Listen, miracle of the future. You strange possibility, my descendant. I know you are embroiled in your own concerns, but hear me. I’ve seen so many miracles in my short life, things I never dared imagine possible, and just as much pain. Here, in this place and this time, I am nothing but what I can conceive, what I can imagine. Why shouldn’t I make a message for you and you receive it? You use machines I cannot even imagine, I know, since even in my time there are machines I once could not have imagined. So think of me with you now, as I think you. Perhaps you are a mix of all the different peoples I have seen. Perhaps you are even something new. You are magnificent; I can sense it. For all I know you might wear a coat woven from insect wings and draw energy from the sun. So listen. You are my greatest imagining.

I have a story for you. It will seem, as you read, that it is a story about me, but the more I write the more I think it is not about my life or my time at all. Mr Antrobus told me so often of progress and emancipation and the evolution of humanity, but some small voice inside me wondered, what if progress is an illusion, alongside these other great Imperial illusions I have come to love and hate in equal measure? What if, in the end, all that exists is the show and the cost of a ticket? No. Let me take you behind the curtain.

I apologise. I grow tired and distracted and abstract. The hour is late. The candle is low. Tomorrow I will see whether it is my friends or a ship homewards I meet. But I must finish my story for you first. My future, my descendant, my mokopuna. Listen.