Chapter 1. Morning
"For to every purpose there is a time and a decree;
But great evil comes to man, that he does not know what will happen;
And how it will be—who can tell him?"
Ecclesiastes
Gregs woke up reluctantly, as he often does lately. There was some feeling of slight fatigue and he did not want as used before to cheerfully jump out of bed and plunge into the morning routine. Probably, after all, this is age-related. Before, it would never have occurred to him to blame age, he always felt young and vigorous, he is only 118, what now considered "junior middle" age. Did he get that notorious psycho-crisis of "middle age"? The crisis which marks the transition to old age?
Ya, anyway it is necessary to get up and again to do this boring morning body diagnostics - the daily routine procedure that machines do to him. Once again you must surrender yourself into the hands of these “pieces of iron”, so funny people called all machines before - piece of iron, hardware. Strange, but his holistic psychodiagnostics shows in recent times a noticeable increase in variability, creativity and stability of his mental functions. And this desirable effect Gregs associated with his latest hobby - retro reading.
Old paper notes, he found not so long ago in an antique-looking jewelry box, served him recently as inspiration for reflection and self-development. The notes were written on separate sheets of paper, either handwritten or typed. They were definitely written a very long time ago, before the onset of the Reformation of Accord era, somewhere in the ancient 20th or 21st century according to the old calendar. That is, somewhere around three hundred years before his birth.
It was not a diaryand not a regular journal of notes – these scattered pieces of paper were the remaining grains of someone's life, his bright moments, insights and emotions, important thoughts and reflections that came to him. At that time, people were quickly dying, not reaching the age of 80 …
This antic box was not a "time capsule"- kind of special “Message to distant descendants” that some self-confident people in the past loved to hide in different caches. No, it was just a small jewelry box, and it was saved up to these days precisely because of its pleasantness, well, and nobody got read the papers inside it - from some moment in the past people just stopped reading all sorts of paper books and documents, everything that was printed on paper.
Well, now everyone simply hates reading as such, and especially reading printed on
