Work Text:
Greetings and salutations, [reader].
My name is Abubakar Star Olunde. I find myself in need of your help, if you will be so kind as to give it to me. Given what I am about to say, I would understand a refusal. Nevertheless, I beg you to at least read this missive to its very end. It will be a short and I hope at least interesting read; if you do not believe a word of it, consider it an enjoyable fictional diversion instead.
I am a Prince of the Resplendent Kingdom of Nigeria - yes, I know how that sounds. Very few scams could be as stupid and obvious; to begin with, as any person of modest culture would know, Nigeria is a Republic! Which leads to my next, even more outrageous claim: that is correct, in your era. In mine, several centuries in the future, the Resplendent Kingdom is one of the most beautiful cradles of civilisation, technology and progress in human history. We are a society of the free - worry not, our monarchy is little more than ceremonial - which has achieved new heights of power, among which, the ability to influence the past. In very limited ways, of course. Transporting a machine or a person is science fiction to us as it is to you. But we can propagate back ripples in the electric field in select locations. Enough, for example, to send an email.
I am currently engaged in a largely ritual traditional contest between me and my brothers to determine the succession to the throne. The object of the contest is simple: we have to persuade a person in the past to part with the equivalent in spending power of approximately $1000. It is a contest meant to demonstrate our charisma and shrewdness as much as our ability in making sense of the sophisticated weaves of time. You would be justified in feeling that it sounds like a rather silly affair; it is a tradition, after all.
The contest has been held for the last five generations of kings and queens, and there are generally dozens of princes competing (I am the twenty-seventh of fifty-six). Your time, between 1990 and 2040 CE, is the most susceptible to our unique avenues of communication, so you have been flooded with all sorts of nonsense originated from our royal family. The situation has probably not been made any better from those who strategically poison the well by sending back obviously false emails to reduce trust in the more serious attempts. For this pollution, on behalf of the Kingdom, I offer you and your contemporaries my sincerest apologies.
I will be frank; I do not wish to participate in the usual means of approaching the contest. There are very strict rules. I can not in any way influence the past with large enough perturbations that they would disturb self-consistency. I mean, I am literally forbidden from it, just as I am forbidden from travelling at the speed of light. If I tried the universe would find the most likely way to prevent me from doing so, which could be quite dangerous. Many a prince have died of a sudden and inexplicable (but altogether not too improbable) heart attack in front of their keyboards. I can not offer you money, nor knowledge that would make you rich. That part of the letters has always been a scam, I'm afraid. Nor do I wish to attempt even more sophisticated deceptions. It is not in my character, and it never had a very high rate of success anyway.
If I win the contest, I want it to be in a way that will represent what I envision for my own reign. I want to be honest, I want to be fair, and I want to bring hope. Honesty, I am doing my best to demonstrate. Fairness requires me to give you something in exchange for what I am asking. I do not need you to send the money to any specific bank account. My victory will be assured as long as you part with the money. I will be happy enough if you donate it to one of the many organisations that still struggle with the problems of your time. But still, the rules forbid me from giving you almost anything in exchange for it. You must understand that even some of the details and names I have given you are pseudonymous - such are the strictures of playing with time. But the spirit of all I've relayed is true to life. And so, what can I give you? Nothing but one thing. Hope.
I have chosen you not because I thought you were an easy mark, or because I thought you would be more inclined to know something that would make you believe. I chose you by reading your letters, your messages, your writings, as our cyber-archaeologists can still retrieve in fragments from old servers. And I know something gnaws at you, as it does with many others. I know sometimes you look out of the window and wonder whether all of this will last. I know you have much to fear, I know you think of the Earth warming up, of the terrible weapons that sleep under your most powerful countries, of the strange and alien machines that some people dream up to conjure, and wonder if this may not be too much. If one day we will make one false step, and it will be all over.
I bring you the only news I am allowed to. We will overcome. We will survive still, and we will be here, centuries hereafter, still creating, still loving, still writing, and holding silly contests of skill with no meaning, just because our ancestors did so. We will be as beautiful and good as we could ever be, and everything will not have been in vain. Not yet, at least.
That is my gift to you. These could of course be just the words of a confidence artist with a bit more panache than usual; you have no way to tell, and I have no way to disprove it. It is up to you to believe them or not, and decide whether to accept and reciprocate the gift with one of your own.
But if you do accept it, and treasure it, know that you are the one who will be richer from the exchange. After all, I will only win a kingdom.
Yours truly,
Prince Abubakar Star Olunde, Son of Abike the III, of the Resplendent Kingdom of Nigeria