Dear Dad,

It’s Julie. This is the letter we always used to wonder about. It took much longer than expected.

My timeline runs parallel to, but thirty years ahead of yours, and I’ve grown older here than you are there.  You’re approaching the point where I lost you. A time when everything fell into chaos here. You wouldn’t recognize my world, but I’m still your little girl. I miss you deeply, shaking as I compose this, trying to decide what and how much to share with you.

I know you’re wondering how we did it. Briefly, new quantum entanglement technologies enabled us to produce wormholes in parallel pairs to navigate space-time. We used these parallel links to solve the issues of your era. Consequently, my peers nominated me as the Four Hundred and Twentieth Warden of Space-Time Navigation. I'm humbled to stand upon your collective backs, to share the title with legends: Galilei, Newton, Hawking, and You.

Sadly, I’m also a harbinger of burdensome knowledge. In my world, your experiments caused a cataclysmic disaster. Your cosmic string bridge snapped, pulling space-time apart for nearly a minute. The Collapse. We lost the majority of the world’s population, including you, instantaneously. It was the Potato Paradox analogy, but on a cosmic scale. When you shrunk the strings by a minuscule amount, like dehydrated potatoes, the resultant change in mass was much larger than you anticipated. Rebuilding has been challenging. We have all the resources we could ever need. There simply aren’t enough scientists or workers left.

I envision the many realities where I didn’t lose you, where we didn’t lose anyone in The Collapse. I can send small objects between these parallel timelines, like letters, but that’s as far as we’ve gotten. Imagine a bridge that could connect us to the ones taken from us too soon: life-giving individuals, artists who shared their talents with us, friends to so many. Men like you, like Alan Jankowski, and many others. A bridge could grant us the ability to see them once again, to make our peace, and to say the things we never had the chance to. This technological gift would rival antibiotics, water purification, or agriculture.

Dad, I need your help to go further. Know that whatever dreams may come, or when, I will love you, wherever you are, always.

Your daughter,

Julie

P.S. I sent Alan that Albert King album he liked so much. Along with some letters from his friends here. When you see him, tell him I said hey.