Echoes of Tomorrow

 In the pre-dawn hush, Bartholomew Smith Wells awoke to a silence that felt foreign and yet familiar. The last thing he remembered was drifting off at his desk cluttered with papers and the dim glow of his flickering light bulb. As he woke up, he felt guilty about falling sleep with unfinished thoughts—essays, manifestos, half-composed letters he was preparing that evening. He blinked at a ceiling made of strange patterns like an upside-down floor, and the air tasted faintly of ozone and wildflowers.

He sat up, heart thumping, and tried to piece together his fragmented memory. The room was unfamiliar: shelves suspended with no visible wires, books with screens instead of pages, and a wall of frames that seemed to pulse gently, shifting with colors and pictures that appear in a random pattern. A gentle chime sounded, and one of the big frames on the wall blossomed into a scene he recognized, it was a photograph from his youth. Bartholomew remembered the original picture. It was a sepia, brown picture of him and his friend Seamus before he shipped off to the war in France now this same picture had bright colours and amazing definition as if an artist had restored it. 

“Good morning, Mr. Smith Wells,” a voice intoned. It was warm, almost affectionate, disarmingly human. “I’m sure you have questions. We are here to help.”

Bartholomew gripped the edge of the bed asking, “Where am I?”

“This is Peterborough Health Centre and prepare yourself - this is the year 2025.” The voice said “You have been in bio-stasis for 110 years. Firstly, let me tell you, you are safe and…”

Bartholomew's mind reeled. “Why… how come - what are you talking about?”

A young woman introduced herself as Dr. Lee. “Because you’re Bartholomew Smith Wells,” the voice replied, as if that were all the explanation needed. Continuing, the voice asked “Would you like to see your legacy?”

Bartholomew’s life had been, by his own measure, unremarkable—a teacher, a writer of minor essays, a quiet advocate for empathy in an era of division. He’d never aspired to fame. The world had felt too vast, his efforts too small, his words lost to the indifferent tides of history.

Bartholomew watched as the centuries unfurled in a cascade of images and voices: classrooms where his lessons on kindness had become curricula, children reciting lines from his essays as mantras on compassion, public squares named after him, a low statue gleaming in the sunlight—his likeness cast not in grandeur, but in the relaxed pose of a thinker at rest.

He saw how his writing, ignored by editors and publishers but shared quietly online, had been unearthed after his death. A new generation, hungry for guidance after the Great War, found solace in his simple declarations: that to listen was nobler than to speak, that to care for a stranger was the foundation of any great society. His anonymous posts, stitched together decades later, became the backbone of what the future now called the philosophy of Smith Wells.

There were children’s books, parables for politicians, and even a day— Bartholomew Day —where people were encouraged to perform “small acts of gentle rebellion against apathy.” He watched, stunned, at the parade of pictures and videos with faces, young and old, reciting his words in ceremonies filled with laughter and tears.

“Your legacy,” Dr Lee explained, “is found in the quiet revolutions of the heart.”

None of the things he learned, on the day he woke up explained how he was thirty-five years old and missed his own success for one hundred and ten years.

Bartholomew wandered the city, guided by a gentle young volunteer. Every corner held reminders: murals of listening figures, quotations inscribed upon bridges, an annual festival where participants reenacted scenes from his life—most invented, some real. In the local museum, a wing devoted to “the Ordinary Revolutionaries” featured his battered old typewriter, a pair of glasses, that Bartholomew realised were not needed anymore and a faded scarf.

He found himself both humbled and bewildered. “I never meant for this,” he told a group of students who recognized him immediately, their eyes wide as they took in his living, breathing presence.

“But that’s why it matters,” one replied. “You didn’t seek to be remembered. You just tried to live well. You taught us that history isn’t made by those who want monuments, but by those who build bridges.”

Bartholomew listened, overwhelmed by the vast tapestry of influence spun from the slender threads of his life. He met people who traced their values to his teachings. He read essays critiquing and expanding his ideas. He sat in on a debate about whether the principle of “radical listening” could solve interpersonal disputes. At one point he was notified that the mayor was planning to rename a park in his honour. The event was something he wasn’t sure he wanted to attend. Everything seemed overwhelming. Bartholomew was a person from another time that didn’t fit in this new world of screens and commercialism. The noise alone was impossible for him to tolerate. 

Each day, as Bartholomew explored this future, he encountered contradictions. There were commercialized versions of his words, cartoonish and diluted— “Bart-Bars” promising moral clarity in every bite, digital filters dubbing over arguments with soothing phrases from his papers, t-shirts with his face on. There were critics, too: some dismissed him as naïve, others accused society of misunderstanding his intent.

At first, he recoiled at these distortions. But then he realized—this, too, was part of being remembered. Legacy was not a fixed monument, but a living, shifting thing, interpreted and reinterpreted by those who came after.

He met a historian who explained, “Every great figure becomes both more and less than themselves in time. You are a household name, Bartholomew, but you are also a myth, a mirror for the age to see itself. You belong to history now, not to yourself.”

In quiet moments, Bartholomew wondered whether any of it mattered. Did the parades and memorials, the statues, and slogans, truly capture who he was? Or did the real legacy lie elsewhere—in the students who taught with patience, in the strangers who helped one another, in the slow, stubborn work of building a kinder world?

He spent the weeks that followed in contemplation. He authored new essays—this time with the impossible clarity of hindsight—and watched as they, too, were analyzed and celebrated, praised, and critiqued. He witnessed how each generation reshaped the meaning of his words, adapting them to struggles he could never have foreseen.

One evening, as the sun set in unfamiliar colors behind the hills of Peterborough County, Bartholomew stood before his statue. Around him, families gathered, children playing in its shadow. He heard a parent read aloud from one of his stories—a simple tale about a lost traveler finding a friend.

Bartholomew smiled, a quiet gratitude blooming in his chest. He understood at last: how we are remembered is a mosaic assembled from memory and myth, truth and wishful thinking. But if some small part of our striving endures, if our words kindle even a single act of kindness in the dark, then perhaps that is legacy enough.

As Bartholomew prepared to step into the flow of this new life, he felt the weight of recognition soften into purpose. He was no longer a ghost from the past, but a companion to the present—a symbol of how ordinary acts might, in time, ripple out into extraordinary consequence.

The day he was planning to see Toronto Dr Lee called him to his office and informed him that there were some tests that needed to be implemented. Bartholomew somehow knew that something was not well with him. All his legacy was of an older intellectual not the thirty-five-year-old who had been in bio-stasis for over one hundred years. “Dr Lee do you think I didn’t notice that my statue is of a man thirty years older than me?” 

Dr Lee, lowered her face and almost in a whisper responded “We didn’t think it was going to work and when it did, we didn’t know how to deal with it. Since 1996, cloning of humans has been forbidden but it was too much of a temptation not to try. Finding the blood intact in your studio was itself a miracle.” 

Bartholomew smiled, “I don’t lament my short life, dear Dr., I lament the memories I don’t have because you found the genetical code of a younger me. Dr Lee, how many people had the opportunity to see their legacy a hundred years after they are gone? I am a person from another time - I don’t fit here. This is not my time it is yours. Don’t feel sad - you did what scientists are compelled to do: experiment with a trial and error. Thank you. And now, let me sleep, hopefully for ever.” 

The news never told the story of the stranger who wrote essays and walked the streets of Peterborough with a remarkable similarity to the town’s hero that everyone remembers differently. Dr Lee signed the death certificate of the stranger who looked like Bartholomew Smith Wells. 

We wonder how we will be remembered. For Bartholomew, the answer lay in the quiet, persistent work of being human.