17776, or What Football Will Look Like in the Future
by Jon Bois
2017
Hyperfiction
As a self-declared nervous-wreck, I’ve always been envious of those with faith: without the promise of an afterlife, the end of this current life and its limited time seems more daunting. Only recently did a friend of mine express fear of the opposite. He, a Christian, is terrified by the thought of existing forever, explaining fears of life (or afterlife) becoming inevitably repetitive and losing all meaning.
This is the main concept behind Jon Bois’ 17776, or What Football Will Look Like in the Future.
In a utopian version of earth where war and poverty have been eradicated, people suddenly stop dying. No more babies are born, the current kids grow but everyone evens out to the age they feel most comfortable at.
On the surface level this sounds incredible, the immortal being trope without all the angst of “my lovers keep getting old and dying without me”. And the human characters in 17776 are mostly grateful, if not a little concerned about whether their indefinitely long lives continue to have value.
The story is presented through 25 chapters, each chapter existing in its own webpage and linking to the next. Some pages contain video links but most is plain text and images/GIFs. Different characters are represented through different text colours with narrative being delivered exclusively through dialogue.
It’s tough to world-build through dialogue alone – people don’t often rattle off everything they know about their own existence. So, to keep the dialogue convincing while also filling readers in, the main POV follows “Nine”, a space probe who has just woken from a one-thousand-five-hundred-year-long coma.
They are naturally very confused.
Nine asks questions just often enough for readers get used to the world in 17776 while letting the various storylines progress. The storylines in question revolve around how Americans are keeping themselves entertained in 17776: by coming up with games.
The main game focused on is a bastardisation of American football: pitches are now hundreds of miles long and games last centuries. One of the first scenes we’re shown by the space probes is a player running into a tornado, armed with the knowledge it can’t kill her.
At one point, a mishap during a different game sees the breakage of a history lightbulb in California that had been functional since 1901 – something that surprisingly exists in real life. This causes “Ten”, the space probe who woke Nine, to mourn like she’d lost a family member.
“Perhaps in a more fearsome age […] we would not have room in our hearts to care for such a little bulb. But we are living in an age without loss. This is a sorrow we have forgotten to experience.”
For me this quote sums up why 17776 is so interesting.
It’s impossible for a truly utopian society to exist; as a species we have different preferences, so in one person’s heaven it may never rain whereas another may enjoy the changing weather. As such, examples of utopian society in media are often flawed societies with out-of-touch almost brainwashed citizens (think the bare-foot people of Spectre in Tim Burton’s Big Fish).
However, the people in 17776 are aware not everything is perfect. At one point a character laments over seeing a mural of a mother and her baby knowing he can never experience fatherhood and a rep for a faith group recounts dwindling numbers for church services as people become accustomed to an existence between life and death.
So, if like myself you’ve spent time fretting over your own demise I’d recommend going through Jon Bois’ 17776. It may not change your outlook on mortality but it’s a hell of a read.
