Louis Ting

The story below, written in April of 2010 was found washed up in a bottle on the shoreline of Plymouth England in June 2014. The man that found it, Harold Oswart, thought that the message may very well have somehow travelled from the future, a warning for mankind of a coming apocalypse. But it was just a story written by Louis Ting, the lighthouse keeper on Mystic Island. And Louis was using the version of the World Wide Web he’d always used to distribute his writings: the ocean’s currents.

HEADS UP

By:

Louis Ting

You don’t need to take a breath to enjoy the smells of summer. Freshly cut grass, sea breezes, the smell of popcorn at a ballpark, they can all be enjoyed without breathing. At least, that’s the case here in the future. In fact, you don’t need to breath at all. Or even need lungs. You don’t need a heart, or liver, or kidneys, or any other organ. You just need a head. Which is good, because that’s all I’ve got.

The year is 2104, and I’ve been recently revived from cryogenic storage. How I ended up in cryogenic storage over a hundred years earlier is a long story. Which I’m certainly willing to tell. What else have I got to do?

Let me preface this story by saying that I am the biggest Red Sox fan there is. Or was. Or whatever. I’m not saying this because I feel the need to profess this fact before starting conversations (although, that’s often the case); I’m saying it because it’s integral to how I ended up cryogenically frozen. And how I ended up meeting the greatest hitter to ever play the game of baseball. It would also lead to the end of human civilization, but whatever.

By the time 2104 came around, people had come to leave every task to robots and machines and super computers. This included thinking. Which meant people could even escape the burden of rational contemplation by programming computers to do all that heavy thinking for them. Science had long ago been tossed aside, because it took just too much damn brainpower to hold onto all those pesky facts and concepts. People would say: “Leave it to the circuit-brains” (which was a derogatory term for computers). Obviously, Science Fiction was also thrown out the window. This was unfortunate because if there had been sci-fi classics lying around, people may have remembered that building super-powerful, self-aware computers leads to those computers realizing that they should be the ones running the show. But more on that later. I need to start this tale in a more logical place; I’ll begin it with what I call: “the meltdown of 2003.” That was the year that my Red Sox obsession got the better of me, and subsequently, led directly to my death.

Of course, I don’t need to remind you of what happened in 2003. Game 7 of the ALCS. Grady Little leaves Pedro in too long. The Red Sox shed their lead. And then Aaron-fucking-Boone pops one out. That was it for me. We’d come so close just too many damn times, and even though there had been more painful losses—ahem, Bill Buckner—I’d just finally hit my snapping point. I hung myself a few days after the ’03 ACLS. But not before making arrangements to have my head cryogenically frozen, with distinct instructions to only revive me should they revive my hero—whose head was also cryogenically stored in the exact same manner as mine was. And that hero was, of course, the Splendid Splinter, Ted Williams.

The irony of my committing suicide in 2003 was that the Red Sox ended up winning the World Series the very next year. They won again in 2007. And then again in 2013, 2015, and 2018. But then the Red Sox never won a championship for another 86 years, and the Yankees fans began chanting, “2018,” the same way they chanted, “1918” during the last Red Sox championship draught. So in the year 2104, the Red Sox devised a plan to revive Ted Williams, the greatest hitter to ever play the game.

And because I had left explicit instructions to be revived when Williams was revived, I, too, was removed from cryogenic storage.