Ciencia
Ficción
“Time”
Riddle, A.G.
The Extinction Trials. En inglés
Ante una decisión de vida o
muerte, nuestra heroína, Maya, comparte esta historia como parte del ejercicio
de conocerse con los otros 5 miembros del grupo que lucha por sobrevivir…
"She turned
the pocket watch over in her hand. “It’s dented and scratched and worn, and I
remember his words to me as clear as if he were sitting here with us: ‘The
watch isn’t worth much. Not anymore. But what it represents is.’” Maya set the
watch on the table. “He asked me what I thought it represented. My first guess
was tradition. Wrong. My second guess was family. Wrong again."
"When
I didn’t wager a third guess, he supplied the answer: a single word—time. The
watch stopped working a long time ago, but it kept time for a while. Like we
all do. But time marches on, a sea that we swim in for a short while, a force
that drowns us all in the end. The central question of our life is this: how
will we spend our time? Will we invest it in a better future for those that
come after us? What will we pass down—like the pocket watch? A better future?
Or a darker one? It seems we’ve woken to the darkest era in human history. What
comes next, we decide. And we have one thing at our disposal: time. We say that
we spend time for a reason—time is a currency. In the end, it’s the only
currency that matters.”
Maya picked
up the journal. “Look at how they spent their time. Just like Alister said:
trying to survive.”
Alister
snorted. “That’s cute. But if you don’t survive, you don’t get any more time to
spend. Game over and nothing else matters.”
“On the
contrary,” Maya replied. “Sometimes, how you spend your time determines if
others survive. What sort of world they inherit. What sort of life we create
for the people we care about. That’s what this pocket watch represents to me.
Sure, it’s a trinket now, an antique some distant ancestor acquired, but it
means more than that to me. It tells a story about my ancestors who tried to
create a better life for me. They didn’t spend their time always focused on
their own survival. It was about more than that. About future generations.”
She set the
watch down. “And I remember one other thing about this watch. My father passed
away a short time after giving it to me. I don’t remember the details, only
that it was a disease that overtook him quickly. I don’t know if he knew he was
sick when he gave me the watch. Looking back, he probably did. His death made
the point even more clear to me: time is precious. You never truly know how
much you have. How we spend it matters.”
Maya locked
eyes with Owen. “That’s why I vote to go to the Escape Hatch location. We may
not survive, but we’ve got a better chance at getting answers there—answers
that could help those people in Garden Station and the rest of the world. I
vote to spend our time trying to help leave this world better than we found
it.”
En efecto, ciencia
ficción.
José Salcido