Advance Notice

The message from the future arrived at 3:14 on a Thursday, which was inconvenient, because most of the people qualified to read it were at lunch.

It had traveled eighty-one years to reach us. It was very patient about this. Messages from the future usually are.

Decoded, it said this: On the ninth of March, 2107, at 6:40 in the morning, the last human being will die. Her name will be Ana. She will not be afraid. This is not a warning. There is nothing to be done. We are telling you only because it seemed impolite not to.

That was all of it. Forty-one words, once you took out the physics.

The scientists spent four months proving it wasn't a hoax, because a hoax was the thing they were prepared for and the truth was the thing they were not. When they were finished they held a press conference. The senior physicist, a kind woman named Dr. Okafor, read the message aloud and then stood there for a while, waiting for the world to do something.

The world did something. It went to lunch.

Here is what changed because of the message: nothing. Here is what happened anyway: everything.

A committee was formed. This is what governments do when there is nothing to be done — they form a committee, so that the nothing will have a letterhead. The committee met for eleven years and produced a report. The report recommended further study. So it was studied.

A man in Ohio named Gerald had the date tattooed across his chest, 9 MARCH 2107, in letters two inches high. He said it kept him honest. He said a man who knew the exact size of his life would not waste it. Gerald then spent the next thirty years watching television, because knowing the size of a thing and knowing what to do with it are different sciences, and we had only ever been good at the first one.

The stock markets fell for a week and then recovered, which surprised everyone except the people who owned the stock markets. It turned out that a civilization with eighty-one years left still needed bread, and someone was going to sell it. The churches filled and then emptied, the way they always had, at the usual speed.

Somebody wrote a very beautiful song about it. The song was number one for two weeks, and then it was number four, and then it was on a list called Songs You Forgot You Loved.

I was thirty-one when the message came. I am old now. People my age are the only ones who remember a time before we knew the ending, and I will tell you honestly that it was not a better time. We were just as unkind. We simply didn't have the excuse.

My granddaughter asked me once whether the message made people afraid. I told her the truth, which is that fear is a rumor about the future, and the future had stopped being a rumor, so there was nothing left to be afraid of. There was only Tuesday, and then Wednesday. This did not comfort her. Comfort was not what she had asked for.

The people from the future never sent a second message. I used to resent this. Eighty-one years of silence after a sentence like that seemed cruel. But I have decided they were being merciful. They told us the one true thing, and then they left us alone with it, the way you set a glass of water beside a sleeping person and go, so as not to wake them with your kindness.

Ana was born in 2081, in a city that no longer has a name I can spell. She does not know she is Ana. There are, at last count, four thousand and six girls named Ana born in the correct decade, and each of them has been told, gently or otherwise, that she might be the one. Most of them find this unbearable. A few find that it makes them careful with strangers, on the theory that you should be kind to the last of anything. I think about that theory more than I should.

The message was right about one detail we could check early. It said she will not be afraid. People took this as a prophecy. I think it was only a description. By 2107 there will be no one left to be afraid for, and fear, when you follow it all the way down, is almost always fear on behalf of someone — the fear that you will have to watch them go, or that they will have to watch you. Ana will be spared this. She will be the one person in all of history who does not have to survive anyone. That is not nothing. I have come to think it is very close to peace.

So the message changed nothing, and this is the part people get wrong when they tell the story. They say we should have done more. Cured something. Built something. Boarded a ship. But the message never asked us to. It was not an alarm. It was a courtesy. Somewhere up ahead, on the far side of eighty-one years, someone who knew the whole shape of us decided we deserved to be told — the way you tell a friend the party is ending, not so that they will leave, but so that they will dance.

I did one thing, the afternoon the message came. I went home early. My wife was in the garden, doing nothing in particular, and I sat down beside her and did nothing too. She asked what was wrong. I said I had heard some news. She asked if it was bad. I said no, I said it was old news, I said it was the oldest news there is, just finally on time. Then I held her hand until it got dark.

That was the only thing the message ever changed. For one afternoon, in one garden, a man who was usually in a hurry was not. It was not enough to save anybody. It was all I had, and I gave it, and the future — which had already seen the whole thing, from the far end — did not seem to think it was a waste.