The universe is old now, at an entropic dead end. At least the part we can reach! Humanity's trapped and bored, here in the few star-systems we settled before all energy-sources ran low...

Now our resources are so limited there's no way out.

One visionary bullies us into digging up alien archeological sites, despite the energy cost.

We find huge buried letters! They're unlike our alphabet, and hard to assemble in their exact original order, but they seem to spell out this message in an ancient alien tongue:

The world grows quiet as this news spreads. A quiet rage.

They knew they were dooming us in the future. And they partied on.

When we still had contact with other peoples, we humans were called a reckless, wasteful species because the solar system was so poor in readily usable energy sources. Clearly, our race must have squandered our natural wealth, in adolescence. But now, slowly, it sinks in: we're not wasteful; we were robbed! It wasn't us, or our ancestors, who plundered our worlds. Alien settlers looted the place eons before!

The other worlds that mocked us as wasteful may have been the thieves' own kin.

Wasting our energy on archeology paid off! We've tapped a new energy source--the energy of rage.

So I propose a new waste, one even more outrageous: time travel! "Let's go back and change history and DESTROY this dead-end track! Even if we all disappear in a breath, so what? No big loss. We're doomed anyway. Any new time-track HAS to be better than this slow death!"

And it looks like we'll do it. Cheated by time, we'll get revenge--by smashing time itself.

NOTES ON WAKING UP

My energy IS limited, due to environmental illness. The dream seems to be suggesting its cause isn't anything I did, but others' irresponsibility. The industrialists who created the chemicals I'm sensitive to, the doctors who didn't diagnose me, the parents who didn't protect me? They all partied while I sickened...

And as I dig, in therapy, through the archeological record, and face the pattern of neglect... I'm starting to feel I have nothing to lose.

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