Editing Journal Entries of Valentina Suarez

Found journal … Serial number 39290, produced in the year 2024. Dated April 12th, 2099.

This is the last piece of paper I have in this journal.

I bought it in 2024, when I was fourteen years old. I think I was trying to bullet journal like I had seen some lifestyle influencer do back in the day. Now, I use it to document the world around me as it bursts into flames. Paper has been outlawed, the logging industry is dead. We must only use Canada chromatic as a document writing program, it’s heavily monitored by the government. I don’t trust it. Call me a flat-earther, or a conspiracy theorist, but something isn’t right, I can feel that it isn’t.

It is a shame what the world has turned into. Each day I watch the news with nothing short of horror and dread filling me. Often, I think of what the world could have become if things were different in my youth. When I started high school, they banned smartphones in schools. My high school banned backpacks too, and then they prohibited us from using laptops in the classroom, claiming we had to go back to the basics to up our literacy skills. The OSSLT became handwritten again, my parents wouldn’t buy me a laptop since I didn’t need one for school and once I got to university, I couldn’t afford to buy my own.

I know there was a problem, we were all addicted to our smartphones but I can’t help but wonder if removing electronics completely was the right choice. Sometimes, I think it was the wrong one. Trump was elected as the United States 47th president that same year which brought forth a wave of conservatism we had never seen before. Ford was elected for a third term too. All of it … All of it seemed like the perfect recipe for totalitarian tyranny. 

Now, internet usage was restricted based on education level and which sector you worked in. Those working for the government had the most access while I, and everyone else who barely managed to graduate high school couldn’t even watch a video on Youtube without hooking up a VPN. Though, they rarely ever worked unless you created and coded the VPN yourself.

Everyday when I send my grandchildren to school I fear for them, for their safety, and for what that god damn drug might be doing to their young minds. Neurovance was only in development for a few months before prescriptions were being handed out like candy on Halloween. And, everyone just accepted it. How ironic. When I was child, everyone threw fits about vaccinations during the COVID-19 pandemic, not that I remember much of those days. I only have hazy memories from elementary school and much of them come from what my parents told me as I grew older.

Now they swallowed stimulants like breath mints and barely batted a lash when the government called university students terrorists. It’s brainwashing them! They’re numb to the world around them. Walking around like zombies starved for knowledge but it is never satiated! I don’t leave my house much these days because of them. My skin crawls at the sight of them. I feel so guilty, but I can’t help it. They scare me. I want this to end.

It feels like I’m watching one of those bad dystopian YA movies from 2014 but instead of being able to hit pause and turn the television off, I just have to keep watching and pray to God that my family stays safe. It was a miracle that my niece, Mirabelle was home sick the day riots broke out at the university. She told me some of her classmates were injured, one of them, one who was a student of Dr. Van der Wood, disappeared never to be seen again. His parents put up missing posters and alerted the police but those who attended those lectures were all labelled fugitives, at least until they were deprogrammed. They fear he’s a part of the Glendonites.

There were whispers though, that many didn’t want to be deprogrammed. CP24 claimed there were growing colonies of terrorists who agreed with Dr. Van der Wood, quietly planning something. That there is more than just those university kids to be worried about. This fear mongering was ridiculous. If they had all this information, why would they dilly dally instead of taking action. It’s because they know nothing! They just want us to be scared because we’ll be easier to manipulate.

Maybe if the schools had us reading Margaret Atwood instead of Shakespeare for four years, the world wouldn’t be the way it is now. We kept looking towards the past without learning anything from it. Now we’re here, living in the world that was but a nightmare over a hundred years ago. It’s a nightmare now, but there’s nothing I nor anyone else could do to stop it. Those college kids, the Glendonites, they put something in motion that cannot be stopped. I just hope it is for the best.

Anything would be better than this.

It scares me… that drug, those poor children. I’ve tried convincing my kids to homeschool their children but apparently CAS would take them away. I can hardly look at them, they sit twitching and writhing at the dinner table, chittering nonsense. They’re only in kindergarten!

Crap … I’ve run out of space.

I guess this is it.

I hope my grandchildren’s future is far better than their present.