In the future, you will find that living beings are competing directly against objects for survival, and that objects are treated with greater respect than beings. Animals will be gone. Machines will be everywhere. People will defend machines and books against those who claim living beings should not compete with objects.

Instead of speaking they will quote. Photographs will receive more care and attention than people or creatures. Many humans will be practically owned by their devices, and will serve them slavishly. Actual human awareness will have gone the way of the passenger pigeon in all but a small stream of outcasts. The schools and cities will become prisons. The prisons will become states.

And there will be war, and poison, and unspeakable hoarding of wealth and resources. They will burn the ancient forests for charcoal. Sleep will come at a price, and the children will be born with raging challenges within their minds, bodies, and the cultures they enter.

In the future, you won’t have to die to get to Hell. We’ll bring it up, special, just for you and what you thought you loved — before we crushed it and sold you back the mangled remnant as a treasure.