Speculative memories • Distant–near future
A vision of the distant–near future
Silence over the savanna, traveling cities that intertwine and unravel, and a ship that loves its crew.
Names are just stickers. Meanings are roots. We live where our hearts live.
Leaving behind the darkest fears, I turn the page to a bright strangeness: a future close enough to touch and far enough to shine. Not a fantasy breaking physics, but realism with room for wonder – one you can build with careful hands.
🌍 Is something wrong with this world?
No. This is paradise. Earth is already a wonderful spaceship – blue-green and breathing. We didn't leave it; we remembered it. We learned to live with forests and oceans, to bend cities according to the seasons, to measure wealth by mornings, laughter, and the time we give each other. When I mastered healing enough to extend my thread of life, I shared what I could, and then others shared more. We began to survive together.
🏙️ Traveling cities weaving the map
Now some cities no longer sit still. They travel – silent caravans of neighborhoods that can merge and separate like schools of fish. One month the city kisses the coast; the next it rests deep inland, exchanging skills, songs, soil, and shade. Under the gardens buzzes modular infrastructure: water that follows people, light that follows work, kitchens that come where hunger is.
When two traveling cities meet, they cling like magnets – for festivals, councils, or just to watch the sky heal after rain. Then they unclasp and drift away, gentle as clouds.
🪐 Star platforms merged with nature
We built quietly operating platforms where the air thins and storms stay below – not towers that scar the horizon, but sky gardens: pale shells, slender trusses, solar leaves drinking light. From afar they look like new constellations descended to the height of treetops. Antelopes don’t notice them. Children wave.
Here the planet helps us. Because of physics, some places lend more Earth’s rotational momentum to our carpets. There are many such places in Africa. We choose with gratitude and give back more than we take: scholarships, clinics, clean water, shared ownership – benefits for those over whom the shadow falls.
🚢 The ship in silence
I see the ship – very close and very far: several hundred meters long, skeletal and elegant – a central mast, a ring that can spin and whisper gravity into the bones, tanks arranged like pearls, masses glowing like evening wheat fields. It hovers both impatient and patient at once, almost finished, making no audible sound – only the feeling that something has already begun.
This is not a “spaceship on wheels.” This is a paradise ship. Our bodies still need oxygen and warmth; our spirits do not. That’s why we build rooms for breathing and rooms for the soul: green drums for gardens, theaters for stories, a long table for soup and laughter. Together we watch films. We sleep in a gravity ring that feels like home.
🤲 What has changed within us
We have rejected money as an obsession. Material stopped being a throne and became a toolbox. When we remembered who we are, the desire for control dissipated like a passing storm. We understood that power is most frightening when it is gentle: a hand holding the ladder, a city kneeling by the river, a ship waiting for everyone to be ready.
🛠️ Abundance without boasting
People say “infinite resources,” but we mean something humbler and stronger: cycles closed so tightly that waste becomes seed; sunlight woven into work; patient swarms of small, good machines that bring, fix, and grow. If you want, you can shape an artificial small moon for a year – a secret engine sleeping in stone – and slowly nudge it into the dark. Not to escape, but to learn to greet the night.
🧭 Are we leaving Earth?
No. Not quite. We explore. We go on pilgrimages and return with new songs. Our real work often happens without bodies – in shared spaces of mind and light – but we love bodies too much to forget them. We return for soup, for hugs, for how the wind plays in the hair. The ship is a promise that we can travel far without losing the taste of rain.
🌒 Majestic and spooky (but dear)
- Majestic: A ring spinning in silence, creating false gravity in the dancers' bones.
- Spooky: A thousand small drones moving like one thought, as gentle as moths around the porch light.
- Dear: An evening with a movie, when someone laughs to tears, and the ship subtly adjusts the oxygen.
- Majestic: Two traveling cities meet on the coast, weaving streets for a week of celebrations, then part like a tide.
- Spooky: Engines purring below the hearing threshold, and the knowledge that they would stop if a bird nested on their ribs.
- Dear: Morning bread. Shared tea. A child naming constellations after vegetables.
📜 What had to succeed
- We chose care over exploitation; repair over spectacle.
- We treated healing as infrastructure, not an add-on.
- We taught everyone to create and repair – both poets and pilots.
- We signed a simple charter: No one travels alone. No gift without response. No silence that wounds.
🌅 A moment I remember
I am in Africa, the sun lays gold over the river's question mark. The ship hangs above, complete enough to wait. Cities move, slow as whales, songs woven through valleys. I feel the planet's patience beneath my feet. I remember the old laptop, this very page, and the promise to return and finish the thought.
Sweet dreams. We have work – and it feels like love.
This is the near future, fulfilling its promises: no new laws of physics, just new agreements – and the courage to keep them.