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Challenge of the Week XXXIX
You took your smartphone and moved back to 1984. For the sake of the plot, your phone works perfectly, but a condition of your year-long relocation in time is no one can see it, or know about it. You are to report back to 2023 the contrasts: With people, music, overall humanity, anything. Send texts, pics, videos, undetected. The elite group with whom you work has cracked the code of time travel and intervention, and while the race to colonize Mars rages on, your group has decided to instead go back to 1984 to reset the world, so to speak. Before that power leaves a seamless, yet indelible mark on the future, the group has to decide if it's for the better, or to go ahead and let it all run the course it's on, and start looking skyward for continuation. Make it funny, make it deep, make it dark, make it yours. Entry with the most likes takes the $25 wire. Go.

the evolution of prophets and phoenixes;

A collection of voice recordings sent to +8675309

“There’s a taste in the air here that I think perhaps my soul knows. Each inhale tastes like freedom, like music, like all the drugs we’ve lied about growing in our basements.

Voices are louder here and when you walk through a crowd they look at you– really look. The sidewalks are alive with the sounds of conversations instead of TikTok reels playing on some endless, inescapable loop. I think perhaps I’ve forgotten this language of life and I find myself half desperate to rediscover it.”

-sent 03/10/1984 at 12:21pm

*****

“I’ve spent years reading magazines about this year in preparation for this. But it all seems different, real instead of a fever dream of something I can only imagine instead of touch. At night the city is alive with conversation. No one is recording their interactions just to taste fame. For them all there is only this moment, this song, this hit of liquor.

Some part of me, so deep and feral that I wonder how my genes recall it, knows this language now. My hair has long since given up its sleek and polished waves. Week by week, day by day, hour by hour, I find myself assimilating the way cancer does in marrow.

And I wonder, sometimes, if perhaps this phone holds within each bit of copper a million spores of a modern bubonic plague. Would it be the flea? Or am I?

Maybe I’m only the body caught in the cart tasting the transcendence of death and thinking I’ve been a fool for fearing it.

I think perhaps I want to be a phoenix.

There is enough ash here that we could grow them, grow ourselves, like flowers in freshly tilled soil. ”

-sent 05/22/1984 at 10:58pm

****

“The dream of Mars seems so pale now, almost as fragile as a nightmare pretending to be a dream. I think perhaps we’ve been mortals praying to the fathomless gods of the cosmos for salvation. Didn’t we all learn that’s how cultures died? Let us stop sacrificing our virgins and children to fill the bellies of the men who call themselves those cosmic prophets.

Perhaps history doesn’t need to repeat, and repeat, and repeat.

Maybe it just needs to be broken.”

–sent 06/25/1984 at 6:36pm

*

“Hope, if you’re still receiving my messages, I love you.

Break it.”

-sent 06/25/1984 at 6:37 pm

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