Everything Belongs to the Future

by Laurie Penny

  He said nothing. He got ready. He let her prepare.

  Head office finally answered his messages after a week of signaling.

  It was all arranged.

  The police would rush them in the service corridor outside the grand dining hall, away from the guests.

  When the time came, he’d be there to stop her. There would be plenty of men there to stop her. Parker had told him. He would just have to trust them.

  He could hardly trust himself. Every day, he was fighting the panic attacks. Waking up pinned to the bed like an insect under glass, gasping.

  Alex walked. He borrowed Nina’s earbuds and took a walk through Cowley. He walked over the bridge toward the university.

  Alex walked. It was September, and the students were arriving for another year. Sleek silver vehicles crammed into cobbled streets built too narrow for cars to pass. Young people in their best outfits piled out of them with arms loaded with boxes and bags, waiting to find their rooms, waiting for their parents to leave them to the rest of their lives. A whisper of autumn on the slight city breeze, the dying excitement of the year—so little time left, count the hours on your planner, and so much to learn, so many new tastes and stories and strangers to kiss.

  Alex left Broad Street behind and headed toward Carfax Tower. He walked for hours. Holding his breath helped with the panic. He would test himself to see how many steps he could take before his lungs screamed and his head swam, punishing himself.

  It was too much.

  He would tell her tonight.

  The house was dark as Alex climbed the stairs. Quiet, except for the rustling of the mice in the walls. They always came back.

  Alex pushed the door to the room and found Nina curled in a ball on the bed.

  The room looked like it had been ransacked. Like a small and sudden hurricane had flung everything.

  Beside her was the backup tablet, the screen alight, something small and black and awful in its dock.

  His fingernail chip. How had he not felt it fall out?

  Alex felt his heart drop through his stomach.

  “It’s true, isn’t it?” she said. Her voice was flat. She stared at a space two feet in front of her, hugging her knees.

  Alex stood frozen with his hand on the doorknob. He gave the smallest of nods, as if his head were in a vice.

  She let out the breath she’d been holding, like the air in the room was poison and she had decided to give up and swallow it down.

  He sat next to her on the bed and reached to stroke her shoulder, but she snatched herself away.

  “Don’t touch me. Don’t you dare touch me.”

  “I love you,” he said. “I was going to tell you tonight.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Do the others know?”

  “Not yet. Tell me,” she said. She took a deep breath. “I want to hear it from you. How it started.” She breathed out, slowly, not looking at him. “Three whole years,” she said.

  So, he told her.

  He told her everything. The whole plan. The deal. How he was going to save them both. The time he had bought. The time they were owed.

  “We’ll both get it,” he said. “Both of us, for fifty years, maybe more. Enough time to—don’t you see?”

  “We were meant to be a team,” she said, as if she was talking to herself. “You and me against the whole damn world.”

  He had always thought she was beautiful when she was angry. Now he knew that he’d never seen her angry, not like this. A layer of shock collapsing into cold rage, leaving something twisted, wrinkled. Something older. Something ugly.

  “How could you ever, ever think that after this, I’d want to—fuck, Alex! Is that even your name?”

  “It’s my real name. It’s someone else’s surname.”

  “But your papers. Your identity chit—”

  “Belonged to someone else. A child. Someone who died when he was a baby. It’s easy for them to rejig the papers.”

  “You’re disgusting,” she said.

  He put his hand up to her face, tucked a hair behind her ear. She took his face in both her hands and kissed him, suddenly, with a wild tenderness.

  Then she pushed him away.

  “Please,” said Alex. “Please just promise me you won’t go through with it.”

  “I presume you’ve told your people the plan.”

  “I did,” he said. “You’re going to be arrested as soon as you get into the hall. If they get to you in time. Which I’m not sure they mean to.”

  “Then we’ll be arrested. Maybe we’ll take a few of them with us. Now get out. You want to be out of here before the others get back. Get out and don’t ever speak to me again.”

  “Please,” he said. “If it ever meant anything. If there was ever any part of us that meant anything to you. It meant everything to me. Just stay at home tomorrow. Please.”

  “Get,” she said, “out.”

  Alex got to his feet, shaking. He opened his mouth to say something to her, anything. Then he shut it again, shouldered his backpack, and left the house forever.

  * * *

  Letter from Holloway Prison, January 2099

  Dear Daisy,

  This is an extract from a talk by some Serbian philosopher who’s apparently a big deal right now. I found it in a magazine they brought me—two months late. I remember you telling me what it was like when the internet was more than just messaging and shopping, when you could find anyone’s ideas online, talk to anyone about anything. I still can’t really imagine that. Everything good seems to belong to the past, sometimes. Anyway, here it is, without further comment:

  If one puts aside for a second the question of strict political morality with the understanding that it is dangerous to do so for more than a second one soon realizes that the Time Bomb is as much a paradigm shift in human violence as the machine gun, the tank or the atom bomb. Few lives are lost in its detonation, except at the center of the blast zone; strictly speaking, no injuries are caused. It is a weapon at once entirely humane and utterly monstrous.

  The potential military applications are enormous.

  The potential social applications are unthinkable.

  * * *

  Alex ran, his sneakers smacking the cobbles as he tore around the dark corners of central Oxford.

  He had to stop her. He had to stop all of them before they got themselves arrested for no reason.

  He pushed past the porter, ignoring the shout, and pelted down the cloisters.

  They would be coming in from the front this time. Milo would let them into Magdalen with his Bod-card implant. Nobody was going to be looking twice at a bunch of servers filing up to the Great Hall.

  The corridor was cold, and old, and very, very empty.

  The Grand Dining Room was a vast red rib cage hung with paintings of grim old white men. The guests were black-robed and ageless and tucking into a trifle of force-grown rhubarb.

  The servers lined the walls, smart and trim in black and white, and one of them was Nina, and one was Jasper, and one was Daisy, and Milo was somewhere among the guests.

  Where the fuck were the police?

  Clear, rhythmic sound. Jasper had stepped forward and was banging a champagne glass with a fork.

  “Ladies and gentlemen! Your attention, please!”

  Nina was on a chair to one side of the cavernous hall, with Daisy beside her. She was a cherub statue with a silver cigarette lighter in one hand and a ball of atomized gerontoxin in the other. It was a rattan thing the size of a Christmas bauble. It didn’t look like much.

  “We have a special announcement.”

  Commotion started to ripple through the guests. Alex saw Milo slide over to the kitchen door on cue, but it was slammed shut, locked from the inside.

  “You have taken what was not yours to take. You have put a price on what was not yours to buy. You have taken years, and months, and days. Years of life, from billions of people. You haven’t shed any blood, but you’re still mur
derers. You have stolen our years, our months, our days. Our moments to live and love and breathe. And now we’re going to steal them back.

  “We are taking back your years. Right now.”

  Someone at the back of the room started yelling as it became clear that this was not part of the entertainment, and then everyone was standing up, and the dons were pushing past one another, and at the back of the room, Milo was flinging himself desperately at the kitchen door, which wasn’t supposed to be locked, which was never locked, which someone had locked from the outside.

  For a second, Alex was frozen on the spot as the noise built to a frenzy.

  Then he turned the other way, back to Nina, grabbed her arm, pleading.

  “Nina,” he said, “baby. Nina. Please don’t do this. It’s not too late. We can live together, go somewhere, anywhere you want. Please.”

  People were screaming now, running for the locked doors. A cacophony of chairs and cutlery hitting the floor. Alex was babbling now, begging her please, please don’t, please wait.

  Nina’s eyes were wide and still and terrible as she listened.

  She loosened the hand holding the aerosol, just a little.

  She looked right at Alex.

  “No,” she whispered.

  She tried to shake her arm free. Alex held her hard. Then something hit him from behind, and he was falling.

  “Fuck you, snitch,” said Daisy, dropping the serving spoon. “Go crawl into the wall.”

  She pointed at a small service hatch set into the far wall by the kitchen. Alex looked at the hatch, and then at Daisy, and then at Nina.

  Nina looked away.

  Alex flung himself into the metal box. He curled into a ball, slammed the shutter down, holding the edge open with his fingers.

  He had to look.

  In the knife edge of light under the shutter, he saw Daisy grab the aerosol out of Nina’s hand. “Get down, hayatih,” she said. “Let me take it from here.”

  Daisy’s lighter snickered as she touched it to the device.

  “Prometheus,” she whispered, and pressed down her thumb.

  A pair of ghost wings, impossibly huge, opening.

  Alex held his breath.

  Great trails of light and silence beat and swept across the room and Nina, getting to her feet, she was the dove, withering.

  The Time Bomb folded its wings over the hall, and she was gone.

  * * *

  Letter from Holloway Prison, February 2099

  Dear Daisy,

  Do you think it was worth it?

  What we did, it was terrible, of course. A monstrous thing. A gorgeous, awful thing. We always knew that. But was it the right terrible thing to do? Did it matter enough? We didn’t take the Devil’s deal. We didn’t cross the bridge. We lit it on fire instead, and look where it got us.

  People are setting off time bombs in New York now. In Paris, in Johannesburg. In fucking Cardiff. Terrorism, and nothing else, that’s what they call it—pure criminality, floating free of politics into pure, abstract fear, clean and convenient. But what does that mean, when everything else they don’t want to think about gets called terrorism, too? Teenagers writing slogans on the walls. Schoolkids reading the wrong books.

  People send me hate mail, and I don’t read it. I know what it’ll say. Whore. Murderer. Burn in hell. Sometimes they send me newspaper clippings, too. Old-school, and those I do read, because I don’t have much else to read. Mostly they don’t upset me.

  This is one of the only ones that did. Please let me know if you’ve spoken to Fidget, if you can. He was the best of us. I’m not glad about much these days, but I’m glad he got away.

  DAILY MAIL, SUNDAY 7TH December, 2098

  “She was more than our daughter, she was our hope”: Heartbreaking words of Gray Tuesday victim’s family.

  Heir to the Everlong cosmetics empire was killed in the gruesome attack.

  Her mother Juliet said the tragedy robbed them of their “shining hope.”

  Described Melissa as a loving daughter with a “bright future.”

  Melissa Court-Jennings was just twenty-one when she was caught in the terrorist attacks at Oxford two months ago.

  Today her parents spoke at the memorial service for families of victims.

  Attractive blonde Mrs. Court-Jennings, 93, could be seen wiping tears from her eyes as she remembered her only child. “She was a kind, gentle girl, so hardworking,” she said.

  The young student, whose father owns Everlong cosmetics, was standing in the blast radius when antiscience extremists detonated the “Time Bomb,” aging her instantly by several decades. Most victims survived, but Melissa died within minutes due to an undiagnosed congenital heart defect.

  “She never even had a boyfriend at Oxford,” said Mrs. Court-Jennings, who was dressed in a black Prada suit. “She said there’d be time for that after her studies. Thanks to these monsters, she never will.”

  Her voice shook as she described her feelings about the terrorists who died detonating the Time Bomb. “I’m a forgiving person,” she said, “but I hope they’re in hell, and I hope they suffer.”

  * * *

  There was too much light in the corridor. Alex felt bleached as he walked down to the visitors’ room, an exposed thing, stripped of all of his usual defenses—tablet, watch, wallet, even his belt and shoelaces. It had all been taken from him at the gate. Like every time.

  They brought her in with unnecessary ceremony, two guards shuffling on either side as she sat down, slowly and carefully. She placed her withered hands lightly in her lap.

  “Thank you,” he said. “For making the time.”

  She laughed, a terrible ancient-lady laugh that shook her small body like a bunch of twigs.

  “All I have is time,” she said. “And more of it than you.”

  “Are you threatening me?” Alex asked.

  “No. I’m not threatening you. What would I threaten you with?”

  Her eyes were polished jewels in settings of old leather.

  “Why are you here again?” Nina asked.

  “I wanted to see you. To see how you were.”

  “And how am I?”

  Old, he thought. “Alive,” he said. “Are they treating you well? Is there anything you need?”

  “What,” she said, grinning, “are you going to bring a basket of goodies for grandma?”

  “You know I’ll bring you anything they’ll let me bring you.”

  “Ah,” she said, “that’s a pity. I was about to ask for some porn. You know what I like.”

  She ran a dark, unthinkable tongue over her thin lips. Alex clenched his jaw to keep from shuddering. She saw, and she laughed.

  “What?” she said. “Aren’t I pretty anymore?”

  Alex looked away.

  When he looked back, she laughed at him.

  “Alex,” she said, “I am not going to give you what you want.”

  “I came to see you.”

  “You came for forgiveness. You’re not going to get it. But it’s sweet that you keep coming back. Can you take my mail?”

  She slid a small pile of papers across the table. Letters, clippings. “I won’t bother to tell you not to read them,” she said. “Just get them where they need to go.”

  He nodded. He slipped them into his briefcase as subtly as he could, with the way his hands were these days.

  “Still working for the company, then?” she asked. Her wreck of a smile didn’t reach her eyes.

  “Freelance,” he said.

  “Checking up on me?”

  “If I said no, would you believe me?”

  “Not for a second,” said Nina. “Go away now. It hurts me to look at you.”

  “I’ll be back,” he said.

  “I’m sure you will.”

  * * *

  On Magdalen Bridge, an hour before dawn, Alex waited for someone from the past.

  The air was brisk and lovely. Alex opened his hands, slowly. It hurt, just doing that. H
e was holding open the hatch when the Time Bomb hit. According to his doctors, Alex now had the hands of a ninety-eight-year-old—twisted arthritic stumps, aching constantly.

  There was a little nest of blue pills cupped in his palm.

  Precious diamonds. Fairy food.

  Alex’s doctors were very understanding. They couldn’t fix his hands, but he still got the full package. A century’s supply. More, if he did a bit of extra work on the side.

  Alex raised his hand to his face and swallowed three of the pills at once, dry. They snagged and fizzed at the back of his mouth.

  A little noise like an engine backing up somewhere far away; a throat clearing behind him.

  She was there.

  She had come, like she said she would. A handsome middle-aged woman in a leather jacket, her mousy hair cut short. Her skin had cleared up, too. Funny how that happened with time.

  “Thanks for coming.” Alex extended a hand in greeting, too fast—he couldn’t make sudden movements anymore—and winced as pain flowered up his fist.

  “Have you got them?”

  He took the letters out of his jacket pocket, slowly, carefully. Handed them over, gripping as lightly as possible. She took them without saying anything.

  “I didn’t want her to do it,” Alex said eventually. His voice was a weird high warble that caught in his throat. “They were meant to stop you. We were meant to live for two hundred years, her and me. Nobody was supposed to die.”

  Daisy shook her head very slowly.

  “You still don’t get it,” she said. “You still don’t get that that’s the worst part of it. None of it was your decision to make. It was hers. She believed in something. You tried to steal it from her.”

  “I loved her.”

  “That’s not fucking love.”

  Creeping rose-gold over the little sandstone bridge. It had collapsed last year under the weight of revelers, but they rebuilt it to look just like the original. For half the money, they could have built a new bridge.

  “And what about the other thing?” she asked. “Is it time yet?”

  “You’re still working on the generic?”