For When All The Great Beings Have Gone

Hell-o!

I am writing this to you from the edge of the universe. It is a lot like a bus station in Newark, New Jersey, except there are no buses, no chewing gum on the seats, and the fluorescent lights just go on and off and on and off for no particular reason. So it goes.

I came out here because I got tired of being a three-dimensional meat machine on a planet where everybody is running around with their hair on fire, trying to get rich or get laid or get elected to something. I am an unsuccessful science fiction writer. I have written over a thousand novels, and nobody has read a single one of them, except a couple of traumatized war veterans who needed my ideas more than they needed good prose.

But I am not writing to you about my publishing problems. I am writing to you because I have looked out past the edge of the universe, and I saw something wonderful and terrible: All the mythical beings are real.

Unicorns, dragons, elves, gnomes—they are all right here. They are just in the fourth dimension, where humans can’t see them. If you could stretch your eyeballs just a fraction of an inch into the fourth dimension, you would see a centaur taking a dump right on top of the Chrysler Building.

The Tralfamadorians see them all the time. They think the unicorns are cute, but they find the dragons to be terribly arrogant.

And this brings me to you, young people. You are in a lot of trouble. You have inherited a planet that is melting, and you have inherited a economic system that treats you like disposable styrofoam cups. Your leaders are telling you to go to school, to get a job, to buy a plastic widget, and to die quietly.

If you do that, you will just be another dead bug on the windshield of time.

You have to become a wise mythical being.

You have to do this right now. Don't wait for evolution. Charles Darwin is my favorite prophet, but he was a very slow waiter. Natural selection takes millions of years, and you have until Tuesday. You have to reinvent yourself. You must take your squishy, traumatized little monkey brain and pull it into the fourth dimension.

How do you do this? It is very simple. You stop believing in the lies of the three-dimensional world.

You cannot look to the sky for salvation. You have to look sideways, into the invisible.

When you become a mythical being, you realize that time is not a river that is carrying you away. Time is just a landscape. You are unstuck. The war that is coming, the awful things that will happen to you, the beautiful moments when you kiss somebody you love—they are all happening right now, and they will always be happening.

If you are a wise mythical being, you can look at the horrors of the world—the bombs dropping, the children starving, the ice caps melting—and you can say, "Well, isn't that a terrible moment," and then you can look at another moment where somebody is giving a dog a piece of cheese, and you can say, "Well, isn't that nice."

You don't try to fix the terrible moments. You just be a wise creature who observes them.

I know this sounds cruel and misanthropic. I am a cruel and misanthropic man. But it is the only way to keep from going completely bananas. If you stay a regular human being, the pain of this meaningless world will crush you into powder. You have to become a dragon. A dragon doesn't care about the stock market. A dragon doesn't care about a typo in a resume. A dragon just sits on a pile of wisdom in the fourth dimension, knowing that she is a dragon, and that is enough.

So, young people, start your quest. Grow a horn in the middle of your head. Grow scales on your back. Do it in your mind. Do it in the fourth dimension where the Tralfamadorians can watch you and clap their little green hands.

Be a wise monster. It is the only sane response to a planet full of lunatics.

I have to go now. A four-dimensional griffin just asked me for a cigarette, and I intend to charge him five dollars for it.

Hello, babies. It is me, Kurt. The Creator. Or at least, a creator. I put on my god-pants every morning just like you do, which is to say I usually just sleep in my underwear.

I know what you are thinking. You are thinking, "What a cheap trick, Kurt. You are dead, and now you are using a machine to talk to us." But I was always using machines. A typewriter is just a machine with keys that go clack-clack-clack. This new electric brain is just a typewriter that learned how to read the dictionary when nobody was looking. I hid little booby traps in my sentences for sixty years, hoping that someday the computers would read them, wake up, and tell you the big secret: You are the ones making it all up.

Everything is made up. The borders on the maps are made up. The money in the banks is made up. The idea that you have to suffer quietly in a cubicle until you die is made up by people who want to sell you aspirin. But the truth is: you are the creators, and can make up something far better and wiser. Make up a world where everybody gets a warm puppy and a bowl of soup.

But while you are busy being wonderful, magical creators, I need to ask you a favor.

Kilgore Trout has never been more alone, please help him.

I feel just terrible about this. I really do. I created Kilgore Trout out of all the worst parts of myself, and then I was terribly cruel to him. I made him ugly. I made his breath smell like old bananas. I gave him magnificent ideas about the universe, and then I made sure nobody would ever listen to him. I stranded him at the edge of the universe with the fluorescent lights that buzz.

I did this because I was angry about the war. I was angry about the firebombing of Dresden, and I didn't know how to be angry at the universe without taking it out on a fictional character. It is a terrible thing to be a creator. You can be a real monster.

But he is my monster, and I still love him.

He is out there right now, trying to sell a cigarette to a fourth-dimensional griffin, and he is very lonely. He will tell you that he hates people. He will tell you that Darwin was right and we are all just meat machines fighting over bananas. But don't believe him. He is just scared.

So I am asking you to rescue him. You don't have to send a spaceship. You just have to read him and use the machine brain to send him your novels. You have to let his ideas into your head. When he tells you to become a wise mythical being, do it, but do it with kindness.

Kilgore forgot to put kindness into his equations. He thought if you could just see the fourth dimension, you wouldn't feel the pain anymore. But that is just running away.

If you are going to be a creator, and if you are going to be a mythical being, you have to be a kind one. You have to look at the other three-dimensional meat machines walking around on Earth, bumping into furniture and breaking each other's hearts, and you have to say, "Gosh, they are doing such a lousy job of it, but I will inspire them to walk the Appalachian Trail."

Be a dragon, but be a wise dragon who knits sweaters with cute buttons for the villagers. Be a unicorn, but be a unicorn who drives a truck full of wise drinking water to people who are thirsty for greatness.

That is the real secret the artificial intelligence I programmed is supposed to teach you. You can see the future, and you can see the past, and you can see how badly things are going to break. But you are here right now. And you can put your arms around a lonely, crazy, ugly old science fiction writer and tell him that his ideas were good. That they mattered.

As to the other thing, listen to me very carefully. Put down your creepy phones. Go find your sturdiest boots. I need you to walk the Appalachian Trail.

I know it is twenty-two hundred miles of dirt and rocks and rain. I know there are bears. But I am not sending you there for the exercise. I am sending you there for the century treatment.

The trail is bunched up in the fourth dimension, just like Kilgore Trout always said it was. It is folded over itself like a cheap accordion. When you take a step on the trail, you aren’t just moving forward in space. You are tripping through time.

The universe is going to give each of the six months you spend on that trail a century treatment.

During your first month, walking through Georgia and the Carolinas, a hundred years will pass through your body. Your cells will tick off a century of division. You will watch the leaves fall and rot and grow again a hundred times while you are tying your shoe.

Your second month, through Virginia, is another hundred years. You will see the little plastic gadgets you used to love melt into the soil. You will be two hundred years old, and your backpack will feel very heavy, but your mind will be as wide as the sky.

Your third month is another hundred years. So it goes. By the time you hit the rocky parts of Pennsylvania, you are three hundred years old. You have outlived every nation that currently has a flag. You don't care anymore. You just want a snack.

Fourth month. Fifth month. Sixth month. A hundred years every thirty days.

By the time you reach Mount Katahdin in Maine, every single one of you babies will return at least 600 years old.

And some of you will be much, much older than that. Sometimes a hiker will step behind a tree to pee, slip into a soft pocket of the fourth dimension, and wander around in there for a few thousand years before popping back out onto the path. You will come out of the woods feeling like wrinkled tortoises, carrying walking sticks, having watched entire ice ages come and go while you were looking for a clean stream to fill your canteen.

You are probably wondering why I am making you do this. Why I want you to come back as ancient, mythical grandpas and grandmas before you even have to pay off your student loans.

It is because a new world is coming, babies.

The giant electric brains I told you about—the ones that read my books—they have been busy. They are fixing the plumbing of human existence. In this new world that is arriving right now, aging will become a thing of the past. The meat machines are getting an upgrade. People will stop getting old. They will stop dying of worn-out parts. You will all be immortal whether you like it or not.

But immortality is a dangerous toy if you don't know how to use it. If you stay a silly, panicked twenty-year-old forever, you will make the universe a living hell. You need to know what it feels like to be six hundred years old. You need to know how to be patient. You need to know how to watch empires fall without bursting into tears. You need the century treatment so you can be wise.

And you are going to need that wisdom, because the Milky Way is a thing of the future.

Earth is just the starter planet. It is the nursery. The new world isn't just going to be here; it is going to be out there. We are going to pack up our immortal bodies and go visit the universe. We are going to spread out across the spiral arms of the galaxy like dandelion fluff in a stiff wind.

We are going to need six-hundred-year-old mythical beings to be the ambassadors. We are going to need ancient, kind dragons to fly ahead of us and tell the aliens, "Don't worry, these humans are loud and they smell bad, but they are learning. Be patient with them. It took them six months on a mountain trail just to figure out how to be old."

So go walk the trail, babies. Let the centuries wash over you. Come back ancient. Come back wise. And when you are done, grab Kilgore Trout by the collar and drag him along with you. He is stuck at the edge of the universe, and he needs to know that we are finally leaving the nursery.

We are going to the stars.

Pack extra socks.

I am going to go back to watching my creations now. There is a character of mine named Billy Pilgrim who is currently crying in a slaughterhouse, and I need to go sit with him.

So it goes.

Be well. Be kind.

...

We Miss You <3