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Topic 14: Twenty Years Hence
Twenty years from now, I shall be dead. I do not need a prophecy or a judge to tell me this. After all, I am an old man now, and I do not live in the safest of professions or circumstances. Contrary to what certain people believe or at least believed, the prospect of eternal life has never appealed to me; certainly not after the loss of my wife. I can’t think of a harsher fate than surviving while watching those I love die, again and again.
As for the world…. There was a time when I had quite firm ideas about what the world should look like a few years hence. I was sure, so sure that all the Rambaldi manuscripts and formulas I had pursued pointed towards one thing, something only a man weary to his bones of human folly repeating itself again and again would dream of: a change of human nature itself.
Rambaldi himself could not have done it. For all his genius, he was limited in the resources available to him at the time. But I believed I could.
I believed. Are not those the words that usually come before any fatal annoucement?
More recently, Jack asked me whether I still wished for that world. “It is of no consequence,” I replied. “And impossible now. At any rate, I stopped working for it when I made my promise to Nadia, and even if I had not, the use Elena made of the formula means it probably never was possible in the way I had intended to begin with.”
“You didn’t answer the question, Arvin,” Jack said, and I raised my glass to him and saluted him.
“No, Jack, I did not.”
Be that as it may, the world as I have once dreamed it to be will not be there in twenty years. There will not be global peace brought by an alteration of human DNA. If anything, there will be more wars. I would like to imagine Sydney at the English Department at some university, as she had planned to be before discovering the truth about Irina, but I rather doubt it. She is too much the daughter of her parents and, dare I say it, too much the woman I had some hand in forming to manage a civilian life in a time of universal bloodshed, especially now that she is about to become a mother herself. Wishing to save the world is a powerful drug, and never more so when one wishes to save it for one’s child. As for Jack, I always said he would outlive us all, and so he will, accidents notwithstanding. I do not think an errant bullet will ever find Jack Bristow. It would not dare. If Irina is still alive, which she just might be, he will either be in the midst of a quarrel or yet another reconciliation with her.
Nadia I can imagine free of what I suppose you could call the family business. But it does not matter, as long as she is healthy again, and alive. She will have inherited various places in the world I own, or maybe she will sell them and donate the money to charity; in any case, I would like to think of her travelling. Even in a war-torn world, there are still wonders to explore, and I believe that she enjoyed at least this part of our brief time together: the myriad of places and people we saw before we came to Siena.
And then there is the child, Sydney’s child. A girl; for some reason I cannot imagine it not to be. She will another name, but for the purpose of this little exercise, let me indulge a fancy and call her… Jacquelyn. There will, I hope, be no burdens of the past casting their shadows on her while she grows up, and she will reduce Jack to the most sentimental of displays on a regular basis. (Having observed him with Sydney as a baby, I am in a position to know.) With no slight intended to the late Michael Vaughn, I am quite sure that the Bristow and Derevko heritage will be on display strongest in her features, which will recall both her mother and her grandmother, as well as a drawing made centuries before her birth.
When she is nineteen, after the best childhood and adolescence various devoted family members can provide, she will find herself on a quest. A quest to change the face and the fate of humanity, which will be more urgently needed than ever, through the works of a dead prophet, and without the terrible flaws earlier efforts have had.
It will be her destiny.
As for the world…. There was a time when I had quite firm ideas about what the world should look like a few years hence. I was sure, so sure that all the Rambaldi manuscripts and formulas I had pursued pointed towards one thing, something only a man weary to his bones of human folly repeating itself again and again would dream of: a change of human nature itself.
Rambaldi himself could not have done it. For all his genius, he was limited in the resources available to him at the time. But I believed I could.
I believed. Are not those the words that usually come before any fatal annoucement?
More recently, Jack asked me whether I still wished for that world. “It is of no consequence,” I replied. “And impossible now. At any rate, I stopped working for it when I made my promise to Nadia, and even if I had not, the use Elena made of the formula means it probably never was possible in the way I had intended to begin with.”
“You didn’t answer the question, Arvin,” Jack said, and I raised my glass to him and saluted him.
“No, Jack, I did not.”
Be that as it may, the world as I have once dreamed it to be will not be there in twenty years. There will not be global peace brought by an alteration of human DNA. If anything, there will be more wars. I would like to imagine Sydney at the English Department at some university, as she had planned to be before discovering the truth about Irina, but I rather doubt it. She is too much the daughter of her parents and, dare I say it, too much the woman I had some hand in forming to manage a civilian life in a time of universal bloodshed, especially now that she is about to become a mother herself. Wishing to save the world is a powerful drug, and never more so when one wishes to save it for one’s child. As for Jack, I always said he would outlive us all, and so he will, accidents notwithstanding. I do not think an errant bullet will ever find Jack Bristow. It would not dare. If Irina is still alive, which she just might be, he will either be in the midst of a quarrel or yet another reconciliation with her.
Nadia I can imagine free of what I suppose you could call the family business. But it does not matter, as long as she is healthy again, and alive. She will have inherited various places in the world I own, or maybe she will sell them and donate the money to charity; in any case, I would like to think of her travelling. Even in a war-torn world, there are still wonders to explore, and I believe that she enjoyed at least this part of our brief time together: the myriad of places and people we saw before we came to Siena.
And then there is the child, Sydney’s child. A girl; for some reason I cannot imagine it not to be. She will another name, but for the purpose of this little exercise, let me indulge a fancy and call her… Jacquelyn. There will, I hope, be no burdens of the past casting their shadows on her while she grows up, and she will reduce Jack to the most sentimental of displays on a regular basis. (Having observed him with Sydney as a baby, I am in a position to know.) With no slight intended to the late Michael Vaughn, I am quite sure that the Bristow and Derevko heritage will be on display strongest in her features, which will recall both her mother and her grandmother, as well as a drawing made centuries before her birth.
When she is nineteen, after the best childhood and adolescence various devoted family members can provide, she will find herself on a quest. A quest to change the face and the fate of humanity, which will be more urgently needed than ever, through the works of a dead prophet, and without the terrible flaws earlier efforts have had.
It will be her destiny.