# The Letter
Author: Paynalton
Canonical source:
Language: en
Original publication:
He opened the box carefully, his hands trembled more than usual, and the young woman beside him, holding the lamp, tried not to breathe more than necessary.
It had been almost five years since he arrived at that excavation, "The Great Palace of the Last King," as read on the remains of the stela they had found then. Tunnels and rooms sprang up one after another, hundreds of archaeologists unearthed artifact after artifact day and night, each more mysterious and enigmatic than the previous one. The museums around the world filled their collections with pieces from that place, and soon there was no more space, and the storage facilities of universities and museums were left without space or hands to figure out what those wonders were used for or how they worked.
His assistant arrived three years ago, sharing with him his fascination with the past and the truth. It was also three years ago that the international teams began to withdraw, the secrets of the temple were literally impossible to release, the excitement of finding a weapon or some piece of divine technology was nonexistent, so the governments quickly lost hope of gaining any military or economic superiority from the findings. There was less and less people, and the rooms seemed endless.
It has been two years since the excavation began toward where he believed the throne room would be, fighting for funding to continue advancing another hundred meters, a month more, toward a room that promised to be a large empty chamber with perhaps a seated corpse on a throne bigger than the ego of its ancient owner.
It has been one year since the budget ran out and the government sent him an ultimatum to abandon the excavation and report to the capital university to lead the team working with the recovered artifacts.
It has been six months since the supplies ran out and one of the few remaining began to fish in the nearby lake to feed them. Three days ago the man got sick and had to return to his village. A few hours ago they managed to advance the last meter and from the earth rose a skull of a round, slightly oval head, exactly the shape of the gods, and, if he paid attention to the stela found, this would have been the last one.
It has been five minutes since they found the box under the remains of those five-fingered hands. Although it was perfectly protected from the elements and had supported without a scratch the weight of the entire palace when it collapsed millions of years ago, it was closed with a very simple lock that was easy to open.
Feeling that at last all that effort was being rewarded, he opened the box and, inside, found one of those transparent tablets that the gods used to write their secrets. As he touched it, the letters of light appeared on the crystalline surface. He was an expert in the history of the gods, the best in the world, some would say, so he asked his assistant to turn off the light and smoothly began to read the letter that was written in those glowing letters.
"What is life? What is its value? What does survival matter? Those questions would have been easy to answer for one of my ancestors, those before immortality. If we could remember the answers, perhaps we would have survived.
I have searched for the answer for a thousand years, and although I have already found it, I continue searching, hoping to find an error, a way to fix it, a way to redeem ourselves, to blame fate, luck, God, or the devil. But every time I look at the history books, every time I review the documents, testimonies, and records, I always come to the conclusion that we were the authors of our own destruction.
When we were mortal, we feared death, seeking in medicine and science the means to extend our own lives until finally we found immortality. We expanded to thousands of worlds, to stars farther than we could see. Our immortal children grew under the light of a thousand suns and we believed that human civilization had overcome all obstacles, but the truth is that we had fallen into one of the cruel traps of fate.
Although our bodies aged and died, our souls survived, being recovered and transferred to a younger, healthier body. Many vices emerged among us, murders for pleasure, outrages with permission, magnates transferring to genetically modified bodies, usurers trading in the best bodies, wars in which soldiers rose again and again to kill and be killed.
Our dream society became the nightmare from which we could not awaken, although we were immortal, we stopped finding meaning in having children or families. Why bring children into this infinite madness of life? With the passage of millennia, our numbers dwindled. An accident here, a definitive suicide there, nobody had children to replace the losses and the number of individual consciousnesses was decreasing more and more. We began to clone ourselves to cover the shortages, but then we began to ask ourselves: Why?
Existence became bothersome, survival an idleness. For what did we exist? Why did we continue clinging to life? Many decided to stop existing, refused to be rescued, invoking their right to die, and although some governments banned death, it was of no use to have people without the desire to live locked in hospitals and asylums.
One by one the lights of the firmament went out, fewer and fewer inhabited worlds communicated with us, and around me everyone was saying goodbye to go in search of eternal sleep.
And I, the most foolish of humans, continued to live with the desire to find a reason to go on. But the truth is that after thousands of years of life, the desire to live has died in me.
A long time ago I should have transferred myself to a younger body, but I don't find any meaning in it. I simply sat here, on the throne of the palace I built to entertain myself for a while, and began to write this letter. Perhaps someday someone will read it, perhaps one of the species of this planet will evolve and find it, I don't know, does it even matter? For now, I only want to sleep, to sleep a long sleep, but without dreaming, just silence and darkness.
After reading the letter, the old archaeologist looked at his assistant; only silence was between them. They lay down on the earth and, looking at the stars, fell asleep without saying a word about what they had just discovered.