by T. K. Toppin
Laughter erupted out of me. To think, after everything my father had done to save me, this was how I was going to repay him? Shame slammed into me for even thinking it.
But I did want to die; I’d wanted it since I first opened my eyes. What was the point now of living? Everyone I knew and loved were gone. My thoughts hurtled back to when I was a kid, all alone and forgotten to be picked up from school. After that, abandonment issues plagued me throughout my teenage years. Just when I thought I’d finally got a grip, the icy festering fingers of doubt slowly dug their way into me. The nightmare was returning. It happened only once, but it was enough to shatter my world.
I was there again, sitting outside on a stone bench. A cold lump in my throat as I watched all my friends hop into their parents’ car, or onto the school bus, going home. Leaving me. Smiling bravely, I waved back, but desperately hoped that someone—anyone—would come soon and collect me. But as I sat there, even with my nine-year-old awareness, I knew my father had simply forgotten to come for me. Embarrassment swallowed me at the pitying looks my friends gave me; some even laughed. I was scared of being left alone while they all went home. How could he forget? Until that day, my existence was a perfect rose-colored world where I was loved unconditionally, smothered with everything good and safe and real. Protected. But that day changed everything. Years later, I knew that day made me grow up, and taught me the world wasn’t perfect after all. But then…until then, I’d never known such fear, such uncertainty. Such crushing devastation.
My father, so engrossed in his work, forgot his most important task for the day. My mother usually dropped me to school in the morning, but Dad was to collect me. Kellan was old enough to take the express shuttle with the rest of his schoolmates, and after, go off to his various after-school sporting activities with designated guardians.
I sat for nearly two hours. Forever. Alone. A worried and sympathetic teacher sat with me, making me feel worse than ever, and utterly foolish. She tried to contact my parents, but I knew my mother was at work in the field with her clients; it was her afternoon routine. And my father, as usual, probably forgot to turn on his phone. I knew this because we always returned to the lab after he collected me from school, and many times his colleagues berated him for leaving his phone switched off. To my absolute horror, the teacher’s next call would be to the authorities. I remember begging her not to call, insisting my dad would come. As I waited, I imagined being in the lab, helping wash out vials and equipment, pretending to tinker away like a scientist, or simply watching with fascination as he worked, as he immersed himself into his own world. All the while, hoping upon hope he would hurry up and come.
When finally he came, I burst into tears, ignored the teacher, who shouted something about forgetting my bag, and fled straight into his car.
I cried for nearly the whole night, my confidence in him, my trust, devastated. Nothing he said worked to appease my hurt. Not even my mother, who screamed at him, threatening to lynch him with the drapery cords, made me feel better. Even the image it sparked in my head, of my father swinging from the thin cords, didn’t help. I didn’t speak to him for a week. He never forgot again. Neither did I, and each time afterward when someone told me to “wait here a sec,” I’d have a momentary jerk of hesitation, a hitch in my heart, and all the emotions from that day would come flooding back.
After that day, as a way of gaining my forgiveness, my father and I played a game of promises.
“I’ll see you later, my dear,” he’d say.
“Promise?”
“I promise.” And then he’d wink to seal the deal.
I’d wink back.
It was our special code, our special language.
That simple expression encompassed every episode from that day, every word spoken, every retort made back, every hurt suffered, until it was fined-tuned to cover it all without actually saying anything.
After listening to Quin, and watching my father again, that familiar squeeze of anxiety clutched at my chest. The fear I thought I’d conquered was back. Tenfold, like a tsunami. Three hundred years later, I was scared beyond anything I’d ever experienced. The kind of fear that builds and builds until borderline hysteria sets in. The room compressed itself onto me, and my breath thinned. Ridiculous thoughts ran through my head like a sickness: If I stay here long enough, surely someone will come for me, take me back. This is the future. Surely time travel has been invented. Everything will be all right again. I can go back, can’t I? Can I?
A mewling sound escaped as I whimpered. My chest heaved to get air. My heart raced, and each beat thumped like a riot in my ears. I barely heard Madge talking to me, but felt firm hands holding my face while something foreign was pressed to my mouth. Cool, clean air shot into my gaping mouth while Madge ordered me to breathe slowly.
In…out. In…out.
I slumped back on my pillows.
Exhausted.
Chapter 4
“It’s not real.”
“It’s not?”
“No. It’s a replica.”
“But how—what? I mean, the wind…” Staring at the window, I must’ve look utterly confused. From where I sat, it looked real enough, and the gentle wind it brought in carried the light scent of sweet wildflowers.
Madge dived into a lengthy explanation about how it came complete with holographic technology, and ten images in its memory chip. It could imitate privacy screens, clouding over with white, black, or any color of choice. It had a built-in fan to produce wind, and artificial scent strips—recyclable and replaceable for a maximum of three months. And finally, it had a sound chip, able to emit anything from birds chirping and leaves rustling to city traffic or ocean waves. The lightweight design made it easy to mount on any wall of choice. To prove this, Madge lifted up a corner at the bottom and beckoned me to look under it. Sure enough. Behind the five-inch relief of the window, more ochre wall greeted me.
“So then,” I mused as I processed this new information while mentally calculating where my room was in the house, “that means, the living room is behind this wall?”
Madge nodded. “And a little bit of the dining room. After I retired and closed my city office, about three years ago now, I turned this room into my office. I had no real use for it other than storage for my junk. So I decided to convert this into a guest room. My sister sometimes comes for a visit.”
Madge and Quin lived in an odd-looking, slightly circular house, nestled among trees in an out-of-the-way hillside spot in the country, north of Christchurch in New Zealand. Having just gotten over the shock of being in a different country from where I’d started out from, my next puzzling thought, obviously, was how I was able to have such a lovely view of the countryside if I was smack in the middle of the house. Mystery solved, and a dubious poke to the “window” to confirm its authenticity, I pounced onto the next bit of the puzzle.
“Is the dog real?”
“Yes, of course she is.” Madge lifted a brow to suggest I might also have suffered brain damage.
Possibly. But this was the future. Robotics in my time were just about to go mainstream. It was a warranted question. I couldn’t be too sure, especially when the dog always stared at me with unnerving gray eyes. Fluffy was strange.
I’d been with the Aguilars for almost five months now, of which I’d spent the first couple bedridden. Once I was able to move my limbs, yoga stretches and meditation were added to my daily routine, which bored me to the point I fell asleep a few times. After, a swim in the pulse pool to build up muscles and stamina. It was like being agitated in a washing machine. Drowning always felt like a more pleasant alternative.
Food was a high-nutrient mixture of proteins and simple carbohydrates, unseasoned and naturally flavored. The texture was soft, like baby food.
I also had much time to rest, mostly outside on the garden bench for a little sunlight and fresh air. Madge often played a segment of a history disc to bring me up to speed. Most of it was a dull and boring blur o
f dates and facts, events and images that flitted across the screen. Instead, my mind wandered constantly, mostly to look around and take in everything. I still couldn’t believe where I was, and what year it was. My mind just couldn’t wrap itself around that fact.
Despite these activities to build my stamina, I ached constantly. My lungs tired easily, which left me short of breath and dizzy, causing my heart to labor from the strain. During the first few months I barely managed to last much after breakfast. The mere walk from the bedroom to the kitchen exhausted me. After dinner, I usually managed to sit up for another hour or two, and this was spent chatting with the Aguilars. I’d ask short questions and receive animated answers from Quin.
While I’d manage to sleep most times after lunch or dinner, usually I’d lie awake staring at the ceiling, or gazing at the fake window. Thoughts and memories tumbled together in a tangled mess, jockeying for position in my head, and again I’d find myself curious enough to look around and wonder if I should pinch myself harder.
Was this really real?
Curiosity gnawed at me. Despite the angst and fear, the sheer enormity of my feelings and what was happening, I couldn’t quell the mounting excitement and itching curiosity of it all. I was in the future! This was the stuff one only dreamed of. This was science fiction; it was a super-cool movie. Stuff you read about in a book—a manga book.
Things like this didn’t happen for real. But here I was, living proof that it did.
Does, exists.
With technology where it was, what was once just a dream for my father was now a reality—a reality he helped to create. And I was the first. Many had followed afterward, skipping through vast stretches of time and space merely by closing their eyes and going to sleep. And I wouldn’t be the last to wake. The Retro’s did it. I knew many more would do the same. Whether it was to cheat death or prolong it, to save lives or to hide them. There would always be another. But still, my Dad and I had started the ball rolling.
We did it, Dad! We fucking did it.
Though you couldn’t tell by looking at me, I did age, perhaps about five or seven years. Dad said no matter how much you slowed down the rate of cell growth by suspended animation, a person continued to age, similar to hair and nail growth in the dead. Only I wasn’t dead.
I was twenty-four when I went to sleep on the sixteenth day of September in 2030. Now, technically, I was twenty-eight to thirty, if one were to be completely accurate. Give or take a couple hundred years. But who’s counting, right? The cells in my body, hibernating, slowed all metabolic processes to a tiny fraction of the normal rate. The much-coveted fountain of youth had been discovered, and here I was, living proof. I still felt twenty-four, but I also felt even younger, and petrified out of my mind, like the proverbial fish out of water.
If skipping through time didn’t consume my thoughts, the advancements in technology did. The Aguilars home alone held many wonders, from amazing gadgets to their personal mobile phones. Even the cooking range looked incredible.
There were hydro-vehicles, air-cycles, and personal walkers were everywhere. There were even shoes with mild anti-gravity capabilities for those suffering from back problems. And light aircraft shuttles or air-buses to passenger liners that all flitted from one end of the street to the next, and from one continent to the next, at extreme speeds and zero turbulence.
And space travel! It was a common occurrence now.
And then there was the new and deadly range of arms and weaponry, too numerous to list, and too violent to imagine. But from what Quin said, most of these advancements had only been made during the last twenty years, after being put on hold from the previous century. Now they flourished. He said: “violence begets violence.” So true.
In the same brush stroke that painted these colorful shades of advancements, a good dollop remained where things hadn’t changed. Food was still food, not a pill, like people imagined it. Some were synthetic or imitations, and organic, free-range, and chemical-free were still as popular and pricy as ever. People took great pride in antiquities, revering objects of art and lifestyles of days gone by.
And then there was the bad. The Aguilars held my attention with lengthy stories of crime and violence, new drugs and addictions, new levels of poverty and riches. The extremes were more polarized now. Countries rose and fell, catastrophic economic disasters ruining whole nations and their satellites in one swift and furious blow, only to be replaced by countries eager and hungry to lead the pack. The world was like a seesaw, ever changing and ever moving, and the people ebbed and flowed to keep time with it.
It had even spawned The Lancaster Rule. That’s what people called it.
Quin had said old man Dane Lancaster was crazy, and speculated he’d suffered from bi-polar disorder. Dane had stamped out the rampant acceleration of technology and modern influences, and installed a reign of old-world values, fashioning them to suit his preferences while hoarding countries and continents. The dark ages had come once more, but with terrifying consequences.
The regime sparked an underground movement of hate, vengeance and, in the end, war. The war solved absolutely nothing, and only made things worse. Like Quin, people grew scared, skeptical, resigned, and submissive. New levels of terrorism were spawned. Their brutality was unimaginable; the swift and rampant disregard for lives limitless. The instinct to survive had made people wary and distrustful, and they became skilled and adept at self-preservation…at killing.
Now, young John Lancaster appeared to be restoring order. His rule was described as liberal-minded and fair. But, like his grandfather before, he was determined and bull-headed, quietly using brute force where necessary to achieve the decorum he wanted. Or so it was rumored. He was by far the most secretive and private of all the Lancasters, and no one knew his real agenda with any clarity. His governing rule spread across the entire continent of Europe, the Americas, and the better part of the Pacific Rim.
The Aguilars told me each country still held its indigenous identity, but an elected minister reported directly to Lancaster and his Cabinet Ministry. The ministry was based in the Citadel, in Switzerland, constructed sixty-five years ago by John’s grandfather. Those not part of the Lancaster alliance were neutral territories and ignored the Lancaster government, but continued to watch fearfully from the sidelines.
Whatever the case, or wherever you stood, the world had changed, but not by much. The Lancasters were just a few more tyrants marked in history as the world evolved. This became clear to me when taken out of emotional context and watched through a video screen. Like a crash course in history lessons, I watched a continuous spiel of narratives and images unfold, telling me what had gone by through the ages. From the beginning of time it had always been the same. Who wants to rule the world, and who wants to stop it, who discovered what, and who destroyed what. Never-ending in its repetitive cycle, going on and on into the next millennia.
I reflected on what I’d learned of the future so far, and immediately felt very old and drained. Three hundred years was a very long time, but very short in the sense of the world events and development. So many things achieved, and so many destroyed. Hate, rampant as ever, and love desperate to bloom amid its stench. War would never die with hate alive in all of us.
A weary breath left me. It would never end. I suddenly didn’t want to be in this new world. Three hundred years and the world still hadn’t learned anything. Life was pretty much as I left it.
But as strange as it seemed, despite my underlying depression I looked forward to sitting with Madge and Quin, sharing stories and just listening to what was happening around the world. Quin made history exciting and interesting. In turn, I tried to supply the Aguilars with answers to their questions, mostly about how people lived in the twenty-first century. Or they’d giggle like children when I told them about what communications were like back then—old land-line telephones or television, the beginnings of interactive TV and virtual reality, cars only just mainstreaming to solar, electric
and hydro power, planes, and the primitive space shuttles.
What blew my mind and sent a surge of adrenalin through me were the space stations. Not those experimental stations where astronauts lived for a few years running tests, but gigantic space station colonies. As the Aguilars said, they were quite the norm now, and with enough money anyone could afford to travel to visit them. Getting the visa to go was another matter. Strictly regulated and monitored by the Lancaster government, the space station headquarters, located in Greenland, controlled and operated close to twenty space stations. Several orbited the moon and Earth, while others, scattered far into the deep, dark realms near Venus and Mars, were mostly research facilities and space exploration command posts.
The closer space stations were either strictly for pleasure, with off-site, tax-free gambling establishments and entertainment houses, luxury hotels and residences for the very affluent, or research and off-planet farming facilities to help subsidize the growing demand for food on Earth. A few were privately owned by mega-conglomerates, providing everything from off-planet manufacturing factories to exclusive entertainment venues.
Space travel was no longer a novel experience, and though the far reaches of the solar system were still unexplored, every day more and more exploration shuttles and ships were constructed and launched. I sat and listened in awe, unable to fathom the changes, the advances. Many times I found myself wondering how, whether from luck or misfortune, I was here now. Whatever it was, a traitorous part of me looked forward to living in this future. In fact, I couldn’t wait until I was strong enough to travel and explore the world for myself. Go into space!
Patience, Madge kept telling me. Patience, and a little time, then she and Quin would take me wherever I wanted to go. I simply had to tell them where, and we’d go. I got the sneaky suspicion the Aguilars treated me like the daughter they never had. They protected me from the world at large, yet encouraged me to open my mind and understand what was happening. Though I was still far from ready to re-enter and assimilate into the world, day by day I felt myself growing just that much stronger, bolder, curious. The stark shadows of those I left behind, and the raw grief that constantly blanketed me, still sent me into a dark gloom. Many times I’d drift off into the past, taking my mood with me, and I’d grow sullen and distant for a few days.