I was eight years old when el padre left for the new world. We walked two days to see him launched off. It happened slow at first, like our world would fight to keep the ship put, but eventually it left from the sky and the only thing that was left of mi padre was the smudges of exhaust against the atmosphere.

    Mi padre, he told me one thing, and just that. “You take care of su madre. You take care of sus hermanas. You take care of sus hermanos.” The eyes of mi padre, they showed of the strictest sorrow. My people, they talk of devastation and resignation and death. They talk of divine rule, injustice, and evil.

    The day of mi hermana pequeña's birthday we were walking down the street and she gripped my hand tight. She held her chin high and grimaced at ever stranger that passed. Hatred in the eyes of a six year old. This is when I finally accepted what my people have been saying. I have begun to understand the hopelessness of it all, of our lives here. There are dangers on the street, el jefe and his gang, hunger, los monstruos rabid at night, thieves, hunters, kidnappers. I must do my duty. I must keep my family safe. 

    After school and when los niños have gone to sleep, I have started to experiment more and more with the material mi padre has left me. I want to make him proud, though maybe, I just want to keep together and discover our ticket to survival. I have not seen my father since the day he left. No one has seen anyone return yet. After someone leaves, we never hear from them again. We know little of what is out there and we know little of our fate here. It is day 29J, the year is 2501.

In the old ages humans spelled messages with ink, the kind my father left me in a little black box with white pieces of a crisp sheet. Those humans wrapped their words into a bundle and wrote another human's title on top. The message went from hand to hand, everything read the name on the top and eventually it was received by that human. El hermano, Eloy,  told me that it wasn't true, that an object could never get pressed beneath eyes and find its way to another life without being snatched away every time. I've never seen a book. It works when a bunch of those little messages are all packaged up, they tell stories, like mi madre used to tell when I was young. I know it's true because the database I have broken into has this system of messages called 'blogs.' From what I can tell, humans from the past wrote stories about their life. They wrote them everyday and other human could see it all. I know there were books, because one time I read about a human who was titled 'librarian.' She spent every day in a place called a 'library' and in the 'library' there were millions of books for other humans to read. I couldn't understand who owned the library or what the human had to do to look at these books. Though I'm sure it was something cruel and disheartening.

I am not worried about other humans reading this. The database has been terminated for  a couple hundreds of years now. I'm not sure I'm the only one here, but no one would tell me secrets. No one would risk that. If no one else sees this, well that's fine. I want words in a place other than my mind. My name is Lula and I created a drug. I titled it xseño, and what it will allow you to create is something unbelievable, but nothing but believable once you have taken it. If the drug does not die when I do, as I hope it will, well at least now it will be known here where it came from, what it was meant to do, what I wished for it. I am seventeen years old, and when xseño was born I knew nothing else.