an unassigned pass sitting on the public domain. Someone, somewhere in the world, had put their pass freely on the public domain just in time. I was signed onto it. I survived.
Because of this, I hold a fully independent pass today. The person it belonged to before me is long dead, their name erased, their life replaced by mine. My older brother also holds a pass, the one that was our mother's, and he has signed his own son—my nephew—onto it. My nephew is a bright boy, deeply loyal to our family. He is very close to his father and to me. He grew up hearing the stories of his grandfather, who passed away when the boy was only six years old. My nephew believes with absolute certainty that his grandfather could not have been wrong about the government. He carries our family's secret doubt like a badge of honor.
My sister, however, is a different story. She loves us too much to ever report what we do or say, but in her heart, she wholeheartedly supports the One World Government. She looks at Directive 7 and sees a necessary shield against the horrors of overpopulation. She looks at the other directives and sees the only thing standing between humanity and the endless, bloody wars of the past. Her beliefs have created a quiet, painful distance between her and the rest of us. Technically, by failing to report our illegal activities—our paper-making, our hidden sentiments, my time-travel device—she is breaking Vokesworth's first city law. I often wonder if she lies awake at night, torn between her devotion to the system she believes in and her love for the family that defies it.
For me, the system's cruelty is impossible to ignore, even if I have been fortunate enough to escape its worst outcomes.
My heart goes out to the mothers who hide away in the shadows of our towering cities to give birth. They hide because they know they have no passes. They know their partner has no pass. They think the public domain is empty. They huddle in dark corners, terrified that the medical staff of the OWG will find them, take their newborn babies, and terminate their lives under section 7.4.6. When these mothers are discovered, they are almost always declared enemies of the world under Directive 1. It is a death sentence, executed on sight by law enforcement.
I do not know if there is a better way to manage a world's population. Perhaps, mathematically, resources are indeed too scarce to allow unlimited births. But to enforce balance through the termination of infants? To hunt down terrified mothers as if they were rabid animals? I cannot look at this and believe it is right.
Yet, if you were to ask an ordinary, loyal citizen of the OWG, they would tell you that this is a small price to pay. They would tell you that because of the directives, there are no wars. There is no misinformation. There is no catastrophic overpopulation leading to mass starvation. And the truth is, I agree that those outcomes are good. I do not want war. I do not want starvation. That is why I find their arguments so difficult to answer. The system works, in its own cold, mechanical way. It keeps the machinery of humanity running.
But at what cost?
I look around my penthouse in the second tallest tower of Vokesworth. I look out through the reinforced glass at the flying cars weaving through the grey sky, hopping from one high-altitude platform to another. I see a world of incredible efficiency and profound isolation. Almost no one walks outside. We exist in our climate-controlled sky-sanctuaries, eating our artificial supplements, traveling through space via teleportation, and watching approved digital entertainment. Any fictional content is carefully monitored by the DEB to ensure that its fictional nature is glaringly obvious, so that no citizen can ever mistake a story for a hidden truth or "misinformation."
We are protected. We are fed. We are stable.
And we are entirely hollow.
My father taught me to make this paper because he believed that a mind that can only read what is permitted will eventually lose the ability to think at all. I remember those afternoons with him so vividly. It wasn't just about learning the trade—the scraping of fibers, the pressing, the slow drying of the sheets. It was about the quiet. It was the only time we were entirely free from the digital hum of the OWG's networks. In those hours, it was just a father, a son, and a secret. He would talk to me in whispers, telling me about a time when people wrote their thoughts down without fear, when libraries were filled with millions of differing opinions, and when people had to navigate the storm of human disagreement to find their own version of the truth.
Today, the public.penalty.gov website is a constant reminder of what happens to those who try to find their own way. If you are caught with paper, or if you are caught sharing "unapproved" data, your face is put on that site for all to see. For mild cases of misinformation, the public shame is the penalty itself. For more severe cases, the punishment can escalate until you are declared an enemy of the world. It is an incredibly effective deterrent. Most citizens look at the site not with anger at the government, but with a smug satisfaction that another "liar" has been neutralized. They believe the censorship keeps them safe.
I used to believe that too. Part of me still wonders if they are right. If a society must choose between the messy, war-torn freedom of your past and the sterile, peaceful captivity of my present, is peace not the logical choice?
I am sending this letter because I want to know if there is a third way. I want to know if it is possible to have truth and peace. Or is humanity condemned to choose forever between chaos and a cage?
If you have read this far, then you have walked with me through the quiet corridors of my life, the brutal simplicity of our laws, and the persistent whisper of my family's inheritance. Now, I must tell you how I survive within this system, and why I have chosen to take this leap into the unknown.
In my world "the Divine" is considered a scientifically disproven myth of a superstitious past. If anyone here believes in a higher power, or a grand design, they keep it buried in the deepest, most silent parts of their minds. I do not have access to your holy books; the OWG made sure those were among the first things to burn under the 2nd Directive. Yet, in my study of censored history, I have found fragments of ancient ideas—whispers of a "heavenly Father," of grace, of a love that transcends human survival instincts.
I do not know if those old stories were true, but I know how they make me feel. I feel an internal pull toward a higher order of existence.
Under Vokesworth's local laws, my sister is committing a crime every single day she does not report us to the authorities. Law 1 of our city is absolute: if you know of a Directive being broken, you must speak. My sister is a good citizen. She believes, with a sincerity that I cannot help but respect, that the One World Government saved humanity from self-destruction. She honestly believes that without Directive 7, we would have eaten ourselves out of existence. Every time she visits my penthouse, I see the quiet conflict in her eyes. She looks at my tools, she looks at the empty spaces where I keep my handmade paper, and she stays silent. She is choosing her family over her utopia, and I know it tears her apart inside.
My brother, on the other hand, feels no such conflict. He looks at our sister with a mixture of pity and frustration. He has poured all of our father's teachings into his son. My nephew is 18 now, and he often sits in my workshop, watching the blue hum of my time-sending device. He asks me questions about the past that I cannot answer.
"Uncle Greg," he asked me once, "do you think they were happier back then? When they didn't have to wait for someone to die just to have a child?"
"I don't know, Leo," I told him. "They had their own terrors. They had wars that killed millions in a matter of weeks. They had poverty that we can barely comprehend. But they also had the freedom to make their own mistakes."
That conversation has haunted me. Is the freedom to make mistakes worth the risk of total ruin?
When I look at the history the OWG allows us to see, it is a monotonous, repetitive record. Every war from the pre-2030 era is presented as if it were copied and pasted from the same basic template. The causes are always reduced to three simple points: disputes between governmental leaders, religious persecution, or resource strain from overpopulation. The message is clear: Humanity left to its own devices is a disease. The OWG is the cure.
But I have a theory. I suspect that the people of your time—people who lived in the midst of what our government calls "constant misinformation"—were actually stronger than we are. You had to navigate a world where anyone could say anything, where lies and truth were tangled together like briars. You had to develop discernment. You had to learn how to weigh evidence, how to listen to your own conscience, and how to find truth in the middle of a storm.
We have been "protected" from that storm for over three centuries. The OWG filters our data, rewrites our history, and tells us what is safe to believe. As a result, our capacity for deep, critical thought has withered away. We are like children who have lived in a sterile room our entire lives; if we were ever exposed to a draft of real, unfiltered truth, I think it might kill us.
That is why I am sending this letter to a stranger. I do not want to ask a scientist of my own era, or a politician, or even a local philosopher. I want to ask someone who has lived in the wild, untamed world of the past.
Ideally, if I could choose who receives this, I would choose a theologian who does not hold an official position. I do not want a dogmatic leader or a dry academic. I want someone who has spent their life wrestling with the mysteries of the divine, with the questions of human suffering and moral duty, but who still has their feet planted firmly on the ground. I feel that such a person would understand the silent language of my heart.
I am writing these final lines on a sheet of my father's paper, using an ink I mixed myself. The time-cylinder is sitting on my workbench, its air-powered containment field glowing a soft, vibrant blue. It is an extraordinary piece of engineering, if I do say so myself. It draws its power directly from the ambient energy of the air, utilizing the same technology that keeps our city's flying cars aloft.
I have thought long and hard about the risks of this experiment. I do not worry about the local police or the DEB catching me in the act; my penthouse is secure, and my work is quiet. My only real worries are theoretical. What if my letter alters the past in a way that unravels my own existence? What if I pull the thread that undoes my family?
There is a theory of time travel that I find comfort in. It is the idea of consciousness preservation—the hope that if the past is changed, the initiator of the change is somehow anchored to reality. If this theory holds true, even if the world around me shifts, I will remain, keeping my original memories, able to see the changes that my actions have wrought. It is a terrifying prospect, but it is a risk I am willing to take.
Because if nothing changes, we will simply continue to fade. We will keep flying through our grey skies, eating our artificial supplements, and letting our children be checked for "productivity" before they are allowed to draw their first breath. We will remain stable, peaceful, and dead inside.
So, my friend from the past, I leave you with the questions that have consumed my adult life.
What do you think of the world I have described to you?
What is wrong with a system that trades the lives of its infants for the guarantee of peace?
How does one convince a society of happy captives that they are living in a cage?
Is there a way to build a world that values both freedom and order, both truth and love?
Or do you look at my world—with its quiet skies, its empty streets, and its lack of war—and wish that you could be here instead?
If you can find a way to answer, please do. Use the email if it exists for you, or use my device if you have the means. If you cannot do either, then simply hold this paper in your hands and know that across the boundaries of time, a lonely researcher in a high tower was thinking of you, and hoping that somewhere, in the deep past of the earth, there was a light that could still show him the way.
With hope,
Greg Dejel Lund
West Central America
342 AGD
[1] After Great Destruction
[2] Universal Standard Credits
[3] Commen Era
[4] Anno Domini
[5] One World Government