I am a historian of the period prior to the mid-21C collapse of the American Empire, in which, as you know, the vast bulk of electronic archives were lost. My credentials are attached.

A long-outstanding puzzle has been how knowledge that would later prove pertinent to the invention of time travel survived, when so much else did not. I recently found records of a website called Ficly on which, it appears, said knowledge was cunningly encoded and hidden in apparently innocent fictional prose.

If I’m right, modern society should acknowledge Ficly writers as heroes, both as a matter of justice and as an important step toward reconstructing our links to the past.

I realise that for understandable reasons, the Department restricts travel into the distant past, but if you will allow it, I plan to go undercover as a Ficly contributor. If successful I will submit a copy of this letter, rediscovery of which in modern times would verify my safe arrival.

Before I go, we must also negotiate a plan for my extraction.