The angels still don’t know I got my email working, but it didn’t seem to matter, since I can’t connect to modern Datacore nodes, and nobody has used this protocol in twenty years.
I thought the effort had been a waste of time, until I got an email.
You still get huge amounts of junk mail after you die, but it’s rare for a dead guy to receive a real email from a real person. But it kind of works out, because the person who wrote this is also dead.
I had been dead six months when I got an email from my mother, Cynthia Kovak, sent to a Boston University student account that didn’t exist at the time she wrote it.
The email said: “I don’t know who you are. I know the email address says Kovak, but if I let myself think about that, I’ll go crazy, and I figure I’m crazy enough already.
“The name implies you’re family, but I don’t have anybody I would call family, and I don’t ever expect to have a family of my own. I’m just going to treat you like any other vision and tell you the same thing I tell everybody else.
“My name is Cynthia Kovak, and sometimes I see things that haven’t happened yet. I didn’t ask for this, and I can’t control it. I wish the visions would stop, but they’re getting worse.
“I go into these trances, and I can’t get out. Sometimes they’re short, just a few minutes, and it’s just a bit of missing time while I’m standing in front of the washing machine. But sometimes I’m gone for an hour or a day. One time I was gone for a week and woke up in the hospital.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
“I’m scared that I’ll eventually be gone for a month, and I won’t wake up at all. Until that happens, I’m trying to write these down. When I feel a vision coming on, I grab a pen and paper and do a kind of automatic writing, so I have some kind of record of what I saw while I was out.
“Every vision starts with a date of when I should send the message and an address of where to send it to. Sometimes it’s a physical address, sometimes it’s a phone number, but lately they’ve all been emails, as I’m seeing stuff that happens further and further out.
“This message is for you, [email protected]. This address doesn’t exist yet, so I’m setting a timer, the longest timer I’ve set so far. I’m leaving this on a big corporate server in an account that’s been prepaid for a hundred years, so I hope this will get to you, and that this hasn’t all been for nothing.
“Your message says: It’s not over. The angels haven’t won yet. Trust the people who trusted you - the princess and the angel, the soldier and the fool. Trust your witches and your demons and the heroes you made friends. You can trust the dead man and his killer and the void they’re both in love with. Don’t be afraid to write what happened next, and please try to forgive yourself. Let yourself fight, let yourself heal, and always remember I love you. P.S. Nergal says hey?
“In all these visions, I’ve never written I love you before. So, I’ll just repeat what my other self said. Whatever’s happening to you, please don’t give up, and always remember I love you, whoever you are.”
The letter is signed Cynthia Jean Kovak, April 13, 2028. And for those of you who haven’t done the math yet, that means I just received an email from my dead mother, six months after my death, written five years before I was born.
And I guess that means I’ll keep writing, no matter how much this next one is gonna hurt.
TIMOTHY KOVAK WILL RETURN IN TALTORAK BOOK 3: TIMOTHY’S DRAGON