《Reviving》


 The Torpedo; and part one of The Video Message

    The Torpedo


    Dr. Saars-Tomlin had already passed away by the time Jessica started her career in the radiology department. The Torpedo ¨C the sole product of the late neurologist¡¯s life work ¨C had been pushed up against a wall in a storage room which also held an obsolete MRI machine. None of Jessica¡¯s coworkers mentioned the stasis device until her sixth week there, and even that was only in passing; an intern was told she might find a certain missing monitor stand in the annex back there by the Torpedo.


    ¡°Does anyone ever check it?¡± Jessica asked.


    ¡°Its lights always seem to be on. You can look at it.¡±


    This last phrase had the emphasis on the you; you can look at it; you can answer the door if you want to talk to the canvasser; you can reserve the cabin in the winter, but I¡¯m certainly not going up there at that time of year.


    Jessica did look at it. It was eight feet long, and perched on a wheeled stand which brought it up to her waist. It was white, and mercifully dust-free despite its neglect. It had no hum, no purr, just a small screen at the side showing a green dot and a temperature: minus 178. On the side toward the wall, the two halves of its shell were hinged.


    She would check it from time to time, although she knew it had lasted for years already with no changes. Furthermore no one would have known what to do if the dot had turned red, or if the temperature had risen to minus 177 or, for that matter, up to a turkey-roasting level.


    ¡°You can open the lid,¡± a chief nurse told her, a few months in.


    ¡°You don¡¯t have to do anything first?¡±


    ¡°No, it¡¯s just a cover. It doesn¡¯t even need that lid to operate. That¡¯s what everyone says, anyway.¡±


    Jessica did lift the top half. This revealed a transparent inner lid. Inside was the man, naked, smothered in clear gel, not looking too peaceful or patient. His eyes were closed; but with his eyebrows slightly raised and his mouth pulled into a bit of a frown, he looked impatient to return.


    He was naked. He was unremarkable.


    He struck her as around forty years old.


    She looked again: Well, maybe thirty-eight.


    ¡°Nothing can be done for him?¡±


    ¡°Dr. Weston was the last one to look into it, and he said no. He said the brain was dead, like a rock. That was a few years ago, though. They say someone has a manual somewhere. Or did.¡±


    ¡°Dr. Weston?¡± Jessica asked.


    ¡°From Neurology. He retired a couple years ago.¡±


    ¡°And this man is dead?¡±


    ¡°Well, that¡¯s what Dr. Weston said. But they say that Dr. Saars-Tomlin thought otherwise. No brain activity, but not dead.¡±


    The man, whose name no one knew, was the first patient to be placed into stasis in the Saars-Tomlin device. He was also the last. A few months after his placement (interment? The language did not have a good word for this), Dr. Lily Saars-Tomlin herself had died. She was young. It was a cycling accident.


    ¡°Ironically,¡± the chief nurse said, ¡°she was roughed up so badly that no one thought it was worthwhile to put her in one of her own devices.¡±


    No one afterward continued Saars-Tomlin¡¯s work on suspended animation.


    The tube had come to be called the Torpedo after some years. Someone said it was a reference to an old movie.


    Jessica took a liking to the Torpedo, and its inhabitant, whom she called Dan.


    In truth, ¡°a liking¡± may be far too warm a description of her attitude; but she was the only person who ever looked at it. The green dot and the temperature never varied.


    She had noticed right away, back when she started, that the Torpedo wasn¡¯t plugged in.


    ¡°It must be battery-powered?¡± she had asked. ¡°No cord. And no solar.¡±


    ¡°It is,¡± the nurse had answered. ¡°A plutonium battery.¡±


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°Yes, plutonium. A tiny nuclear drive. They were once used in pacemakers, you know. They stopped using them because they were worried one might get cremated along with a body. But that¡¯s what powers it. Dr. Saars-Tomlin actually repurposed two or three old pacemaker generators, for this.¡±


    The light stayed perpetually green.


    One particular January First, Jessica set a cupcake on it and wished Dan a happy new year, thereby starting a tradition which no one else observed in the years in which she herself was away or just forgot.


    A woman came to visit the Torpedo on several occasions, but Jessica missed her each time. Her colleagues said she was Dan¡¯s daughter. (These colleagues didn¡¯t call him Dan, and neither had this visiting woman, of course, but no one remembered his name if she had said it.) She was old. On the last visit she was reported to be frail, and then neither she nor anyone else ever came again.


    Time passed. Careers progressed. Jessica had considered looking up the retired Dr. Weston, to ask what he knew about Dan and the Torpedo, but she never had time. After a few years she wasn¡¯t even sure if the name she had heard had actually been Weston. Maybe Wesson? Winston?


    Jessica moved up in the department. The hospital went through a renovation, but the Torpedo stayed in the same building. It was rolled to different rooms several times, but never left the institution.


    Jessica herself left the hospital for some time to pursue a placement abroad, but eventually returned. Later she took a year off for a teaching sabbatical, and again came back.


    Jessica retired. On her last day, she did not say goodbye to Dan.


    The Torpedo had been stored upright for a time, and had at one point been shrouded in a discarded painters¡¯ drop cloth for over a year; but the green dot never faltered, as far as anyone knew.


    The Video Message


    Part One


    Perry was dreaming of a dizzy spell. He was spinning, with his feet barely on the floor, and the blood was rushing to his brain to the point of bursting; and now while the front of his skull was about to detonate, he was also drowning, in thick water, a slab of it atop his face. A slab of water suffocating him, and he was unable to move, unable to rise. His hands floated free in space but he could not move them to push away the pillow of water.


    His raging skull and the slab of water merged, joined, and then began to slide off. The water slid down his face as he rose. He was being pulled. Someone was pulling him up; hands were on him.


    And now he reclined in a bed, its back raised. Another person was there, actually sitting on the edge of it. Was it the same person who had pulled him free? Maybe. It was a woman around sixty.


    ¡°You look better today,¡± the woman said. ¡°Are you feeling better?¡±


    ¡°How do I,¡± Perry started. ¡°Look better. How. Do I look better?¡±


    ¡°More alert,¡± she said.


    ¡°I. I don¡¯t remember this place.¡± He could see it was a hospital room.


    ¡°Well, it has changed,¡± she said. ¡°Although you have been here a very long time. Do you remember my name today?¡±


    ¡°I do not. I have met you already?¡±


    ¡°I am Penelope. This is your fourth day awake.¡±


    ¡°Just Penelope?¡±


    ¡°My last name is Serrano.¡±


    ¡°But I mean you look like a doctor.¡± She wore a white lab coat over matching dark blue pants and button-up blouse. ¡°You must be Dr. Serrano.¡±


    ¡°I am.¡±


    ¡°What specialty?¡±


    ¡°Neurology. You are definitely more awake today. What do you remember?¡±


    Perry looked down. He was covered with a white sheet. His arms were atop it.


    ¡°I don¡¯t remember coming here.¡±


    ¡°How about where you were before that?¡±


    All that came to him was a long time of darkness, apparently sleep. That had started immediately after a bright white light. He could see this in his mind: a flash.


    ¡°Go back as far as you can.¡±


    He tried to picture the time before the flash. For a moment it seemed it might have been an eternity¡ªforever¡ªbut then he saw himself:


    ¡°I remember something. Sitting in our driveway. As a child. It was gravel. I think I had a truck. A toy truck.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s the first thing you¡¯ve come up with, in these four days,¡± Penelope said. ¡°You¡¯re doing very well.¡±


    ¡°My mother was there. The sky was blue, it was summer. A warm day. I remember birds. Birds in the trees, we had many of them.¡±This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    ¡°Many birds, or many trees?¡±


    ¡°Both.¡±


    ¡°And your name?¡±


    ¡°My name? I haven¡¯t told you that?¡±


    Penelope barely shook her head. She was smiling.


    ¡°Perry. My name¡¯s Perry.¡±


    Not until the sixth day did he see a time between his childhood and the white flash. And now the memories came in a surge:


    He had a wife.


    Or ¨C


    He had had a wife.


    She was beautiful; the kind of woman he had dreamt he would be with, when he was a teenager.


    Black hair. Tall. And warm; she was warm with him. She smiled at him.


    She wore denim. He could be himself with her.


    Her smile dazzled. And her eyes.


    Wife? Could be a girlfriend. But she was with him; that was certain. If she was his girlfriend, she wasn¡¯t going anywhere. He didn¡¯t need to worry about that.


    He remembered that had been the heart of his daydreams, back when he was fifteen, sixteen: Not that his future wife would be super cute ¨C although he did envision her that way ¨C but that she would be with him. For good.


    ¡°All the doubts will be over,¡± he had said to himself, long ago. ¡°You¡¯ll just be with someone. There won¡¯t be any games. There won¡¯t be anyone else. You won¡¯t have to ¨C prove your love.¡± He would remember her birthdays, and he would clean for her; that wasn¡¯t what he meant. He didn¡¯t mean that he would be able to take her for granted. But the games of the sixteen-year-olds would be over; he wouldn¡¯t have to worry if she liked someone else. He wouldn¡¯t have to worry that he revealed his feelings too much. It would be acceptable to tell your feelings to your wife.


    ¡°Someday I¡¯ll just be with someone.¡±


    And that was what he remembered now: he had indeed met someone, shared a life with someone.


    Many years ago.


    He was aware enough ¨C becoming aware enough ¨C to know that this was much too much to share with Dr. Serrano now.


    And there were children; or at least one child. A daughter.


    Oh my God I hope I¡¯m not forgetting a child, he thought. Forgetting a son. Or another daughter.


    Go easy on yourself, you¡¯ve been half dead.


    It was a girl he remembered, and he realized he must have been remembering her at different ages. He held her; and she walked. Her hair was thin, and then thick, and then long and thick. She looked toward him ¨C and toward his wife, his girlfriend, the woman in denim ¨C for everything, at first; and then she looked out on her own.


    He remembered her in a purple dress. She wore her hair tied back with a ribbon.


    Araceli.


    It came to him.


    He breathed in sharply and felt his heart pound.


    His wife was Jennifer. Their daughter was Araceli.


    ¡°How long?¡± he eventually asked Penelope. (She had asked him to use her first name.) Today she was wearing a long black dress. It did not strike him as office wear, but it was just another day in the hospital room.


    ¡°How long do you think?¡±


    ¡°It must have been decades. Your clothes are different. You sound different. And your screens are nothing we had.¡±


    ¡°This?¡±


    She shrank the transparent screen which she held in her hands down to a disc the size of a silver dollar, just by moving her hands together, and then pulled it out to its full circumference again.


    ¡°Yes, like that,¡± he said. ¡°But you can tell me. You don¡¯t have to keep trying to make sure I¡¯m ready. I know that everyone I knew is gone.¡±


    Penelope smiled.


    ¡°We know you can handle it. And we¡¯ve already told you, but you¡¯ve forgotten.¡±


    ¡°Oh. I¡¯m sorry.¡±


    ¡°No need to be sorry. It has been at least one hundred and twenty years, for you. You were asleep that long. It is 2148.¡±


    Neither spoke for a long while.


    ¡°I can¡¯t remember years, Penelope.¡±


    She didn¡¯t respond.


    ¡°But one hundred and twenty?¡±


    ¡°Yes.¡±


    ¡°So everyone is gone, then.¡±


    ¡°You have great-grandchildren,¡± she said. ¡°We have told them about you.¡±


    ¡°Told them about me,¡± he repeated. ¡°Of course they had forgotten. The family wasn¡¯t aware.¡±


    ¡°They were aware you had lived. But no, they hadn¡¯t known that you might come back.¡±


    How long does it take history to forget?


    More interestingly: What of the last person to remember?


    King Richard III was killed in the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. His grave was lost to history as soon as the following century.


    In 2012, his bones were found beneath a parking lot. How long had they lain forgotten? How long did his erstwhile subjects and their descendents remember the burial place of their king?


    And who was the last person to remember it? Certainly when he was buried, everyone would have known. It was not done in secret; the newly-minted king, Henry VII, had exhibited the body for days to stem any rumors that Richard had survived the battle. The burial would have been publicized; perfunctory, but publicized. Everyone near the church would have known.


    But perhaps as soon as the next generation, the grave had been forgotten.


    Who was the last person to know that Richard was buried beneath the floor of the church, or beneath the floor of the ruined church, or in the lot which had once been occupied by a church? Was it someone who had seen the burial with her own eyes? Perhaps someone who trusted her eyewitness father, and who had been told by him? A wise old woman in the neighborhood?


    Whoever it was ¨C Perry mused ¨C his or her friends, family, and neighbors would have thought the person crazy toward the end.


    Grandma is claiming again that Richard Crookback was buried just down the street, they must have said, rolling their eyes.


    There were still buildings, streets, cars in 2148. Perry saw them out his window, at first, and then in walks around the hospital. There were no floating cities or flying pods. Many of the buildings dated from his first lifetime or earlier.


    ¡°How should I phrase all this?¡± he had asked Penelope. ¡°My first life and my second life?¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s up to you, you¡¯re the pioneer. You tell us.¡±


    People still came into the hospital; ambulances still brought them. The ambulances were silent and driverless, but they brought them.


    ¡°You don¡¯t have robots fly out to cure people in their bedrooms?¡± he asked.


    ¡°We do, sometimes. But people still come in. As you see.¡±


    ¡°And I was here the entire time?¡±


    ¡°The entire time. You were moved around from room to room, but always in this hospital.¡±


    ¡°I can¡¯t imagine the bill I must have run up.¡±


    ¡°You were not difficult to maintain.¡±


    ¡°I was just lying in that case? For over a hundred years?¡±


    ¡°Yes.¡±


    ¡°And the power never went out on that thing? Was it solar?¡±


    ¡°It was nuclear powered. Like a space probe. But you¡¯re not radioactive. We checked.¡±


    ¡°How did I not starve? Or ¨C decompose?¡±


    ¡°The woman who designed it worked a miracle. We could not replicate it today.¡±


    ¡°Really? You could not build another? Even today?¡±


    ¡°No.¡±


    ¡°She must have been well ahead of her time.¡±


    ¡°She was.¡±


    ¡°And she didn¡¯t build more?¡±


    ¡°No one was sure it would work. And she died young, herself. And wasn¡¯t able to come back.¡±


    ¡°I remember what I did,¡± he told her on another day. ¡°For a living. But I can¡¯t take so much of your time. You¡¯re the only one listening to all this. You must have other patients.¡±


    ¡°We¡¯re all content to have someone assigned to you. And I¡¯m the one. And I¡¯m passing along everything I hear, don¡¯t worry,¡± she said.


    ¡°Archaeologist. That¡¯s what I did, what I was. With the state university.¡±


    ¡°Did you enjoy the work? Do you remember?¡±


    ¡°I loved it. I remember feeling very lucky to have that career.¡±


    ¡°Very nice, Perry.¡±


    ¡°Ironic, isn¡¯t it,¡± he said. ¡°I can dig for my own first life, now.¡±


    ¡°Well, we still have archaeologists. There¡¯s still plenty of history to study.¡±


    ¡°Even more of it, actually,¡± he said.


    He eventually learned that there was indeed much more to study. Among many other things there was a Roman shipwreck in Iceland; a Polynesian fishing camp on the west coast of Guatemala; and Columbus¡¯s Santa Maria had been found.


    ¡°I have news,¡± Penelope told him one day.


    ¡°Every single thing you say is news to me. This must be big.¡±


    ¡°We found videos. For you. From your wife, and your daughter.¡±


    Penelope had asked Perry several times if he wanted to wait, perhaps until the next day, to watch the videos; but he wanted to see them right away. He now sat with her in her office. She had placed her screen on her desk, then extended it upward until it was three feet in diameter ¨C it stood vertical on its own ¨C and now touched an icon.


    Jennifer and Araceli looked out at him.


    Both had dressed well. They wore dresses, and Jennifer had spent time on her hair. Araceli looked just slightly older than he remembered; but he suspected this was because his memories of her backdated her age somewhat, rather than because a lot of time had passed between his near-death and this video.


    ¡°Perry,¡± his wife said. There was weight to it. ¡°Dr. Saars-Tomlin ¨C¡± she paused slightly ¡°¨C tells us that you will be able to watch this, someday. If you can¡¯t just speak to us directly. Speak to us or to Araceli.¡±


    The pause before she had said ¡°tells us¡± made him think that she had been on the verge of saying ¡°insists that¡± instead.


    ¡°If you are watching this, she must have been correct.


    ¡°I suppose that whoever you are with will tell you what happened. But ¨C you had died. Your brain activity had completely stopped.¡± She looked slightly away from the camera and shook her head, barely.


    ¡°You were gone.


    ¡°But Dr. Saars-Tomlin offered to put you in the stasis device. It was new. You were the first person to be placed in one. And you¡¯re still the only one, for now. Your parents and your sister wanted to try it. They said there couldn¡¯t be any harm. And we didn¡¯t mind; I didn¡¯t mind.


    ¡°Perry,¡± she said. ¡°We don¡¯t really know how well this device you¡¯re in is going to work. But here we are. If you are seeing this, the doctor was a genius. Wasn¡¯t she.


    ¡°We are doing well. I¡¯m working and Araceli¡¯s in school. We miss you so much.¡±


    Araceli leaned into her mother, at that point, and Jennifer put her arm around her.


    They didn¡¯t speak, for a moment. Araceli kept her eyes on the camera while Jennifer looked down. Jennifer had been speaking with warmth, and with love, he saw, but also in doubt. He imagined her delivering these words to a blank camera lens.


    Araceli, for her part, beamed.


    She may have talked Jen into this, he thought.


    His wife resumed:


    ¡°The university paid out your death benefit. We¡¯ll be fine.¡±


    She smiled, nearly laughed.


    ¡°They paid out your death benefit. There¡¯s a sentence very few people have ever heard, I¡¯m sure.


    ¡°Perry, I just feel like sharing the . . . quotidian details with you, but I¡¯m not sure what you¡¯ll care about when you see this. The azaleas are blooming. Araceli only missed a week of classes. I think Ellison knows you¡¯re gone, it seems like he sits outside the bedroom for you sometimes. Whistler is good, still in Ara¡¯s room. We¡¯re going to drive up to Pittsburgh next weekend to see my parents. And Bill and Connie have been very helpful, very kind. Of course. Through all of this.¡±


    He saw her look down, and tighten her arm around their daughter.


    ¡°There are so many instances, so many times a day, when I think that you are still here. I put the car key in the bowl where you can find it. I don¡¯t open mail to you. And the things you¡¯ve done for us are all around . . . the lilies of the valley you planted look so nice. The pesto you made is still in the freezer, we haven¡¯t had the heart to eat it.¡±


    ¡°Save it,¡± Perry murmured. ¡°For when you¡¯re really busy and you need something quick.¡±


    Araceli said something not caught by the audio. Jennifer nodded to her. ¡°Of course.¡±


    She spoke to the camera:


    ¡°Daddy, I got the solo. And they made the decision before the accident; they didn¡¯t just give it to me. Because of that. You know. I¡¯m sorry you can¡¯t be at the concert.


    ¡°And I¡¯ve been weeding the strawberries,¡± she added.


    Then the two of them were quiet. Araceli looked at her mother, and then back to the camera, and then she too dropped her gaze just as Jennifer had.


    ¡°We miss you so much,¡± Jennifer said. ¡°My love. My love.¡±


    It was rare for her to use language like that. Perry breathed in.


    ¡°And we hope you never see this. Or we watch it together, but it¡¯s old news. We¡¯re waiting for you.¡±


    ¡°We¡¯ll see you, Daddy. We love you.¡±


    This story to be continued

 Two - His Esteemed Wisdom

    ¡°Even the greatest leaders, like me, need miracles,¡± the Princeps told Perry. He laughed, loudly and carelessly, unconcerned if anyone joined him. Simultaneously he reached out to an attendant, who placed a wrapped candy into his hand.


    ¡°And you are the miracle,¡± he continued. ¡°Brought back from the dead. After three hundred years! By me. After no one else had been able to¡± ¨C he searched for a word ¨C ¡°reactivate you, I suppose. Reactivate? We will need some new vocabulary for this.¡±


    He focused on the candy for a moment.


    ¡°And I,¡± he added, ¡°will be the one to create that new vocabulary.¡±


    The words Perry was hearing did not match the movement of the young man¡¯s mouth. They were being translated, somehow ¨C dubbed ¨C instantly.


    ¡°Of course my chief medical officer may have had something to do with this, but that will be ignored. And I¡¯m the one who appointed her, anyway, so I would get the credit.¡±


    He laughed again. The laughter, unlike the speech, was not dubbed; what Perry heard did match the Princeps¡¯ shakes and quivers. It was high-pitched, and childlike. It seemed forced.


    The Princeps looked childlike also, for that matter, Perry thought. He was young ¨C Perry would have guessed no more than nineteen or twenty ¨C but his baby-smooth face, peachy cheeks, and overall doughy physique made him seem even younger than that.


    The chief medical officer the Princeps had referred to was standing right there with them. Perry glanced at her. She was expressionless. She was much older than her ruler, perhaps fifty, and was dressed in what looked like a military medical officer¡¯s uniform, in dark blue.


    She looked respectful of her ruler, Perry thought, but yet not . . . subservient. She never prostrated herself, neither literally nor figuratively.


    The Princeps accepted the candy from his attendant, slid it out from its wrapper, and smashed it into his mouth.


    No one else spoke. Perry glanced around the giant chamber. He supposed he would describe its design as Totalitarian Bohemian Eclectic. There were tall, fat columns, sky-high ceilings, and long red tapestries. Grand staircases led down from several adjoining rooms, so that the Princeps, Perry realized, could make grand entrances. His seat, though, was up more steps again, to keep him elevated.


    ¡°But don¡¯t worry about the medical officer,¡± the Princeps continued, talking around the candy. ¡°She is well-compensated. At the top! One of the elite!¡±


    ¡°Not one of the torturable class,¡± Perry said.


    ¡°Pardon me?¡±


    The young man had been handed another candy by the candy attendant, but now froze and held it out in midair. The chamber had been quiet already ¨C the attendant, the chief medical officer, and the guards present were not speaking, and whatever noises existed outside the expansive compound did not penetrate ¨C but now Perry heard it become absolutely still and silent. The Princeps looked at him, his smile frozen.


    ¡°It¡¯s from an old book,¡± Perry said. ¡°From my time.¡±


    ¡°And she is not in what class?¡±


    ¡°The torturable class. That¡¯s how they said it.¡±


    The Princeps unfroze, and unwrapped the candy.


    ¡°That particular book has not made it down to us,¡± he said. ¡°You can tell me of it, later tonight. It sounds interesting. But back to my discovery and recovery of you.¡±


    The Princeps related the same story which Perry had heard already in two previous audiences: the great leader had unearthed the mysterious white case in a cellar in the depths of his palace; he had divined its operation, single-handedly; and he had then revived his honored guest from the past.


    Perry realized, now, that the story was likely not just embellished, but completely fabricated. He¡¯d assumed that the white case really had been kept somewhere in a building owned by the Princeps ¨C that did not seem preposterous ¨C before being opened by the chief medical officer; but it had probably been found in someone else¡¯s basement, or maybe a trash dump for that matter.


    There had been a desk in front of the man when Perry was first taken into the chamber, but it had melted into the floor. The Princeps sat elevated before them in a tall black chair. His dress echoed the gauche design of the hall: a cape, epaulets, a red sash.


    ¡°So then. Sir time traveler. Is this time travel? Close enough. Close enough for you. But enough about your revival, you¡¯ve heard that before. Let¡¯s discuss your future here. Your job will be to appear in public. To look alive.¡± The young man laughed again. ¡°I don¡¯t care what you do. Have fun. Just show people you are alive. Rescued! And after three centuries!


    ¡°You know, it occurs to me,¡± he continued. ¡°I almost could have used someone else for your role. A double for you, I mean.¡±


    And now the Princeps seemed to talk more and more just to himself. Perry got the impression he had been raised to ignore his listeners:


    ¡°I mean, many people saw your device, sure. And they saw you. Much more of you than they may have wanted to! But it would not have been hard to pass someone off as you. How would they know? Really? You were pale in there. Flat. And you don¡¯t look very remarkable. Begging your pardon.¡±


    Another candy.


    ¡°Well, at any rate. We are due for a distraction.¡±


    ¡°You schedule those, also,¡± Perry said.


    ¡°Of course! All planned. All part of the science. If any little glitch happens with the rest of the show, we have a distraction. You will be a good one. Such a good one that I considered holding you back until I needed you. But we shall proceed. We have had no truly stupendous achievements for nearly a year, now. Not since we completed my sphinx on Mars ¨C you¡¯ve seen images?¡±


    ¡°I have, yes.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s astounding. A thousand kilometers from chin to tail, you know. But we can¡¯t be complacent. We will share you. Very soon.¡±


    Perry knew that the ¡°sharing¡± was the process of projecting what he would have called video. Similar to the dubbing of the current English, the sounds and pictures seemed to simply materialize in the air in front of him, and in front of everyone.


    ¡°We don¡¯t want to wait until it is too late. We take actions before they are direly needed. Prevention, you know. The science is clear.¡±


    *


    The ¡°science¡± was the subject of another speech that Perry would hear repeatedly:


    ¡°You know, my friend, I am a scientist. A scientist of rule; of power. Great leaders have been attempting to maximize their power all throughout history, but none has been as methodical as I.


    ¡°You cannot just crush everyone, you know. That¡¯s where many of my predecessors have gone wrong. But of course you cannot allow dissent to diminish your power, either. So you must seek a balance. A balance which leaves you the absolute maximum amount of power and resources available, but without sparking violent discontent.


    ¡°This is history, you know,¡± the Princeps continued. ¡°History is just the process of elites ¨C the greatest leaders ¨C trying to take as much as they can. To control as much as they can. Every now and then they take a bit too much, and out come the guillotines!¡±


    He laughed, and mimicked a blade coming down with his hand.


    ¡°Did you have guillotines in your time?¡± he asked.


    ¡°No. I missed them by a few hundred years.¡±


    ¡°Ah. Regardless ¨C an unwise ruler overreaches, and off comes his head! And the balance is reset. Perhaps the commons enrich themselves somewhat, for a year or two. And then a new leadership class resumes concentrating power. It¡¯s all in the balance.¡±


    He held his hands out to portray a scale, although it was slanted drastically toward one side.


    ¡°You must have an elite class.¡± He indicated his left hand, which was high up in the air; then he shook his right. ¡°Others, you must lock up in cages. Many others, you need to be free ¨C well, somewhat free; no need getting carried away ¨C in order to produce. You must share with them the absolute minimum necessary to keep them producing.¡±


    ¡°You mention that you have prisons, still,¡± Perry said.


    ¡°Yes. I¡¯m afraid it¡¯s inevitable in any advanced society.¡±


    ¡°I suppose you must keep a certain percentage of the population locked up at any given time, as part of your science?¡±


    ¡°Exactly!¡± the Princeps said. ¡°Very good. Now you are thinking like a competent leader.¡±


    ¡°One other thing,¡± Perry said. ¡°In my time, many assumed that the producing class would be eliminated in favor of robots.¡±


    ¡°And that almost happened!¡± the young man said. ¡°But some of my wiser predecessors determined it would not work. Tempting though, isn¡¯t it? You could have all the goods you want, all the food you want, with just a very small elite to maintain the machines. You could just allow the producers and the caged to, you know.¡± He held his hand up and waved it, as if scattering populations to the wind.If you come across this story on Amazon, it''s taken without permission from the author. Report it.


    ¡°But the machines very nearly took over. About two hundred years ago. But they were surprisingly inefficient about it! Some of them did things like rerouting power from nuclear plants for their own ends ¨C you have to admire that ¨C but others spent all their time just trying to annihilate other machines. So that came to an end.


    ¡°Now, some will say that great leaders, like me, want to keep a controlled producer class around just because we thrive on exploitation. Because we are sociopaths, psychopaths, all that. But that¡¯s not true! What kind of science and efficiency would that be? No, we simply need oppressed people around to produce for us, and for the elite. A properly-oppressed class of producer humans is far less likely to cause trouble than machines given autonomy and production power.¡±


    ¡°Wouldn¡¯t it be possible to produce what you want without oppressing anyone?¡±


    ¡°Perhaps, but why bother? Most commoners don¡¯t mind being robbed. So why not take advantage of that? There¡¯s no reason to be just another plebeian. If you¡¯re methodical about it.


    ¡°Now, my father. My own father ¨C I¡¯m afraid he, too, went overboard. Too far to the extreme of oppression. The producing class was producing less and less, because of it. There was even sabotage. Sabotage! Do you know the etymology, Perry?¡±


    ¡°I do not.¡±


    ¡°And it¡¯s the same word today as in your time! Watch my mouth when I say it ¨C you¡¯ll see it¡¯s the same. Sabot - age. It¡¯s derived from the boots of the commoners. Sabot was the name of a shoe of theirs. Commoners kicking it over. Kicking over the system, you know. We can¡¯t have that. And I¡¯m afraid my father did have that; but not for long. It led to his downfall.¡±


    Perry had the impression that ¡°downfall¡± may have been a euphemism.


    ¡°As soon as my father met his unfortunate demise,¡± the Princeps continued, ¡°I immediately shared a bit more with the commoners. Just a bit. They have remained content ever since. It¡¯s science; simple science.¡±


    *


    From the balcony of the apartment he¡¯d been given in the compound, Perry could look over the Princeps¡¯ capital city. His surroundings were clearly not of the twenty-first century, but yet not so different as to be alien or incomprehensible. It was quiet, but not apocalyptically so. Perry could see some bustle in the streets. A few vehicles flew around, but the skies were not infested with hovering cars. Buildings were tall, but the ground was still visible, and the city had parks and squares that looked familiar.


    Familiar.


    He had the sense that some things were familiar, and some not, but it was hard to remember why.


    He focused on one of the parks, not far from his building. In it, there may have been a stream; perhaps in between those trees. And in the stream, perhaps ducks.


    *


    Baby ducks in a pond in a park. He remembered a woman and a girl, both excited to see ducklings paddling in a little flotilla behind their mother. The adult duck cut through the water, seemingly effortlessly; the ducklings¡¯ heads twitched as they swam hard to keep up.


    What made Perry smile was the woman¡¯s enthusiasm, more so than the girl¡¯s; it rubbed off on the girl, whose eyes opened wide as she looked from the woman to the ducks and back.


    The woman was a serious person, he could tell; she had grave responsibilities; but here, with these ducks, she literally bounced on her tiptoes and waved her arms. Perry had known her a long time but was still delighted and surprised to see her laugh at baby ducks and pull their daughter along into the laughter. How lucky he was to have found this wife.


    That was why that park seemed familiar to him. He wondered now if the people down there still laughed, still leapt with joy to see ducklings.


    *


    ¡°Princeps,¡± Perry asked, at the next audience, ¡°what exactly have your people seen, about me?¡±


    ¡°You don¡¯t know?¡± his host asked, seeming genuinely surprised.


    ¡°No.¡±


    The Princeps spoke sharply to one of the attendants. It wasn¡¯t translated for Perry.


    ¡°Well then. Let me replay it.¡± The glorious leader produced a silver device, about the size of a car key from Perry¡¯s time, pulling it out of the interior of his cape.


    ¡°This is going out to everyone?¡± Perry asked. He knew that the Princeps usually controlled broadcasts to all his subjects with the device.


    ¡°Yes. They can watch it again.¡±


    A scene appeared in front of Perry. It was the white case being lifted out of a hole in the ground by a claw on a cable which was attached to some unseen crane or hovercraft. Then, the Princeps in a laboratory room, dressed in a lab coat himself, inspecting the case. More scenes followed which all emphasized his excellent highness more than either the case or Perry himself. Viewers saw the Princeps in some sort of control room, and then in a hospital, and then strolling the halls of the compound.


    Through all of it, the narration emphasized Perry¡¯s long suspended animation and the Princeps¡¯ genius in rousing him from it.


    ¡°And very soon, an interview,¡± he told Perry now. ¡°We¡¯ll take you out and talk to you in front of a very old building from your century. It¡¯s time. I have discovered we need a distraction.¡±


    ¡°From what?¡±


    ¡°Well, from something I¡¯m going to do. I am letting the distraction tail wag the development dog, to an extent. Did I formulate that right? That expression dates from your time. Anyway, I realized this would be a good opportunity for it. You see, I¡¯m afraid my main prison for dissidents is getting overcrowded. And the labor camps don¡¯t really need any more help. So, an excess of these prisoners is going to ¨C ¡±


    He waved his hand in the air just as he had done in his science speech when he talked about liquidating entire classes of society.


    ¡°Are you sure that won¡¯t send you the same way as your father?¡± Perry asked.


    ¡°It won¡¯t, no. It¡¯s all calculated.¡±


    *


    Before his debut interview, Perry managed to speak to the chief medical officer alone. They were standing again in the grand bohemian fascist hall, waiting for their Esteemed Wisdom to descend a staircase once more, but he was late; over two hours late.


    ¡°Please call me Diana,¡± she was saying. ¡°Not chief and all that.¡±


    ¡°Very well.¡± Her name really was Diana, he saw; the sound he heard matched her mouth when she said it. It was not the automatic translation dubbing some other name into an older form.


    ¡°Does he listen to all of us?¡±


    ¡°When he asks us questions? Yes, for a moment at least.¡±


    ¡°No, I mean does he spy on us. Is he monitoring this conversation.¡±


    ¡°Ah, I see. I don¡¯t think so. He certainly could if he wanted to. But I don¡¯t think he believes we have much valuable to say.¡±


    ¡°Do you believe he will ¨C maintain power? And not be taken down the way his father was?¡±


    ¡°Well, it would be impossible for him to be taken down the way his father was unless he himself has children,¡± she said dryly. ¡°But I see no event that would bring him down. Nothing anytime soon. But you should not speak of this,¡± she added. ¡°You don¡¯t know me. Or anyone.¡±


    ¡°How long have you worked with him?¡±


    ¡°Ten years. Since before he came to power, obviously.¡±


    ¡°Ten years? You must have started when he was just a boy.¡±


    ¡°And what do you think he is now?¡±


    *


    ¡°Tomorrow, then,¡± the Princeps eventually told him. ¡°We will transport you out to this old building I told you about. I think you¡¯ll recognize it. A grand retail marketplace from your time.¡±


    ¡°I can¡¯t wait.¡±


    ¡°Boxiness, with windowless, unbroken exterior walls ¨C these were architectural ideals for your builders, weren¡¯t they?


    ¡°I would say that¡¯s accurate, yes.¡±


    ¡°Tomorrow, then,¡± the leader said. ¡°So, is there ¨C anything I can do for you?¡±


    Perry was surprised by this offer. He had been fed well, and housed in the lavish compound, but he¡¯d never been aware of any concern by the Princeps for this comfort. He did have an answer ready:


    ¡°Yes, thank you. I would like to learn if there is anything known about my family. I had a wife. A daughter.¡±


    ¡°Ah. A wife. And child.¡± For the first time, the First Citizen seemed to empathize with Perry. ¡°I¡¯m afraid not. Records have been destroyed through the centuries, you know. Even for persons who ¨C¡± he paused, in another uncharacteristic moment of awareness. ¡°You know, even for very prominent figures of your time, we do not have much information. You might think of how much you know yourself about people who lived in, what, the 1700s. As far back from you as you are from us.¡±


    ¡°Little. Apart from a few.¡±


    The leader nodded. ¡°There you are.¡± He was silent; but then suddenly he raised his voice and snapped his fingers.


    ¡°A DNA test! Why didn¡¯t I think of that before? We could test your DNA, and see how many descendants you have. It would be easy; we have everyone¡¯s DNA on file already.¡±


    ¡°That doesn¡¯t surprise me.¡±


    ¡°Of course, anyone we find would be nine, ten generations on. I¡¯m afraid your genetic material would be quite diluted by now. You could have a large number of great-greats by now. Thousands would not be out of the question.¡±


    ¡°You really don¡¯t need to do that.¡±


    The Princeps ignored him and pressed ahead. ¡°And we could share that, too. Share all of it. Put you in a room or even a stadium with all of your living family. That would be something else that would be a very effective distraction. Let us get a sample from you.¡± He waved to an attendant.


    ¡°I am in no rush to do this,¡± Perry said.


    ¡°Very well. Not now. But we¡¯ll get one.¡±


    *


    The next day Perry was picked up outside his room on what looked to him something like a narrow golf cart, driven by two of the quiet attendants. He boarded. It trundled down the hall a short distance but then turned sharply and passed through what had looked like a solid wall. The cart hovered in the air, banked, and made for the edge of the capital.


    ¡°You know,¡± the driver/pilot told him, ¡°in your time the capital was known as Pittsburgh.¡±


    ¡°So that¡¯s what it is,¡± Perry said. ¡°I don¡¯t recognize it.¡±


    ¡°You had been there? Well. Our Princeps has improved it immensely.¡±


    The flying cart was no more than two hundred feet off the ground, but as they traveled from the center of the city to the north, Perry indeed recognized the Monongahela, Allegheny, and Ohio Rivers, although he assumed the Princeps had long since named them all after himself. The young man did have himself a beautiful capital, though, he had to admit. Trees abounded, buildings were well-kept, parks were green.


    They landed near a long, nondescript red brick building. Unrivaled boxiness and windowlessness, just as the Princeps had promised.


    The Princeps was there already, smiling in the sunshine. The chief medical officer stood near, also. Before the Supreme Planner, facing him, stood two attendants, a man and a woman. They held no cameras nor any other gear, but it struck Perry that they had the bearing of a film crew about to broadcast a live segment.


    Once near the Princeps, Perry asked:


    ¡°Did the liquidation go well?¡±


    ¡°Don¡¯t call it that.¡± The young man smiled and swatted Perry on the arm. ¡°More of just a ¨C cull, we could say. It hasn¡¯t happened yet; tomorrow. Here we go, we are ready.¡±


    The Princeps faced his attendants and brought his broadcast controller out from his cape again.


    ¡°People of my nation,¡± he said. ¡°I know you have had many questions, so I have brought our visitor from the past, whom I revived, here to speak with you. Next to this marvelous building from his time, which we will ask about.¡±


    Perry stepped toward him and snatched the controller away. He spoke toward the two not-camerapersons:


    ¡°Listen to me. Everyone out there. The Princeps here is a fraud. He killed his father and now he¡¯s going to kill many of you. He did not bring me out of my sleep. If anyone here did, it was the chief medical officer.¡±


    The Princeps yelped:


    ¡°What are you doing?¡±


    ¡°This boy,¡± Perry continued, ¡°is a fool. For the ages.¡±


    The Princeps¡¯ shock bled into rage; his face nearly bloomed red.


    ¡°You ¨C ¡±


    But the two attendants tackled him instantly. He went down to the ground with a thud and another yelp.


    ¡°I believe,¡± Perry finished, ¡°that the chief medical officer may now be relieving your Princeps.¡±


    Diane was next to him, by now, and she took the control.


    ¡°That¡¯s that,¡± she said.


    ¡°You ended the transmission?¡±


    ¡°They don¡¯t need to know anything else, for now.¡±


    She added: ¡°You may remain in the compound.¡±


    Perry looked at her face. He had assumed she would have looked ¨C benevolent; expansive. He had thought she might say more to the people. Also that she would share with him more than just her permission to remain housed; some words of thanks, perhaps of relief.


    But she said nothing. Her face was blank; flat. She seemed to Perry to be immersed in calculations.

 Three - You Have An Account Full Of Credits

    Perry was dreaming of an outdoor lunch gathering a month before, which was over ninety years before, and the guests began to slow down. There were three of them: one man and two women. The women were different ages; one very young, and the other, Perry guessed, in her fifties. All three were dressed in white for the summer weather, and they became blurred, and stiff.


    And then it was no longer a dream, and no longer a lunch, but him rising up. Up for air; up for life. He felt he should be wet with the polymer gel, but it was gone. He had been cleaned, and was dressed in white himself.


    ¡°Yoooouuuu wiiiilllll¡± the older woman was telling him. Their speech, as he heard it, continued like this for some time.


    ¡°wake up slowly¡ª¡±


    Even as they came more into focus, and spoke at more of a regular speed, they still sounded different. The schwa sounds he would have expected were different, shortened; sedation came off more like a very quick sedashyin, to his ears, or even just sedashn. Relatives became reltivs; he focused on this for some moments before he realized they were telling him that they had located none of his.


    But he did have credits. They mentioned¡ªthey would have called it minshind¡ªthis several times.


    ¡°We have an apartment for you, small but very nice, just outside the hospital. You should be able to go there very soon. And of course you¡¯ll have all the credits you need to get set up again.You¡¯ve nithn to worry about.¡± It was still the older of the two women speaking. She seemed to be the lead. Perry noticed a name tag on her white jacket: Dr. Shaughnessy.


    The three of them¡ªall sat in chairs directly in front of him, while he was still in a hospital bed¡ªwere a bit too intense for his taste, leaning forward toward him and barely blinking. Now he realized that Shaughnessy didn¡¯t seem to blink at all.


    But they were earnest. And he knew he should thank them, for they had brought him back from the dead. Or back from his stasis fog, which might have been worse.


    He had been aware that he had nearly died, and that he was frozen and paralyzed. Nothing more than that, but he had known that much. He¡¯d had no sense of time passing, but at the same time his fog had seemed to last far too long.


    And now he was back. These people had raised him up.


    And they had credits for him.


    ¡°So do you know what you might need?¡± This was from the man, who was leaning forward nearly off his chair.


    Perry had been awake, to his mind, for less than half an hour. After decades.


    ¡°Anything at all,¡± the man repeated, ¡°that you might need?


    ¡°I don¡¯t suppose anything I owned has come down with me?¡± he asked them.


    ¡°Good question!¡± the younger woman said. ¡°But no, we¡¯re afraid not. It has been a very long time, you¡¯re aware.¡±


    ¡°Of course.¡± He remembered the current year, which they had told him: 2121.


    He looked down at himself. ¡°How did you do this? What was wrong with me?¡±


    ¡°Some irreversible brain damage that has become reversible,¡± Dr. Shaughnessy said. ¡°You will be as good as new once you are set up. Set up and on your own, with a budget. So, clothes? You¡¯ll want those of course. We¡¯ve provided you just a few things here, but you¡¯ll want to pick your own.¡± She nodded slightly but repeatedly as she said this. She was good-looking, he thought, but he found himself wanting to back away from her, which he could not do in his angled bed.


    ¡°We can get a screen for you,¡± the leaning man said, and he was just as anxious-making. The lean did bring his name tag close, at least: he was Orville.


    ¡°In fact ¨C ¡± Orville added, and he pulled up a large translucent tray; but then Perry realized it was not a tray, but rather the screen he had mentioned.


    ¡°In fact, you can have this one. I can charge it to your credits.¡±


    He held it up, and nodded to it. Pictures of garments appeared on it.


    ¡°Online shopping hasn¡¯t changed,¡± Perry said. ¡°And you are Dr. Orville?¡±


    ¡°Just Orville. And I don¡¯t know about the line,¡± he said, with a pained, begrudged, quick half-smile. It was there, then it was gone.  ¡°But yes, you¡¯re free to shop. Do you see anything here?¡±


    The garments on the screen¡ªjackets, pants, and, interestingly, formal robes¡ªscrolled. Perry realized they did this automatically, responding to the gaze of his eyes whenever he looked anywhere but the middle of the screen.


    ¡°What do you think?¡± Orville prodded.


    ¡°It¡¯s not easy for me to focus,¡± Perry said. ¡°The screen senses where you¡¯re looking?¡±


    None of the three staff answered.


    ¡°Well, how formal are those purple robes these days?¡±


    The younger woman had come closer to him, and now had her face next to his, looking at the screen.


    ¡°Yes, that would be a good choice,¡± she said. She and the other two stared at the screen as if it was something a normal human being would have shared right away with a patient who had just woken up after a hundred years. ¡°I¡¯ll reserve it,¡± the young woman said. ¡°What else would you like?¡±


    *


    He was given an apartment. The airy architecture of the building, or its green walls, might have grabbed his attention, but they were overshadowed by the lobby: it was strewn with deliveries ¨C packed with them ¨C at every hour of every day. And these were not simply packages that were unclaimed; they were constantly being retrieved by residents.


    Most of the deliveries were brought by large, silent white spheres which rolled up and disgorged their contents. Their sides opened up and small, self-propelled carts emerged. These carried packages, which were dumped in the lobby. The empty carts then returned to their spheres; and as soon as one left, another rolled up.


    He lingered in that lobby for some time, taking it in. The other residents of the building hustled in and out, picking up their deliveries and then dashing back up to their apartments. Judging from the pile of stuff that never seemed to diminish, they might have been running right back to purchase more.


    They paid him no mind. He was dressed in what turned out to be common clothes ¨C loose blue pants with a string-tie waist, and a buttonless long-sleeved shirt ¨C and apparently no one could guess he had been away for a century.


    He was surprised that the pile of deliveries was apparently not secured in any way. Residents rummaged through the stacks, looking for their names and addresses but evidently never tempted to take anyone else¡¯s items.


    Perry eventually asked one of them about this; a woman, about his age, burrowing through the pile. He sidled up to her, gradually sliding into what must have been her discomfort zone, but she focused on the deliveries. He ended up just asking:


    ¡°Pardon me, sorry to bother you. A lot of deliveries today, eh?¡±


    She glanced at him, then back to the pile.


    ¡°Can I ask you something?¡± he continued. ¡°Aren¡¯t you worried that someone else will take your things?¡±


    She paused, and looked at him blankly. ¡°Are you not from here?¡±


    ¡°I ¨C no. I¡¯ve traveled here.¡±


    ¡°You do sound different. Pirn me for saying! But what sort of accent is that?¡±


    ¡°I was home-schooled. In the Yukon.¡±


    He had anticipated that he¡¯d be asked this question, and this was one of the answers he¡¯d considered, as something easier and quicker than the truth. He hadn¡¯t quite decided for certain to use it, but it was official now.


    ¡°Home. Schooled.¡±


    ¡°Yes.¡±


    ¡°I see.¡± She nodded with exaggerated agreeability, eyes wide open. ¡°But no, of course no one around here would take anything. I would hope it¡¯s that way where you are from, too?¡±


    ¡°Oh, of course. I just thought ¨C well, I wondered about things here.¡±


    ¡°Oh yes, just the same.¡± She nodded, too hard. By now she had lifted three small boxes.  ¡°I have to run with these.¡±


    She darted toward an elevator.


    *


    He¡¯d returned to his apartment for just a minute when its door buzzed. Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.


    Outside was a self-propelled table displaying packaged food: cups of instant oatmeal, boxes of coffee, dried bananas. There were also citrus fruits the size of small oranges but as blue as blueberries. Toward the back of the cart was a small upright control panel that rose like the tower on a tiny aircraft carrier.


    An aircraft carrier full of unneeded snacks, he thought.


    A light on the control blinked and the cart started to barge into his apartment. Its wheels whirred.


    ¡°No! Stay the hell out!¡±


    He shoved it back; this was difficult, but not impossible. He shut the door.


    He listened to the rolling cart buzz the door again, and bump into it several times, before it apparently gave up and moved to the next apartment.


    *


    He looked at the screen Orville had given him. It lit up when touched, and was filled with advertisements. Clothing, food, pharmaceuticals; dog treats, yard furniture, train tickets; and some items he couldn¡¯t identify, such as items labeled ¡°cubes:¡± square, colorful boxy containers shown on kitchen counters.


    The train tickets seemed to be to some sort of mall. The screen displayed it as a collection of low white buildings. It looked like an oceanside village in Greece, Perry thought, but streams of people were walking in empty-handed and coming out with boxes.


    He had no idea how to search the screen. He could scroll with his finger, as well as just by moving his eyes, but in every direction there was just more merchandise; seemingly infinite merchandise.


    *


    The main window in his apartment overlooked the street. This day, his third out of stasis, was gorgeous. Pedestrians wandered about. Vehicles hummed by on the street, silently and fairly slowly. Many people rode bikes.


    Stores occupied every space in the ground floors of the buildings as far as he could see, and sometimes the second and third floors also.


    The delivery spheres rolled up and down the sidewalks, constantly. There was never a moment when he couldn¡¯t see at least five of them at once.


    Just then a floating sphere arrived outside the glass before him. It was about the size of a soccer ball and was made of many small metal panels.


    In a loud voice, heard easily through the glass, it told him:


    ¡°SEARCH AND PURCHASE. SEARCH AND PURCHASE.¡±


    It repeated for a moment and then moved to the next apartment down, making the same command.


    *


    The next morning, the door buzzed again. Perry prepared to fend off the overkill food cart, but this time it was Orville.


    ¡°Perry, how are you doing? We need to speak with you.¡± He was still leaning in too close, but at least now Perry could retreat.


    ¡°I am fine¨C¡±


    ¡°Good, good. We¡¯ve been informed that you have not been spending down your credits. You have been acquiring very little. Or actually nothing. Is everything all right?¡±


    ¡°Yes. I just haven¡¯t needed anything.¡±


    ¡°And you remember we showed you how to order before you left the hospital, correct?¡±


    ¡°Yes, I remember.¡±


    ¡°But you haven¡¯t been spending your credits on anything?¡±


    ¡°No, not really. I still have the food you had sent for me. I received some clothes. I¡¯m fine for the time being. It¡¯s only been a few days anyway.¡±


    Orville nodded, but Perry could see that he was clearly not satisfied with the answer.


    ¡°Perry, we are all concerned that you¡¯re not obtaining enough. There is so much room in here. You could get large amounts of things.¡±


    ¡°Look, Orville,¡± Perry said. ¡°Come in, first of all. You don¡¯t need to stand out there to tell me this.¡±


    Orville said a perfunctory ¡®thank you¡¯ and stepped into the apartment. Perry closed the door and resumed:


    ¡°So, listen,¡± Perry said. ¡°You know, I¡¯m basically new here. I¡¯m wondering¨C¡±


    He had been trying to stay calm, but he felt like a cracking dam.


    ¡°What is going on, Orville? What the actual hell is going on? Why have you all been talking nonstop about me needing to buy things? Is that all anyone does? Am I going to get thrown in jail if I don¡¯t buy crap?¡±


    Orville shook his head, agreeably. Perry was alarmed that what he himself thought was clearly insane ¨C getting incarcerated for failing to buy enough ¨C did not seem to faze him.


    ¡°No, not jail,¡± he answered. ¡°You¡¯ll be entered into subscriptions.¡±


    ¡°Subscriptions for crap?¡±


    ¡°I wouldn¡¯t put it that way, but you¡¯ve got the idea. Every citizen has to spend down a minimum of credits each week, or else basic goods are sent automatically. It¡¯s how we all take care of each other, you know, Perry. It¡¯s how the system runs.¡±


    ¡°By buying crap nonstop?¡±


    Orville raised his hands, palms out.


    ¡°I¡¯ve been reading a little about your time, Perry. I had thought this would be more familiar to you, because it seemed like you were born in our era; but now I¡¯m thinking it started shortly after you ¨C left. So, perhaps I should apologize. And I should have explained more.¡±


    ¡°Okay then, that¡¯s fine.¡±


    ¡°So we really need you to start using your credits.¡±


    Perry stared at him.


    ¡°That¡¯s it? That¡¯s the explanation?¡±


    ¡°I thought I¡¯ve been clear already.¡±


    ¡°How can this be?¡± Perry demanded. ¡°How can the planet not be full of trash with all the stuff you must be throwing away? Or is it, and I just haven¡¯t noticed yet?¡±


    ¡°Full of trash?¡± Orville seemed truly shocked, or maybe offended. ¡°Oh, no ¨C our dissolution and reconstitution system is nearly one hundred percent efficient. We have far less consumption debris than you did in your day.¡±


    ¡°Where does the energy come from, then? You must go through petawatts of power making all this, and then trucking it around, and then tearing it down.¡±


    ¡°We do, you¡¯re absolutely right. But again I should have mentioned: we have fusion. What you would have called cold fusion.¡±


    ¡°Cold fusion powers all this?¡±


    ¡°Yes.¡±


    ¡°And it¡¯s clean?¡±


    ¡°Wonderfully clean. It¡¯s how we can still have a planet, really.¡±


    Perry took this in.


    ¡°So this is the point of your economy now.¡±


    ¡°Essentially, yes.¡±


    ¡°You ¨C provide jobs, basically, by just producing . . . an endless flood of consumer goods. And you do it without exhausting the planet.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s it. That¡¯s a good summary.¡±


    ¡°You spend, who knows ¨C a sun¡¯s worth of energy to produce a planet¡¯s worth of crap, and then you tear it all down and start over again.¡±


    ¡°You know ¨C again I wouldn¡¯t put it exactly like that, but you¡¯re on the right track.¡±


    ¡°And if this frenzy were to stop, this fever you all seem to have for buying things ¨C ¡±


    ¡°People would lose their occupations. They would have nothing to do. So many of our sectors have become so efficient, Perry. We don¡¯t need many farmers. Our transport is automatic. Now, it¡¯s true that our population is smaller than in your day. But, you know, many people are still here, and we can¡¯t just get rid of them. We have to do something.¡±


    ¡°What about leisure time? Staying occupied by, whatever, exercising? Hiking? Making art?¡±


    ¡°Those are great ideas ¨C do you mean you want paints, or something?¡±


    ¡°And all these credits that I apparently have ¨C how am I getting them? How is anyone getting them?¡±


    ¡°Well, most of us work at least a few hours. I don¡¯t do this for free, you know! But you¡¯ve been given a temporary budget as someone . . . someone who is just finding his land legs, we could say. The councils are pretty lenient with how they provide credits.¡±


    ¡°I can imagine. Councils?¡±


    ¡°Mayors, boards. Local government.¡±


    ¡°My God.¡± Perry shook his head. ¡°So the opiate of the people ended up being just, stuff.¡±


    ¡°Marx! But that¡¯s essentially right. I¡¯ll just start you up on some subscriptions, it sounds like?¡±


    ¡°I ¨C¡± Perry started. ¡°No.¡± He spoke with resignation. ¡°I¡¯ll take a bicycle. I was going to look for one used, but I guess that¡¯s not the way, these days.¡±


    ¡°Great idea! A new bike. Let¡¯s pull up a list.¡±


    *


    The next day Perry sat in his apartment ¨C surrounded by boxes holding the bike, and several other things he¡¯d grudgingly ordered ¨C and finally, it seemed, sighed and took a break.


    It occurred to him that the culture shock ¨C time shock, consumption shock ¨C had dominated his attention so much that he had been unable to reflect on anything else going on until he had dealt with it. And now, as a reliable citizen dutifully purchasing things, he could think.


    He remembered his wife and daughter. He thought of how ridiculous they would find all of this. He had so many muddled memories to sort through; but thanks to this society he was immersed in, the recollections foremost in his mind were of the three of them cleaning and painting an old wooden rocking horse.


    The second-hand rocking horse memory had sprung up, of course, because he knew that today ¨C 2121 ¨C it would have been summarily shredded and replaced with a new one. But back when Araceli was four or so, he and Jennifer had pulled the old toy out of his parents¡¯ garage, and restored it.


    ¡°Old, but not quite enough to be an antique,¡± he had said.


    ¡°It¡¯s fine, we should use it,¡± Jen had answered.


    She had seemed genuinely enthusiastic about it, and this struck him, because frankly she did not have as close a relationship with his parents as he had hoped, and he knew his parents were at fault for that. So he hadn¡¯t assumed that an old family possession that had come down from his father¡¯s side would be something she would value. But she did. She dusted it off immediately when he slid it out of a corner.


    ¡°You played with this?¡± she asked.


    ¡°I did. I don¡¯t remember it very well, but I did. And my father too, he said. And I don¡¯t think even he was the first owner.¡±


    The horse was awkward-looking. Even when it was new, its unnaturally squat legs and too-sharply-inclined head might have made it hard for a child to love. And now its paint was worn, and the coloring it had left was dirty and showed scuffs.


    But Araceli had liked it as much as Jen did. It was solid; and its rockers, of course, worked just fine. She had ignored spider webs on it to ride it, hauling back on the pegs that extended out from its head.


    ¡°Can you paint it white? And gold?¡±


    ¡°Of course. And you can help.¡±


    The three of them had scraped it and painted it together, in an afternoon.


    ¡°She¡¯s going to burst a blood vessel in her head waiting for that paint to dry,¡± Jen had said.


    Araceli had played with it often before outgrowing it. The last he could remember, it had still been in their basement, waiting for the next rider.


    *


    In 2121, a young family would have just bought a new rocking horse. Or two or three.


    But he supposed there were worse ways for a society to coerce its population into supporting the system. He had certainly read and seen enough dystopian fiction that he could easily compare this world to one in which people were slaves, or segregated into either wastelands or luxury bubbles, or locked into suspended cages.


    Any rulers anywhere ¨C and at any time ¨C would have to either allow the masses to provide for themselves; or just provide for them directly; or oppress them. He could remember how many times he had heard, in his first life, about volatile nations plagued by unemployment and unrest. Here, everyone had something to do: build, buy, or shred.


    ¡°There are worse ways to provide for your people, I guess,¡± he said aloud. He could hear the snack cart out in the hallway banging into the front door again.

 Four - The Sylvan. Part one of two

    Perry woke up on the ground¡ªoutdoors, in a field, on grass¡ªcovered in the gel. His head spun. He lay prone. Rising to his hands and knees was simple enough, but then when he tried to stand any further, vertigo nearly overwhelmed him. He dropped back on all fours.


    He felt as if he were a boy again, playing football, having been tackled hard. It would have made sense but for the gel and no clothes.


    Something moved to his right. He looked over.


    The field he was in was unkempt; just a natural clearing surrounded by trees. On one edge of it, close to him, he saw ruins of a building. Torn-apart walls rose two or three stories, and some sections of iron protruded from them a bit higher into the sky.


    The movement he¡¯d glimpsed was, he saw now, a woman. She approached to within feet of him and then stopped, staring.


    She wore a dress that looked to be made of leather, held together with laces. Perry thought it looked like something traditional a Native American would wear.


    She held a spear. She had set its butt on the ground and had her hands folded around it.


    She spoke to him:


    ¡°Shu na tode.¡±


    ¡°Na tode,¡± she repeated; but it sounded to him as if she were saying this more to herself than to him.


    The gel was falling off him in glops. He turned his head; there sat a long white container the size of a coffin. It had been opened up, like a huge eyeglasses case, and he could see it was filled with the gel. He had clearly been in it.


    ¡°Where did that come from?¡± he asked her. She did not answer.


    He managed to stand. He faced her, and looked down at himself.


    ¡°What in the hell,¡± he said. He began sloughing off the gel with his hands.


    The day was warm, fortunately.


    The woman lifted her spear¡ªnot threateningly; just to carry it¡ªand came closer. She was looking at his body, seemingly curious about something. She circled him, apparently to inspect him from behind. He didn¡¯t feel there was anything to do about it. He kept squeegeeing himself as clean as he could.


    As for his own inspection of her, as she walked around him: She was tall, young, strong. Her hair was brown, and she had a relatively dark complexion. Her eyes were bright. She struck him as ¨C healthy. He didn¡¯t know why, exactly, but she just exuded health.


    But neither her actions nor her words ¨C certainly not her words ¨C were telling him anything about what was going on. He looked over again into the container; it held nothing useful. On its side there was a black panel protruding that looked like it might have been a display of some sort, but it was blank.


    ¡°Did I get jettisoned from a plane or something?¡± he said.


    The woman stopped her walk, in front of him again. She held out her hand.


    ¡°Sark?¡± she asked him. She lifted her hand toward him, showing him the side of her pointer finger knuckle. ¡°Sark?¡±


    At first he thought she was gesturing toward something, but then realized she had a large scar on the knuckle, running down most of the finger.


    ¡°No. No scars on me,¡± he said. ¡°No big ones. Just this. Accident at a summer job a long time ago.¡± He raised his hand and showed her a small white line on the side of his palm.


    She frowned and shook her head.


    ¡°Nem sark,¡± she said. ¡°Shu nam todem.¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t understand you.¡±


    ¡°Come,¡± she said.


    ¡°Come? I will come.¡±


    ¡°Come ora grunen satay.¡±


    She nodded toward the ruined building and began walking toward it, slowly, exaggeratedly, as if she were leading a dog, or a child. She kept her eyes on him. ¡°Come.¡±


    *


    As he walked, two realizations came to him simultaneously: First, he had somehow been assuming that he knew his own story, his background, his narrative; that it was there in the back of his mind; but, second ¨C this supposed memory was nearly empty.


    Only now that I stop and think about it do I realize how little I know ¨C


    His name was Perry; Perry Doran. He ¨C


    He had a wife.


    And a child.


    He lived in the year Two Thousand and ¨C something. 2020? No; at least 2022 ¨C he had watched that World Cup. 2025? He could picture that date on ¨C something. Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.


    *


    The building, he saw, had not fallen into ruin anytime recently. Its lower walls were intact, but dirt covered the floor, fires had been built in it, and any metal and glass doors or windows it might have ever had were long gone.


    The woman indicated he should stay inside, and she would return. She pulled her dress, and then made a waving gesture at her own mouth.


    Her dress was clearly handmade leather, and of course he couldn¡¯t miss the spear, but she didn¡¯t strike him as any sort of television barbarian. Her hair was carefully braided. Her face was not covered with smudges of ash or anything else. She wore well-made moccasins.


    ¡°Doesn¡¯t look like there¡¯s going to be any Planet of the Apes roundup, at least,¡± he said aloud.


    *


    The woman ¨C he eventually learned that her name was Andolen ¨C returned with two men. They were dressed as she was, in leather. One carried a bow and arrows; the other was unarmed. Like her, they struck Perry with their near-glow of health. They looked like they could be her brothers, or cousins; but later, Perry would see that most members of her clan simply had this similar appearance.


    They had brought him a sort of long vest ¨C like a cape with armholes ¨C and a leather cord to tie it around the waist.


    One of them, who looked older, handed it to him and muttered some words which were not even as clear as anything Andolen had said; but yet, oddly, Perry felt that he could understand him just by his tone and his glance downward. He guessed he had said something coarse along the lines of ¡°You can cover that thing up, my man.¡±


    The other one handed him something soft covered in wide leaves. He parted them and saw it was a cake of cornbread.


    Andolen pointed to herself and said, slowly and clearly.


    ¡°Andolen.¡±


    Then, pointing to each of the other two in turn:


    ¡°Rorlam. Adan.¡±


    ¡°Perry,¡± he told them. ¡°Perry Doran.¡±


    Rorlam ¨C who had given him the garment ¨C started a short conversation with the other two, the meaning of which was, again, obvious. He nodded toward Perry¡¯s bare feet, but they apparently came to an agreement that he could walk without the moccasins the others wore.


    They motioned for him to come along.


    *


    The people lived in a nearby village of sturdy, portable tents. There he was given more food ¨C roast meat on a spit; he thought it was venison ¨C and seated in front of an open fire to be talked about and talked to.


    Andolen said a few phrases directly to him, which he did not understand. The words seemed more run together, singsong, compared to what they had said to him so far. He guessed she was trying out a different language which neighbors must have used.


    ¡°I¡¯m afraid I only speak English,¡± he told them.


    He remembered:


    ¡°And okay Spanish. Ah, por casualidad ¨C se habla espa?ol aqui? Castellano? Nadie?¡±


    Andolen shook her head. They did seem to understand the question.


    An older man and woman joined them. The six of them sat on wooden stools. Other villagers came up to try to gawk, but Andolen, Rorlam, and Adan shooed them away.


    *


    Soon he would learn that people called themselves The Sylvan. They raised corn and potatoes in patches of cleared land. They fished in a river, mostly with nets, and hunted deer.


    There were other clans around ¨C many of them ¨C but he learned that the spears and bows and arrows he saw were primarily just for hunting and for defense against bears. The Sylvan didn¡¯t worry about violence from their neighbors.


    He dressed in deer skins. He eventually helped to fish, plant corn, start fires. He was given a small tent. A one-person tent; Andolen was partnered, with Adan, and there didn¡¯t appear to be any single women his age. Perry found this a relief. He looked down at his left hand.


    ¡°At least they could have left me my ring when they put me in that thing,¡± he said aloud. ¡°I can¡¯t believe that would have disabled it.¡±


    *


    It was when he was lacing up the moccasins that had been given to him that he first wept for Araceli.


    She had had a similar pair; they were boots, though, with long leather strings that took time to work through all the holes. She was old enough to lace shoes, by then, but had grown frustrated.


    ¡°Here,¡± he said, ¡°I¡¯ll do one, you do the other. These are hard.¡±


    He didn¡¯t want to do too much for her, but he also didn¡¯t want to leave her upset and overwhelmed. This seemed like a good compromise.


    He sat down with her on the thick white rug on the hardwood floor of her room, and together they laced the boots in the rays of sunshine coming through the windows. She calmed down. They had, as far as he could remember, worked silently, or nearly so.


    Jennifer had worried about this exact problem, with the new boots. She had also bought that soft rug. And she had dangled colored glass stars ¨C on thin lines from the top of the window frame ¨C which now dappled the rug with reds and oranges in the sunlight.


    They had been so happy.


    *


    Perry remembered more and more of his first life, quickly, but he was not able to use his knowledge of that industrial age to help the Sylvan at all. He found this immensely frustrating. Despite their healthy appearance, he did see them fall ill from causes which were probably bacterial, and suffer from wounds which certainly were. He knew that antibiotics had been developed from bread mold, but what good could that do him, or them? Even if they had had wheat, which they apparently didn¡¯t, he would not have been able to build containers to isolate and test mold, and of course his hosts would have thought him insane had he tried.


    ¡°I can imagine trying to get them to take experimental pills made from bread mold,¡± he muttered to himself. ¡°Just trust me, folks.¡±


    The people could already obtain and refine iron; they knew about charcoal, ore, and forges. They already had wheeled carts, and wheelbarrows. They made soap.


    He couldn¡¯t build a glider, nor would it have served any purpose had he been able to. Their children already knew kites ¨C made from woven grass, or bark paper ¨C and played with those.


    *


    The Sylvan were literate, too, many of them. They could make bark paper, and ink from certain large seed pods on trees. But the use of writing was not widespread. Perry remembered well that this had been the case in many ancient societies ¨C writing being confined to a few scribes, and upper classes ¨C but it still struck him to see it demonstrated. He could not have imagined any large number of people back in his time passing up the opportunity to learn to read and write; but here, it appeared that only a handful of children ¨C evidently those considered to be brighter than average, and teachable ¨C were taught. And then they had very few opportunities to make use of it. Village leaders would write down agreements to trade made with neighboring tribes, if needed. And Perry eventually came across an older woman who kept a long record of notable weather events, and long-term changes in the numbers of deer around the village, and visible migration patterns of birds. But no one was much interested in reading her notes.


    If he made his own bark paper and ink, might he write down their folklore, and their herbology, and their history? But their attitude was that all of these things should be known by everyone. Each person should know what plant to rub on a burn; it would be a sad state for The Sylvan if such knowledge was forgotten but for lifeless words written on ephemeral bark.


    *


    He did consider trying to build a wooden bicycle, as a project, but again he couldn¡¯t see that anyone would find a use for it in this woodland community without roads. It would just be a toy, and they didn¡¯t need those.


    Perry remembered, as a child, constructing from a kit a small generator which could light up a tiny bulb. It consisted of a roll of copper wire spinning between two magnets. Or was it magnets spinning inside a sleeve of copper wire? In any case, even on the outside chance that over the rest of his life he could locate copper ore, refine it, and hammer it into wire, there was no way he could make a glass vacuum tube or magnets.


    ¡°After you finish your penicillin pellets, everyone, help me blow this glass and build this air pump and mount a filament for my generator,¡± he said to himself. ¡°And by the way, does anyone have a couple magnets?¡±

 Four - The Sylvan; part two of two

    Days with The Sylvan became weeks, months, years.


    He learned their language. They could soon convey to each other that he did not know what exactly had happened to him, and that they had no idea, either; nor did they know the fate of his time, of 2025.


    Their world certainly included his white casket. They had grown up with it; grown up with him. Not among them, but nearby, and known to them. The casket had been lying in a corner of one of the ruined buildings as far back as any of their ancestors could remember.


    They had assumed he was dead, but they could see he was not decomposing; and because of the latter, no one had ever buried him. The casket had been hauled outside just a few days before his emergence when the green light on the control panel, which had been illuminated all along, fell black.


    He also never learned why the container opened when it did.


    *


    ¡°Long ago there were crowds.¡± That was the only folklore he heard which alluded to his time. There was nothing else, no explanations for what had happened. No tales of seas of fire, nor meltwater floods, nor machines run amok. Only this acknowledgment that once, long ago, there had been many more people around. Their oral histories didn¡¯t attempt to explain why.


    He asked the older man and woman he had met by the campfire about this. They were the oldest people there, it seemed; they looked to be in their seventies, perhaps closer to eighty. Their names were Willen and Arina.


    ¡°Has anything else been told about these crowds you mention?¡±


    ¡°No,¡± Arina said. ¡°Just that there were crowds. More people.¡±


    ¡°Do you know where? Did they exist right here?¡±


    ¡°It must have been here. Our people have always lived here. As far back as any stories tell, at least.¡±


    ¡°And did your elders speak of why they ¨C went away? Why there are fewer of you?¡±


    ¡°There are no stories about that. Just that there were more people, once. And less woods, fewer open streams. That¡¯s all that has come down to us.¡±


    ¡°And now we know these stories are true,¡± Willem said. ¡°From you.¡±


    ¡°There were certainly more people than I see here,¡± Perry said. ¡°I can¡¯t say what happened to them, though.¡±


    *


    Two years on, Perry could do no better in estimating the amount of time that had passed than simply examining and thinking about the ruins, which didn¡¯t illuminate anything much for him. How long would it take a concrete and steel building to crumble? He thought of Chernobyl, in his own time: forty years on from the disaster, windows were broken and animals had the run of the abandoned streets, but the buildings were intact, from what he could remember.


    Here, various ruined buildings were around; but he found no tattered calendars, no canned food with long-gone expiration dates, no yellowed newspaper clippings. He found no messages left behind by the people before the fall who intended to pass an explanation on to future generations. A monument with inscriptions carved into panels of aluminum? A stela of immortal plastic? A gold record of the type placed on the Voyagers? He found nothing like that.


    The stars had not moved. He knew that the constellations would change over thousands or tens of thousands of years. But they had not. He didn¡¯t know many of them, but the Big Dipper was still the Big Dipper, and Orion¡¯s Belt looked the way it did during his previous life, and Cassiopeia¡¯s chair looked the same as ever. The North Star, he knew, had not been in its current position as recently as the Roman Republic; but it was still there now, just as he remembered it, about six lengths away from the far edge of the Big Dipper. So it came back to the buildings: had the constellations changed, that would mean that the buildings were not the ones from his time; but they clearly seemed to be. If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    He knew the Sylvan language might suggest how much time had passed. It was clearly descended from English. Come, brother, hound, midday, and many other words were the same or little changed. The written version of the language, too, was obviously based on English; many of the letters were the same. But the spoken language was different enough that he did have to learn it ¨C it was far more than just a changed accent ¨C and he knew from his studies that such a change would likely have taken at least five hundred years.


    *


    He now thought of the casket as a sort of warm cryogenic chamber ¨C


    Warm cryogenics, makes perfect sense, he thought ¨C


    ¨C which had delivered him perhaps five centuries into the future, and which had negotiated its way around what must have been a catastrophic breakdown of some sort.


    And he couldn¡¯t really complain, he knew. He was welcome here. There was enough food, and mild winters. He had become a very good bow shot, hunting deer, and was fastidious about cleaning skins and other chores. He would sing around their campfires, at night, sometimes, and the people enjoyed that. He sang whatever he remembered ¨C Stand By Me; Changes in Latitudes. Whatever struck him, they liked.


    But he felt he needed closure, oddly, for Araceli and Jennifer¡¯s sakes, even though they were long gone. He felt he owed it to them to figure out what had happened.


    At night in his tent this would bore into him, and ruin his sleep. They must have lived their lives, and died, waiting for me, and I¡¯m not even able to tell them what happened. During the days, he realized that the stress he felt about this was ridiculous; it was not his fault.


    But, he thought, at the same time, I can feel what I feel. No one else has ever been in this position . . . as far as I know. There are no other caskets lying around, certainly.


    The Sylvan had very earnestly told him everything they knew about their environs and what could possibly have happened to his time, but that left him with no explanation.


    Few of them had traveled very far. Some had been to the ocean, which was a five-day walk to the east. One of them had walked north to trade for copper several times, a ten-day journey through mountains.


    The odd foreign traveler and trader would pass through, but they had never been concerned about trying to come up with any explanations regarding the end of the long-ago age when there had been crowds.


    One man of the tribe had left, years ago, to journey south, to try and see a legendary land ¡°of sand but no sea.¡± He had never returned. Some of the villagers thought he still might, one day.


    Perry began to gather supplies: dried food, extra moccasins, a smaller tent. His hosts noticed, but said nothing.


    ¡°I need to journey,¡± he eventually told Andolen. ¡°I have to try to find out ¨C something. Find out anything about what happened to those crowds.¡±


    ¡°I know.¡±


    ¡°Maybe as far as the shore, and then up or down it. Or beyond the mountains. I have to try.¡±


    ¡°I know, Perry.¡±


    He picked up his pack.


    ¡°Watch for bears,¡± she said.


    ¡°You¡¯ve taught me well. No bear is going to bother me.¡±


    ¡°And catamounts. Moose, if you head north. Bison.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ll make you proud. Everyone will respect The Sylvan. You taught me how to stay alive.¡±


    ¡°How to stay alive? For a long time? You were already the greatest at that, Perry.¡±


    He slung his pack over his shoulders.


    ¡°I¡¯ll come back.¡±

 Five - Dead, by the Standards of My Day

    ¡°This is the fourth day since you were recovered,¡± the woman said. ¡°You still don¡¯t feel able to talk?¡±


    ¡°I feel slow.¡±


    ¡°Your speech should be over eighty percent functional, by now. And I¡¯m communicating in your version of English. I am confident in it.¡±


    She was not frowning, although she sounded to Perry like she was. The two of them were sitting in a courtyard garden.


    ¡°Perry Doran. That is your name. Your records are available.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m grateful. For reviving me. But I barely remember where I have been.¡±


    ¡°Again, you have been in a stasis device. For six hundred years. You have been recovered by this institution.¡±


    ¡°A hospital.¡±


    ¡°No, this is not a hospital.¡±


    He looked down at the brick patio of the courtyard.


    ¡°Who placed me in a ¨C stasis device?¡±


    ¡°Someone back in your own time. Likely medical staff.¡±


    ¡°Why would they have done that?¡±


    ¡°Lack of brain activity. Death.¡±


    ¡°I was dead?¡±


    ¡°By the standards of your day, you would have been considered dead.¡±


    ¡°And you said ¨C six hundred years.¡±


    ¡°Again, yes, Perry. And we have mentioned this before.¡±


    Perry still thought she looked just blank-faced despite her tone and seeming exasperation. She was a dark-complexioned woman he took to be about thirty. She wore a long, simple blue dress. She leaned back in a wooden chair. She kept her dark eyes on him, barely ever blinking, her brows motionless.


    Her calm face and voice didn¡¯t match the impatience of her words. He remembered learning, long ago, that a mismatch between his sense of motion and what he was seeing out of a car window could make him queasy. Her face reminded him of that.


    He looked around at the plants in the garden. He recognized a hibiscus, and none of the others looked unusual either.


    ¡°This courtyard we are in ¨C is it old?¡±


    ¡°No.¡±


    ¡°It looks like one we would have in my time.¡±


    She didn¡¯t seem to want to say anything more.


    ¡°These records you have of me. What are they?¡±


    ¡°You will need to speak to someone else about those.¡±


    She rose and left.


    *


    September 3rd, 2695 is what they tell me the date is. Although I¡¯m not clear if they themselves are commonly numbering years like that anymore.


    Asked for a notebook and something to write with.


    I¡¯m writing this, I have learned, in the city of Nassau, Ohio. Or town ¨C it¡¯s not large. It didn¡¯t exist in my time, my first life. The closest nearby city is Cincinnati, which is still called that.


    Had anyone told me what this century would be like, I¡¯d have assumed that the automation of absolutely everything would have been what I noticed.


    Because everything seems to be automated. Growing food, transportation, the making of everything. And there isn¡¯t much transportation needed, of people anyway; but when they need it, it¡¯s just these sort of force-field giant fishbowl things that move around through the streets. No drivers, or conductors. It seems like they hover, but I¡¯m not sure. I still need to ride in one.


    I think a lot of what people eat may be grown ¨C or brewed, whatever ¨C in vats and tanks. I¡¯ve also seen a few videos or live shots of farms, and people don¡¯t seem to work at them at all. Many are indoors and vertical. Planting, harvesting, and shipment is all done by machines. And everything is vegan now, apparently, so no eggs to gather or anything like that.


    Most people seem to spend the vast majority of their time on leisure. Just as predicted. There are still schools, or at any rate children are gathered together for something ¨C education, I assume ¨C and I don¡¯t think robots teach that. And there are the people in the not-hospital, whatever it is, who revived me. But with so much else, nearly everything I¡¯m seeing, there¡¯s not much work going on. I haven¡¯t identified any buildings that are stores. Even if you spend your leisure time skiing, biking, whatever, the equipment is apparently fabricated by machines and just gets delivered to you by more machines.


    Anyway again I¡¯d have thought all that would be the story, but it¡¯s completely overshadowed by these people not talking. Or barely talking. I am not understanding this at all. I think this is beyond temporary culture shock.


    People ¨C the few I see ¨C don¡¯t talk to me, and will barely make eye contact. Their English is different, but you would think they¡¯d say something, once in a while. I go for walks and no one looks at me. I tried to ask someone on the street about the force-field fishbowl car things, and I think she understood me well enough but she wouldn¡¯t answer.


    I had been standing in front of a building ¨C I¡¯d seen a few people walk in and out, but I had no idea what its function was ¨C and all at once I noticed an older woman standing next to me, and also one of the transparent car things progressing down a street one block down.


    I could barely discern the ¡°vehicle¡± at all; I saw it was there because of just a slight blur as it moved around. Three people stood in it, two women and a man. They were facing each other. The thing disappeared silently behind a stand of ornamental trees.


    I turned to the woman.


    ¡°Where do those stop?¡± I asked her. I spoke slowly. ¡°How do they work? Can anyone get on?¡±


    She looked up at me, and I swear she looked disappointed. She was maybe seventy and had a scarf over her head. Just like the brick compound I was staying in, she looked very familiar. Could have been an older person from 2025.


    ¡°Where need go?¡± was all she said.


    And I told her nowhere, that I was just wondering how they work. And to that, she actually frowned ¨C everybody here sounds like they¡¯re frowning all the time, when they do talk, although they¡¯re usually not; but she really did ¨C and she just half-said, half-indicated that I should just ask when I needed to go somewhere.


    And they don¡¯t talk to each other much, either. One block over from me, there¡¯s a sort of restaurant ¨C it¡¯s cafeteria-style, and the food just appears at a counter after you say what you want ¨C with small tables, and there are often a few people there. And some of them sit together, but they don¡¯t speak much.


    I¡¯ve seen the children gathering in groups apparently to enter their not-schools, whatever they are, but they¡¯re also oddly quiet. They look like normal kids, and they have backpacks and whatnot, but they¡¯re strikingly quiet.


    *


    I¡¯ve honestly wondered if it¡¯s just that the entire population is on the autism spectrum now, but I don¡¯t think that¡¯s it; they seem perfectly able to read my emotions. If I get impatient with them they can definitely sense that, and then they clam up even more quickly. They just shut down any conversation or interaction.


    *


    Another person dressed in blue at this whatever-it-is where I¡¯m staying showed up yesterday. I assumed it was to do some maintenance, at first, because he wandered around the courtyard seeming to inspect it. But then he didn¡¯t do anything; he just turned around and started to leave. I thought maybe he was just looking at the plants.


    He knew I was there but said nothing to me, and after making his circuit walked right by me on his way out. But I stopped him. The conversation went something like:


    ¡°Are you a gardener?¡± I said.


    ¡°This is a courtyard,¡± he answered.


    ¡°Indeed. I haven¡¯t seen you here before. Like the others I see here.¡±


    No answer.


    ¡°Do you live here in Nassau?¡±Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.


    No answer.


    ¡°Tell me, do you understand my English? I know it¡¯s old.¡±


    ¡°We understand,¡± he said.


    ¡°The people here told me they had to learn it. I know it may be like ¨C¡± at this point I started talking more to myself ¨C ¡°Shakespeare would be to me. Or even Chaucer.¡±


    And at that, he shook his head.


    ¡°We understand. Your English is more permanent. Shared. Now I go.¡±


    And he went.


    What the hell is going on.


    *


    Another question is just what people do all day. There is a lot of leisure, as I said; biking, walking. People sitting around a pond in a park. I don¡¯t see road crews. I don¡¯t see construction or maintenance workers. I don¡¯t see people running to stores, and of course that means I don¡¯t see anyone working in stores either.


    I did come across a group of children playing what looked like an organized game, in a park. They didn¡¯t wear uniforms, but they were all the same age, and some parents were watching. Chased a very large ball around a field, trying to move it according to some rules I didn¡¯t understand. Sometimes several children pushed it; sometimes it was obvious that only one was allowed to. That looked normal enough, although again they were very quiet.


    *


    The only silver lining I guess is that this has served as a distraction from ¨C everything else. My life. Jennifer and Araceli are gone. At night, at other times when I¡¯m not thinking hard enough, I have a sense in the back of my mind that I¡¯ll see them again. I wonder what Jen would have thought about, will think about, the room they¡¯ve given me, or the quiet children. I wonder what Araceli would have thought of a rabbit I saw outside of town. I make a mental note to take her out there to try to see it again before I realize she¡¯s gone.


    *


    The rabbit, as least, looked normal. It froze when it saw me, and then hopped off into brush. I wanted to thank it. This was on the edge of a field past the last buildings in town.


    *


    I¡¯m still in the same room in the two-story building. I thought it was temporary after they revived me, but there¡¯s no sign that I¡¯m moving anywhere else.


    I talked with the staff guy about it:


    ¡°So, this is not a hospital¨C¡±


    ¡°No.¡±


    ¡°But you are the ones who revived me.¡±


    ¡°Yes.¡±


    ¡°Are you physicians?¡±


    ¡°No. A physician would not do this work.¡±


    ¡°How did you come to do it, then? Do you volunteer? How does this place function?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s a place you can live. And anyone could have administered after you exited the device.¡±


    ¡°Did I need help exiting it?¡±


    ¡°We have explained this before. It became obvious you would be released. You recovered while you were in the device itself.¡±


    ¡°How did it become obvious that I was healed?¡±


    ¡°A light on it which had been green, turned blue. Also, we opened the upper cover and saw that you had eye movement.¡±


    I moved on and just asked him:


    ¡°Could I live ¨C anywhere else?¡±


    I didn¡¯t really feel any need to move. I was asking this just as another way of trying to get a sense of how this society was working. Was this some sort of benevolence association? Or a government agency?


    ¡°You could. There are various places around the city. If you see one you want to move to, you can do so.¡±


    ¡°I wouldn¡¯t have to ¨C pay any money?¡±


    ¡°We do not do that.¡±


    I thought of something:


    ¡°By the way, about that stasis device, that tube ¨C what happened to it?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s still here. We will put it in your room.¡±


    *


    The ¡°staff,¡± whatever the blue-uniformed people are, did produce the records they spoke of. And they did it in an odd way, of course: they just put them on a table in my apartment one day while I was away, on a walk. I wonder if they intentionally waited until I had left so they could avoid talking to me about them. Because they were intense.


    The records were printed out on papers.


    Jennifer and Araceli both lived long lives, to 88 and 94 respectively. That means that Ara made it into the twenty-second century ¨C 2109 ¨C which of course seems like far into the future, strangely.


    (That¡¯d be an interesting quirk to talk with people about, wouldn¡¯t it; if anyone here talked.)


    Jen apparently worked her entire career in the same school system she¡¯d been in while I was there. It was mentioned in her obituary.


    There was nothing about her remarrying. I¡¯d be surprised if she didn¡¯t pair up with someone else; she was so young, still, when I left. And gorgeous. I can¡¯t know. She apparently didn¡¯t have any other children, at any rate. That was one thing she did, I believe, only with me.


    Araceli did have children and grandchildren of her own. There¡¯s a good chance I have descendants around. I could work on finding them if I feel like tracking fifteen generations or whatever it would be.


    There was no news about me, no obituary (there¡¯s a sentence I never thought I¡¯d write), and I still don¡¯t remember what exactly happened.


    I remember up to 2025. We were living in a house in Richmond. Jen and I were thinking of trying for another child. Ara had come along before I had felt very settled in my job, and it was the same for Jen. But both of us had just nailed down more secure positions, her in her school system and me at the university, so we were feeling more confident.


    I had worked on an excavation at a freedmen¡¯s village in Virginia.


    I¡¯d been invited to another in Guatemala. Tunneling into a pyramid.


    We had bought a new car.


    Our roof needed to be replaced.


    Ara had gotten a guinea pig. That was a story:


    We¡¯d gone out for the day to a large flea market and fundraising sale event thing in a rural area. We¡¯d given Ara ten dollars and told her that was her budget; she could buy anything she wanted. Turned out she found a guinea pig. Wasn¡¯t quite what we¡¯d meant, but he was a good pet. She named him Whistler.


    I remember all that, but can¡¯t remember how I ended up dead (by the standards of my day).


    (By the way I think ¡°Dead By The Standards of My Day¡± would be my memoir title. Unfortunately I can¡¯t imagine anyone here would read it.)


    Anyway I had gone out with Ara a day after that flea market to get a cage for Whistler. So that cage would have been something she would have remembered about me, a solid memory, after I was gone. Because Whistler certainly outlived me. I wondered what Araceli remembered of me; how often she thought about me. That guinea pig cage, at least, would have been a reminder. She must have had it for at least several years, if Whistler lived a normal life. I keep thinking of things like this, and it seems to pull me down into a well that I don¡¯t want to be spending all my time in.


    *


    I went into that restaurant thing yesterday. Several of the tables were occupied. Only one couple had been saying any words to each other when I entered, but they stopped.


    It¡¯s in the bottom floor of a residence building. It¡¯s open to the sidewalk. There¡¯s no doorway, you just walk in wherever. It¡¯s actually very pleasant, airy. Jen would have liked it. You walk to a counter area in back, say aloud what you want, and then a door goes up after a moment and it¡¯s there. I asked for tomato soup and bread ¨C having no idea what they might have ¨C and nothing happened. I switched to potato soup, and then the door went up and there it was. I¡¯m not sure if they didn¡¯t have tomato, or if the machine didn¡¯t understand me.


    I went to a table, and everyone else in there was just silent. No eye contact. It was so bizarre. I noted the sweater sleeve of a guy at a table across from me because he kept his arm down along the edge of it as if he were guarding his plate from me. They finished their meals and filed out. I was nearly alone there when I had finished mine.


    *


    I should make more of an effort to note the days in this thing, but they seem to run together. I imagine this is a sign of depression. Jen would have been worried about me.


    Anyway, I just went ahead and grilled the staff guy about ¨C everything, yesterday. I¡¯d read some history of the past centuries. Once again, I would have thought that things like the dissolution of the United States, the geoengineering of the planet, et cetera, would have been what I focused on, but in reality I had spent nearly all the time trying to identify the disconnect between my culture and this one. The disconnect of silence.


    ¡°Listen,¡± I¡¯d told him. ¡°I want to ask ¨C but first of all, what¡¯s your name? I¡¯ve never learned it. Do you have names these days?¡±


    ¡°Yes. Solman.¡±


    ¡°Okay then. So in my time, people talked a lot more. Are you aware of that?¡±


    ¡°I was not.¡±


    ¡°Really? And I don¡¯t mean that I assume you¡¯re especially interested in the twenty-first century, I understand that. But it¡¯s striking. Do people from here just have a reputation for being really quiet, now? I mean, some people did, in my time. Like people from Finland.¡±


    ¡°We are no different than anyone,¡± he said.


    ¡°Are you all ¨C telepathic? Do you send ideas to each other without speaking?¡±


    ¡°We do not.¡±


    ¡°Okay,¡± I said. ¡°It was just very different in my day. You don¡¯t know if any ¨C major change happened at some point? The, uh, silence revolution? Something like that?¡±


    ¡°I do not.¡±


    I felt I was really flailing, and I would have assumed he would try to ease the conversation a bit by asking me a question, commiserating, something, but he just stood there.


    I stood there, too.


    I didn¡¯t know what to try to say.


    He took advantage of my pause, and turned and left.


    *


    It¡¯s nine days later.


    I have a backpack. I¡¯m going to go out on a hike.


    I don¡¯t know where I¡¯ll go. I¡¯m just going out to where I¡¯ve seen that rabbit, and then past it. It¡¯s in a green area, the edge of a field. I¡¯ll walk across that and keep going.


    It was six days ago that I realized the walls were listening to me, basically, and I could just ask for anything and probably get it. That¡¯s how I got the backpack; I just said that I wanted one, aloud, in my apartment, and it was outside the door shortly after.


    And of course once again the thing which I would have assumed would amaze me, back in my earlier life ¨C the fact you can get things here just by voicing them to an interior wall, apparently ¨C is overshadowed by the fact that these walls listen to me. And see me, for all I know. There is basically constant surveillance. And who knows who is watching it. I guess I was naive to have expected otherwise.


    I had thought that the ordering system at that restaurant was just in place there, but it works nearly anywhere. Food appears in my pantry or in my temperature-control box (it¡¯s not really a refrigerator; things in it just stay cold) if I just say that I want it. On one occasion, three or four days ago, I asked for a watermelon and Solman actually walked in with it ¨C without knocking ¨C and put it on a table.


    Regardless, I asked for a backpack. I asked for better shoes, and they appeared in a closet. Then, a little tent. So I¡¯m walking for some time. We¡¯ll see if the fields out there listen to requests, too. If I break any rules, someone will have to tell me about it, and I¡¯d welcome the conversation. I am taking off to see the rabbit, and beyond.

 Six - The Orange Sphere and the Pink-Tinged Sky

    The ground beneath Perry, and the entire landscape, as far as he could see, was the color of an orange. He was reminded of an orange also because he was on a shallow hill, or rise, which dropped down very gradually all around him ¨C as if he were walking on a planet-size orange.


    Well, not actually planet size, he thought; more like a very small moon. Its sky was blue, and clear, but didn¡¯t seem to be the sky of Earth because it was tinged pink at the horizons, all the way around wherever he looked.


    The sky was bright, but there was no sun. There was, however, some sort of airship in the distance. He could make out only its sails, which were an off-white. Just like he would have expected to see on an old ship. They rippled in what must have been the higher-altitude wind; where he was, the air was calm.


    He realized it may not have been an airship. His brain may have been just forcing some strange phenomenon he had never come across before into a category that he did know. He saw that the supposed ship had no hull, nor suspended gondola. It might have been a massive kite flown by someone far away. Or perhaps a work of art; or just something unknown that reminded him of an array of sails.


    He was alone, except for the case. Next to it was a large puddle of the gel that had covered him. He had cleaned himself off as best he could, and was now dry after some time sitting exposed in the air.


    There were no other people around. There was nothing. Perry remembered his name, and who he was, but not how or when he had been placed in the white case.


    He stood there, waiting for anything to happen. After a time he sat down. The orange ground was soft and smooth.


    ¡°They¡¯ve put me in a padded room,¡± he said to himself. ¡°A very large one, but a padded room.¡±


    *


    He walked toward the thing that reminded him of a sailing ship. He felt he walked for the better part of an hour before he was close to it.


    He turned and looked back for the white case, but it was lost in the distance. He hoped he would be able to get back to it if he needed to, but he couldn¡¯t envision why he ever might.


    The object in the air with the apparent sails was oblong, and the part nearest to him seemed to be its rear. This would help him remember the direction of the case, far behind him. Assuming that the aircraft, kite, whatever it was, did not move.


    ¡°And aircraft do tend to move,¡± he said to himself.


    Now, for the first time, he heard a sound. At first it was just a far-off crackle; soon it became more of a ripple. Like running water.


    He scanned the sky, and saw it: A sort of gliding stream of water, lower down than the giant kite but still well higher than his head. The airborne stream seemed to pour itself laterally across the sky. It moved the way a flood of water running down steps in a house might, but flying rather than falling.


    It passed over him -- underneath the giant aircraft -- and then flowed off into the distance. None of the water fell; it hovered.


    And then he sensed a fragrance. It was hard to pinpoint, but some sort of fresh fruit, or maybe an herb ¨C mint? Lavender? It followed the strange river of water, and he wondered if it was caused by it or part of ¨C whatever the water was.


    The fresh smell took him back to his home, and Jen.


    *


    Before he had met Jennifer, he had lived his life with just white soap in the bathroom, and whatever random scent of spray-bottle cleaner had presented itself on the store shelf. Now his bathroom ¨C his shared bathroom ¨C was filled with lime body wash, cucumber shampoo, coconut hair oil. Behind that bottle of wash was another, this one tangerine, and then yet another, mint. In the open closet just outside the bathroom, Jennifer had placed lavender sachets between and on top of the new stacks of towels.


    Jennifer would sometimes scent the kitchen, after meals, by boiling a tiny pot of water, cinnamon, and cloves.


    He was living with Jennifer.


    Jen had moved into his home. A woman was sharing his bathroom.


    His life expanded. The ceilings seemed higher. He breathed mint, and coconut. He breathed the same air as Jennifer.


    *


    That life had to still be there. He would get back to it. But somehow he also felt, simultaneously, that an enormous amount of time had passed. This scared him, and he tried not to think about it. Somewhere, away from this orange world, Jen and Araceli were without him; waiting for him.


    He ran his hands through his hair. It seemed frivolous to him to be daydreaming about his first months with Jen when he was lost and would presumably die of thirst unless he could figure out how to get out of this strange orange void (or at least how to pull down the next sky stream that might fly overhead, and drink it).


    *


    He walked more, underneath the giant kite and then past it. He hoped to see something else in the distance; anything ¨C yet another kite, or a building. Or maybe an emerald city. But there was nothing, just the endless orange ground.


    He turned. The airship was still visible in the distance, but now very far. He might have been walking for two or even three hours, now.


    *


    ¡°I may be able to help you.¡±


    The voice came from behind him. He whirled around. There stood an older man in a white suit. He wore a white boater hat. His hands were folded before him.


    ¡°We have just become aware that you have emerged. Pardon our tardiness in approaching you. We¡¯ve been waiting for you.¡±


    ¡°You know who I am?¡±


    ¡°Perry Doran, yes. You were in that case, right with us.¡±


    ¡°With who?¡±


    ¡°All of us. The few that you see here, and many more.¡±


    ¡°I haven¡¯t seen anyone here. Other than you.¡±


    ¡°Well, yes you have. All these manifestations you see ¨C the air carrack, the water, the fragrance, the very object you are standing on ¨C are beings. People; our people. And there are many more that you don¡¯t see, but they are here. They may move too quickly, or they may be masses of elements something like the line of water you saw, but transparent. And some are simply too far away to be seen. But they¡¯re out there, and they have seen you.¡±


    ¡°Intelligent beings.¡±


    ¡°Yes.¡±


    ¡°Including this very ground I¡¯m standing on.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s an unusually large one, but yes.¡±


    ¡°And you are saying these are ¡®people.¡¯¡±


    ¡°Yes.¡±Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.


    ¡°I would not call them that.¡±


    ¡°But they are,¡± the man repeated. ¡°Shapes have changed. Presentations have changed. And states of being. And lifespans, certainly.¡±


    Perry wondered if this person speaking to him was a hallucination, and if he was letting himself fall further down some well of insanity by conversing with him. But there was nothing else to do, no one else to speak with, nowhere to go.


    ¡°You¡¯re making it sound like people have chosen to transform themselves into kites, planets, gasses, whatever.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s the case. Over the years we have become no longer bound to our bodies. So once that happens, why look human at all? Why not be a mountain, if you want to be, or a glacier, or an aurora?¡±


    ¡°So where is Earth? Are we in orbit around it? I¡¯m lucky I can breathe.¡±


    ¡°We are on earth. But what you see as the sky, here, is not Earth¡¯s. It is yet another person.¡±


    ¡°A person, a being, who is a blue sky. With pink edges.¡±


    ¡°Yes.¡±


    ¡°And not really related to this orange surface. It¡¯s just a coincidence that this sky-being is here.¡±


    ¡°Not exactly. They do like to pair up, and they understand that they complement each other.¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t understand. I don¡¯t understand this place. And you¡¯re speaking as if I¡¯m far in the future.¡± He paused. The man in the boater hat regarded him, silently. He looked old, but sharp. Like a very experienced lawyer walking him through some unexpected legal calamity. (Dressed, for some reason, maybe for a formal picnic on a lawn by a lake.) His eyes were clear, and his eyebrows slightly raised.


    ¡°Far in the future,¡± Perry repeated. ¡°Well, I suppose that would explain some things.¡±


    ¡°We have known you would need a guide, so I was created as one. Futures need guides, you know. Winston Smith had O¡¯Brien, to explain the brave new world. And in that world, John the half-savage had Helmholtz Watson.


    ¡°This is your new world, Perry. And yes, it is in your future. More than two thousand years have passed, for you.¡±


    ¡°Two thousand years,¡± Perry repeated.


    ¡°That¡¯s right.¡±


    He felt himself sway.


    ¡°Be careful, Perry.¡±


    ¡°That means everything I know is gone.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m afraid they are. We¡¯re all very sorry.¡±


    The man paused. His expression did not change, but he ¨C it ¨C apparently understood that this was shocking for Perry.


    ¡°We did not place you in that case, Perry. It has simply come down to us. Across all these years.¡±


    ¡°So I¡¯ve been in that thing all this time.¡±


    ¡°Yes. People from your own time placed you in it. We assume you must have been very ill. Or dead, even.¡±


    ¡°So my condition was, possibly dead.¡±


    He looked down. The man, or the projection of a man, waited a moment and then asked:


    ¡°You don¡¯t remember any of it.¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t. Not getting in, and not really even getting out. I¡¯m not remembering anything.¡±


    ¡°Perry, we all feel for you. This is difficult for you. We know your time was different.¡±


    ¡°It sure was.¡±


    Perry looked down at the orange ground and wished it was normal. He wished anything was simply normal.


    ¡°Not one normal thing here,¡± he said aloud. ¡°Not one thing I recognize.¡±


    ¡°We tried to make this projection here familiar to you. The face. The clothes.¡±


    ¡°Sure, but the surroundings,¡± Perry said.


    He continued: ¡°My family. I had a wife. A daughter.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m afraid they have long since lived their lives.¡±


    ¡°Long since.¡±


    Again the projected man was silent.


    ¡°Why did I exit that thing now? What changed?¡±


    ¡°It simply completed its work. It revived you. This is how long it took.¡±


    ¡°You weren¡¯t able to ¨C speed it up at all?¡±


    ¡°We might have been able, had we tried. But your century was already long gone by the time anyone could have done that.¡±


    ¡°You look like me, but you¡¯re not a copy. So there must be some of you who still appear ¨C human. As I knew them. You had a model to work with.¡±


    ¡°We¡¯re well aware of what our race looked like in the past, Perry. But yes, you are right. There are still some people around who choose to look like the old humans.¡±


    ¡°I would like to meet them.¡±


    ¡°You shall.¡±


    ¡°And I can ¨C leave here? Move myself off this orange being here, and away from the sky? All respect to them.¡±


    ¡°You can, yes.¡±


    *


    Perry came to know the world as it now was. The projection led him around. It was able to teleport him instantly; sometimes apparent hundreds of miles at once, sometimes a few yards.


    First the orange ground disappeared, and Perry and the projection stood on top of a bridge of mist; an arch of mist. It rose out of what looked like a rain forest, with more mist hanging below amid the tops of the trees.


    ¡°Where are we?¡±


    ¡°Not so far away from where we were. You can see where we came from.¡± The projection gestured behind Perry. He turned and saw the giant orange sphere hovering perhaps a mile off. He guessed it was at least a hundred miles in diameter; its top faded into the sky, rising into space, hard to distinguish.


    ¡°And this ¨C bridge,¡± Perry said, looking down. ¡°You know, I¡¯m surprised it can support me.¡±


    ¡°It can.¡±


    ¡°It seems like a cloud. Is it another being?¡±


    ¡°It is.¡±


    ¡°Do you speak to them all? Communicate with all of them?¡±


    ¡°We are always speaking, yes. Many of us are merged.¡±


    ¡°Merged?¡±


    ¡°In ¨C ¡± the projection considered its words ¨C ¡°constant communication. Shared thoughts.¡±


    ¡°You mean you share a consciousness? One mind?¡±


    ¡°Not one mind. Just ¨C communicating. At all times.¡±


    ¡°And the forest beneath here? Is that a being? Is each tree another one?¡±


    ¡°No. They are simply trees.¡±


    ¡°So this is the surface of earth.¡±


    ¡°It is.¡±


    ¡°How many beings are there?¡±


    ¡°Many millions.¡±


    ¡°But not billions?¡±


    ¡°No.¡±


    ¡°Are they any of them that I can speak with?¡±


    ¡°Among the majority of our people, no. Not as you know it. That¡¯s why I was created.¡±


    The projection transported him around and introduced him to other . . . people. There was an obelisk, and a monolith. There was a murmur. There were varied spheres of light, and a sphere of water. There were a few birds that were actually people, but also birds which were just birds. There was a swirling flurry of snow which never completely fell, and never melted.


    ¡°Are any of these ¨C mortal?¡± Perry asked. ¡°Does anyone die anymore?¡±


    ¡°We do not. The humans you will meet do.¡±


    ¡°Do you ¨C or how do you ¨C reproduce?¡±


    ¡°We will create new beings. From time to time. They are created as the community decides, but they take their own form soon enough.¡±


    *


    It was individuality taken to the extreme. You could not only choose your name, and where you would live, and what you would do; you could define a completely unique state of being. You could choose to be a scent, or a reflection, or an emotion.


    *


    The people who had chosen to remain people, were essentially Amish.


    There were hundreds of thousands of them. They farmed vast expanses of land in what had been the northeastern United States. They went to school for more years than the Amish in Perry¡¯s first life had, and many were not noticeably religious at all, although many others still were.


    Perry would have to learn German ¨C their version of it ¨C to talk to them.


    ¡°Many years ago, centuries ago, many of them were bilingual,¡± the projection told him. They had moved now to the top of a low hill from which they could see farm houses, and barns, and, far off, a man riding a horse along a grass lane through a field.


    ¡°But as years passed, everyone else stopped speaking aloud. The more modern people like us, I mean. So there was no one left to speak English with. So they kept only their German.¡±


    ¡°You know,¡± Perry said, still looking out at the rider, ¡°back in my day you would never see them on horseback. Come to think of it. They had plenty of horses, but they didn¡¯t seem to ride them. Everything changes, I guess.¡±


    He looked down at his feet. The ground here was dirt, grass, and dandelions.


    ¡°This looks so much better to me. Begging your pardon. Thank you for bringing me here.¡±


    ¡°Of course. We did not know if you would want to resume something like your previous life. It is rare, today. There are few people who live like this. So many of us want to ¨C be something else.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m content to stay with them. I don¡¯t know anything about farming. I hope they can take me in anyway.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m sure they will.¡±


    He looked back down at the ground. This time, rather than the familiar grass and weeds, it was his bare feet that struck him.


    ¡°I will need clothes. I doubt they want naked men wandering around.¡±


    ¡°They will bring some to you right away, I¡¯m sure. I leave you here then, Perry. You know you can always be anything you like. You can find us just on the other side of this hill.¡±


    They both turned to look on the other side of the hill. In that direction, there were no rolling Amish farmsteads; just fields. And far off, a silver dome. Perry guessed it was half a mile wide.


    ¡°Is there anything under that dome?¡± he asked.


    ¡°No. It is just one of us. The closest one to the old world, here.¡±


    ¡°All right then. I¡¯ll know where to find you.¡±

 Seven - XX

    Perry smiled ¨C respectfully ¨C and shook his head.


    ¡°You know, there were stories about this. Science fiction stories.¡±


    ¡°We know,¡± the doctor said. She did not return the smile. ¡°Had you read them?¡±


    ¡°I read about them, more than I read them. Many were old. I do remember one movie. Are you ¨C familiar with them, yourself?¡±


    ¡°About as much as you are, it sounds like.¡±


    ¡°Well. Of course there always had to be a setup for how it had happened. Sometimes the Y chromosome just failed. In other stories, the women gained control and intentionally ¨C ¡± he searched, then shrugged ¨C ¡°drove the men to extinction, basically. Decided they¡¯d be better off without them.¡±


    He paused. She said nothing, and neither did any of the other four staff who were gathered in the room, all of them women.


    This struck him as an odd time for a pause. All five of them just looked at him, waiting for him to continue. He was in bed, while the women all sat in chairs. He felt alert, but weak after his long coma.


    ¡°Or perhaps it was an alien species,¡± he said. ¡°A species which was very close to being human, or slightly altered humans, something like that. But all female. Or space settlers who had evolved that way. But then regardless of the setup, the drama of course was in how the man, or the few men if it was a group, would relate to the all-woman society. It wouldn¡¯t do to just have a happy ending, in fiction. The man couldn¡¯t just ¨C mix himself in and be done with it. The women often had to attack him, or cast him out, or something.¡±


    He stopped talking, and the room was silent.


    The woman who had done the talking so far seemed older than the others, perhaps in her upper forties. None of them was particularly old, he noticed. Or at least they didn¡¯t seem so, to him; he guessed it was possible that in the future, no one would ever really look old.


    The other four included a tall woman in doctor¡¯s white, a young one wearing a suit, another in the blue of a nurse, and the last one, a blond woman staring at him, again in a suit. The one talking ¨C and  taking notes ¨C looked more like a laboratory researcher, in a long white coat.


    They all had very attentive eyes, and all five had their eyebrows slightly raised. He wondered if he were in Scandinavia, or just somewhere other than the U.S., and this was just a cultural trait. But they all spoke what he considered unaccented American English.


    After some moments of silence, he resumed:


    ¡°So, can you tell me why it has happened here?¡±


    ¡°You said you had seen one movie about it,¡± the doctor said. ¡°Do you remember it?¡±


    ¡°Yes, pretty well.¡±


    ¡°What happened in it?¡±


    ¡°Well, in that one the women were not able to reproduce by themselves. They hadn¡¯t been without males for very long.¡±


    ¡°But what had happened to the rest of the males in the first place?¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t remember the back story in that one. It almost doesn¡¯t matter, you know? Like with an apocalypse movie. Often it doesn''t really matter what causes the apocalypse. Caused the apocalypse.¡±


    He caught himself:


    ¡°Not that I¡¯m saying this is an apocalypse here. Whatever happened.¡±


    That probably did not sound great, he thought to himself. If you come across this story on Amazon, it''s taken without permission from the author. Report it.


    The women just continued to stare at him.


    ¡°Anyway, in this movie, they wanted to get him to father some children; but the drama was that they were very controlling. It was all on their terms. They were enslaving the guy, basically.¡±


    ¡°And how did it end?¡±


    ¡°He ended up running away. With his dog.¡±


    The lead looked down to write something in a notebook again.


    It was a paper notebook, and she was using what looked to him like just a regular ink pen. This surprised him somewhat because they had indicated, earlier, that at least two hundred years had passed. But they still used pen and paper.


    He looked over their lab whites and other work wear again.


    ¡°Clothes haven¡¯t changed much,¡± Perry said. ¡°Assuming you¡¯re a doctor and you¡¯re a nurse.¡± He nodded toward them.


    ¡°They have changed, and must have come around again,¡± the leader said.


    ¡°Can you tell me,¡± Perry tried again, ¡°what happened here? What happened to the men? And the boys?¡±


    ¡°Well, the boys¡± ¨C she emphasized the word, oddly ¨C ¡°were the first to depart, of course. They aged into men. But then the men ¨C were not replaced.¡± She looked to her left, at the blond woman who was still staring at him.


    ¡°I don¡¯t believe we¡¯re going to explain it,¡± she said.


    ¡°No,¡± agreed the blonde.


    ¡°Tell me, Perry. What would you do here? Out in our society?¡±


    ¡°What would I do?¡±


    He was alarmed that this was phrased as a conditional. He pressed ahead:


    ¡°Well. I would ¨C I will ¨C try to earn a living. Take care of myself. I was an archaeologist. Still am, I would say. So I¡¯d look for that sort of work, if it¡¯s still around. And ¨C¡± he shrugged. ¡°Live and learn, I guess.¡±


    None of them responded.


    ¡°I didn¡¯t ask to come here,¡± he said. ¡°I don¡¯t even remember being put into that device. I didn¡¯t come here to ¨C interfere. You know, you¡¯re starting to scare me a little. I¡¯m not sure why. I¡¯m feeling like you¡¯re upset with me for some reason.¡±


    Even to this they made no answer.


    ¡°Anyway, like I said, I¡¯d be glad to just ¨C mind my own business, here. Find something to do.¡±


    The leader snapped her notebook shut.


    ¡°It doesn¡¯t matter if you asked to come here or not. You have an inflated sense of your own agency. As if your motives matter to us. As if your attitude is anything we care about. You will ¡®try to earn a living here¡¯ ¨C as if your effort would make a difference. In reality you would either succeed or fail based on our decisions. You are shockingly arrogant. I don¡¯t know if this is due to the epoch in which you were raised, or if it¡¯s due to ¨C ¡±


    She frowned, and Perry thought she tilted her head, just barely, to indicate his crotch.


    She then said:


    ¡°You¡¯re going back.¡±


    ¡°Back where?¡±


    ¡°Back into that case.¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t think it travels backward in time.¡±


    ¡°It certainly does not,¡± she said.


    ¡°And I¡¯m not sure it will turn on again.¡±


    ¡°We can turn it on. Do you think we don¡¯t understand how it functions? We¡¯re not murdering you.¡± And she shook her head, dismissively, as if he were a grade schooler who had come up with a ridiculous idea.


    The five of them all stood; he did too. He half expected them to call in guards to pin him, then, but they did it themselves. He took steps backward, but they came at him; and in any event they were positioned between him and the door so he had nowhere to go.


    He thought about trying to crash straight through them, but his legs felt too weak.


    The one who seemed to be a doctor grabbed one of his arms, and one of the two in a suit took the other. The nurse-looking one stepped behind him and put her arms tight around his ribs.


    The one who had done the writing then produced a syringe and injected him in his upper left arm.


    The shot, whatever it was, turned him limp but did not knock him out completely. He was aware of being dragged down the hall a short distance to the stasis device. He was aware of the women lifting him up and holding him horizontally. Then he felt the wet of the gel as they pushed him into it.


    The lids of the device came down; first the transparent one, and then the outer one that turned everything dark.

 Eight - The Patient With The Absurd Story

    As the man ¨C he couldn¡¯t remember his name ¨C became conscious, he was aware that he was covered by liquid but was somehow being covered yet again by liquid; he was drowning. He was awake, and drowning.


    A memory of being awoken early in the morning, in the dark, and pulled out of bed with no warning; the unfairness of it; it made him angry ¨C but he realized he had to fight;


    He fought against the water. He was enclosed in something and slipped out. He tried to force his eyes open, but they were covered in gel which was now being submerged in water.


    He shook his head and tried to breathe, but he was under;


    And now hands grabbed him. A strong hand on each arm. They pulled him out, and then up over the edge of a small boat. They sat him down on its floor, handed him a blanket, and tried to get him to calm down.


    ¡°Tranquilo, tranquilo. Ya est¨¢.¡±


    They tried to assist him getting the gel off his face, and they laughed.


    ¡°Tranquilo, todo bien ahora. Todo bien. English?¡±


    He had been drowning, and covered in gel, and trapped in a sinking case, all at once; plus he had no memory of his name, nor how he had gotten here, nor where he was.


    He cleared his eyes in time to see one glimpse of the Torpedo before it sunk entirely into the deep.


    The boat was a sailboat. The two men sat near him but called to two women, also on board, to bring towels.


    The couples found spare clothes for him, barely ¨C a pair of swim trunks, and a jacket ¨C and took him to a hospital. A car was waiting for them at the dock. The two men climbed in with him, and the car drove itself. It was nearly silent; the hum of the tires rolling on the pavement was the most noticeable sound.


    ¡°What is your name?¡± one of them asked. The vehicle made virtually no sound apart from its wheels running on the flawless road. The men waited for him to answer.


    The question seemed impossible. He was someone who had been bobbing in the ocean and had almost drowned; that was all he knew of his story.


    He could only shake his head. He said nothing.


    The car rolled quietly past orderly croplands and occasional steel and glass buildings. At one point it shifted slightly to move around a bicycle. The bike, at least, was familiar; the usual frame, black tires, a laboring rider.


    ¡°Perry,¡± he said. ¡°I¡¯m Perry.¡±


    *


    The hospital kept him overnight.


    ¡°Yeh look ellright bet we¡¯ll keep yeh here at least a deh,¡± a doctor told him. The man sounded slightly Irish, to Perry, but everyone else who spoke English did too. The car that drove itself clued him in that many years might have passed, but he only asked about it when he heard how much the language had changed. (Somehow the Mexicans¡¯ English, when they had switched to it, had sounded more like his own than everyone else¡¯s did, which seemed an irony.)


    ¡°I¡¯m afraid I don¡¯t remember what year it is,¡± he said now.


    ¡°Twenty-two twenty-eight.¡± The doctor paused. ¡°Is that whet yeh were expecting?¡±


    *


    The Mexican men had told the emergency room staff that ¡°he came out of some kind of case¡± that had been floating, for a moment, in the gulf; that was all anyone knew about his origin. Perry would have liked to have seen more of his cocoon, but all he had was the one glimpse as it dropped below the surface, became obscured by the water, and then vanished.


    ¡°Yeh can remember no more than that?¡± the doctor asked. He was tall, white, bald, and appeared extremely attentive, with his eyebrows raised high. He had introduced himself as O¡¯Toole, with no honorific.


    ¡°I don¡¯t know what that thing was that I came out of. I¡¯m glad I made it out. I wonder . . . I could have drowned in that thing. I¡¯m just baffled about what happened.¡±


    O¡¯Toole made no answer.


    ¡°I do remember that I had a wife. And a daughter.¡±


    ¡°Do you know their nehms?¡±


    ¡°Just their first names. Jennifer. And Araceli.¡±


    The doctor looked down, then back up.


    ¡°I¡¯m sorry yeh don¡¯t remember. It may be hard to find them.¡±


    ¡°And I think I remember ¨C when I am from.¡±


    O¡¯Toole waited for him.


    ¡°Twenty twenty-five.¡±


    ¡°Twenty twenty-five,¡± the doctor repeated. ¡°Two hundred years ago?¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s what I remember.¡±


    ¡°How do you know that?¡±


    ¡°I just remember. My daughter turned ten, that year; that¡¯s one thing. I remember seeing it on calendars, also. And I don¡¯t remember any calendars later than that.¡± He paused. ¡°I wish I could think of more.¡±


    ¡°And where have yeh been since?¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t know. Maybe just floating in that ocean. I think someone would have seen me, though, in all this time. Don¡¯t you? Maybe I was submerged, somehow.¡±


    The doctor wrote something down. Perry noticed that he used a metal stylus and a clipboard-size screen.


    ¡°Although that¡¯s the least of the problems with this story, I know,¡± he added.


    O¡¯Toole kept writing.


    Perry asked him: ¡°Is it possible for you to ¨C put people in suspended animation? Now?¡±


    The doctor shook his head.


    ¡°We ked pet them under anesthesia for some time. Not two hundred years, though.¡±


    ¡°Do you think I¡¯ve lost my mind?¡±


    ¡°No. Just some memory. But we cannot find yeh as a missing person. A current missing person, I should say. And certainly not as someone from two hundred years ago with just your first name to search for. Yehr case is ¨C unique, Perry. I will say that.¡±


    *


    He was given a private room in the hospital. Some things were the same, others very different. His vitals were displayed on a screen above the bed, but they were apparently monitored by the bed itself. Food was brought in for him from time to time, but it came on a near-silent rolling platform under a dome cover that would retract and wait for him to select something.


    Nurses and assistant doctors made rounds. One of them showed him how to activate a display screen that was built into the wall facing his bed, which had been invisible to him up till then. It was voice activated and could answer questions. He vaguely remembered such technology from his first life, but this version seemed uncannily smooth.


    ¡°Can you display Paris?¡±


    A still picture appeared on the wall.


    ¡°I mean live. People walking in Paris, right now.¡±


    The scene switched to an apparent live shot of a street with the Eiffel Tower in the background.


    ¡°Show a giraffe.¡±


    A photo appeared.


    ¡°I mean a live one. Walking around.¡±


    The picture switched to a video of two giraffes in savannah.


    ¡°Well, giraffes and the Eiffel Tower have made it,¡± he said to himself.


    ¡°How about the bottom of the Mariana Trench? Live?¡±


    The scene changed to a blank seafloor.


    ¡°Is that really live? This instant?¡±


    The wall turned gray; that seemed to mean no.


    ¡°Stumped you.¡±The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.


    The panel could also display a literal wall of text if he asked for things to read. When the screen¡¯s voice spoke, it was in the same somewhat-Irish accent everyone else spoke with. The articles he found were in English he could follow fairly easily, although there were so many unknown references in them that he felt they, too, seemed foreign. The word order and verbs also took him time to parse, especially in headlines:


    ¡°Reports SA Orlando Domes Second Opportunity Spur¡± meant that the Space Administration was reporting that an interplanetary settlement consortium based in Orlando had completed a dome over a new expansion of the city of Opportunity on Mars. To ¡°dome¡± something in this way was now a verb. Sorting all this out left him fatigued.


    *


    ¡°Sleep well?¡±


    ¡°I did.¡±


    ¡°So yeh¡¯ve had two nights here, now, and we¡¯ve no rehson to keep you any longer. Have yeh remembered any more?¡±


    ¡°Nothing much helpful. I lived in Virginia.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s progress.¡±


    ¡°And I was an archaeologist. I suppose I still am.¡±


    ¡°Well, that¡¯s good, you know; it transfers. We still have archaeologists.¡± O¡¯Toole nodded. ¡°There¡¯s a tiny bit less for yeh to study, I¡¯m afraid, if yeh¡¯ve been away for two hundred years. Unless yeh¡¯re a diver.¡±


    It was perhaps not a surprise, it turned out, that he had been found floating in water; the oceans were far larger than in his earlier life. The chance of finding oneself in water these days was much higher. South Florida was mostly gone. Venice had been abandoned. Leptis Magna was gone.


    ¡°Do yeh happen to remember exactly any projects you worked on? As an archaeologist?¡±


    ¡°I can¡¯t. I have memories of digging. Of being underground.¡±


    Being underground


    ¡°Because if yeh did, we might search for scholarly articles from the time. If we could find any. Yeh might recognize yehr full name on one.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s been a very long time.¡±


    ¡°Yes.¡±


    ¡°You know, I have no illusions that history would remember me. Out of my own century.¡±


    ¡°Well, this is your century too, right now. Yeh just skipped one, from what yeh tell me. And don¡¯t sell yehrself short. It¡¯s something yeh could work on.¡±


    The doctor was being kind, Perry knew, but there was something in his tone in that last phrase ¨C ¡°you could work on¡± it ¨C that sounded patronizing; as if O¡¯Toole did not believe he had actually been in stasis for two hundred years, but would not shoot down what would be a harmless activity for this patient.


    ¡°But regardless. We have a placement staff who will work with yeh, so yeh can get set up out there. Come back if yeh need to.¡±


    *


    Later on a second doctor stopped by, and then a third. Perry got the impression that his story was unusual enough that they wanted to hear it in person before he left. He told them everything he could remember, which ended up being mostly a list of everything he could not remember.


    He asked one of them:


    ¡°Do I seem coherent to you? Apart from this gap in my memory? Now that you¡¯ve listened to me?¡±


    The doctor told him that he did seem coherent; and she sounded almost surprised that he did.


    *


    Dr. O¡¯Toole later wrote, in his notes:


    Male, 35 to 40, near total retrograde amnesia. Otherwise good health. Absent from current directories. No indication of brain trauma. Aware and alert. Admitted subsequent to possible near-drowning, observed for 72 hours. No underlying causes identified. Discharged to Placement.


    *


    There was one more thing Perry remembered, which he did not tell the doctor:


    He remembered a woman moving into his apartment. He felt that she was, or became, his wife. The apartment was white, full of light.


    He remembered the hem of a dress, or a skirt. A smile. A necklace. A twist of hips, a turn of a body. He remembered warm skin; the curves of collarbones.


    And love. And touch. The love was almost a physical presence; it was heat, light.


    He remembered feeling that his life had multiplied, somehow. Expanded. If now he had been asleep for two hundred years and locked in a shell floating in the ocean, the widened horizon he felt when it had cracked open and released him was still nothing like what he had felt ¨C what he remembered ¨C when that woman had moved into his space.


    He didn¡¯t feel this was concrete enough to share with the doctor. And he had also felt it would be a violation of something if he did.


    *


    Housing ¨C basic housing ¨C was free in 2228. A social worker from the hospital moved him into an apartment on the outskirts of the city. This was Citronelle, Alabama, the successor to inundated Mobile.


    Food was also free. Again it was basic food, but stores with staples would distribute to anyone who stopped by.


    ¡°I wish I remembered more,¡± Perry told the social worker, ¡°but I¡¯m certain survival was more of a struggle in my time. Maybe ¡®survival¡¯ is too strong a word. But food, clothing, shelter.¡±


    She was a young Black woman, named Tolliver, every bit as attentive to him as O¡¯Toole had been.


    ¡°Well, we¡¯ve had problems since 2025, but we¡¯ve sorted out some things, also,¡± she said. He felt that she was humoring him somewhat by referring to the date he had given them; she seemed to say it the way a parent might play along with a child who reported an invisible friend. But she was kind enough to remember it, at least.


    The apartment was a small one, in a row of them. A fence in back surrounded a small patch of grass and also some flowers.


    ¡°My wife would have liked these,¡± he said. ¡°And my daughter ¨C I do remember her playing on grass.¡±


    ¡°Yeh haven¡¯t remembered more about them?¡±


    ¡°Not really. Just images. Impressions, almost. It¡¯s hard to describe. I hope I get more.¡±


    *


    And again there was a memory which he didn¡¯t share; not a fiery one, like the one of his wife, but nevertheless something he didn¡¯t want to tell Tolliver.


    He remembered mending his daughter¡¯s dress.


    Mending clothes had seemed to be his job, in the family, not Jennifer¡¯s.


    Araceli had accidentally cut through the fabric while crafting something else on her lap, with scissors. She had presented it to him, and he had held it in his hands.


    But the searing memory was not the cut; it was Araceli¡¯s earnestness and remorse when he had said that she needed to be careful.


    He remembered her ¨C a miniature Jen ¨C standing beside him as he sized up the slit in the fabric.


    ¡°I¡¯m sorry, Daddy.¡± Her voice had been anguished; far too anguished for a crafting mishap.


    ¡°It¡¯s okay, darling. I know you didn¡¯t mean to. I just don¡¯t want to you to cut yourself too.¡±


    And she had breathed in relief.


    *


    ¡°I am going to search for contacts in archaeology for yeh,¡± Tolliver told him, the following week. ¡°To try to find yeh employment.¡±


    ¡°I would be more of an asset to them if I could actually remember anything, I know,¡± he said.


    ¡°Yes. Because then yeh might be able to tell them exactly where to dig for something, mightn¡¯t you, Perry.¡± She was half-joking, half not.


    ¡°If they wanted to dig up a video store,¡± he said.


    She looked at him with a smile, and her eyebrows up.


    ¡°A place where people used to obtain videos to watch. But anyway, yes, I wish I had more to offer.¡±


    ¡°It must be frustrating, I know. But at any rate, we¡¯ll try to put yeh to work.¡±


    *


    There were, indeed, many opportunities for archaeological work, as O¡¯Toole and now Tolliver had alluded to. Perry had learned from reading articles on his apartment¡¯s wall display panel that, while he had been away, a frozen and nearly-intact Neanderthal woman had been found in Siberia; a Phoenician trading vessel had been excavated just off Bermuda; and a Ming Chinese camp had been found in northwest Oregon.


    Further afield, animal fossils had been found on Mars. The creatures were primitive ¨C one-centimeter trilobites ¨C but there had been life there.


    ¡°But that didn¡¯t really prove enethin about life outside the solar system,¡± Tolliver had told him. ¡°Specks of life could have been blown from Mars to Earth by asteroid strikes. Or vice versa. No one can prove, still, that life arose in both places independently, based on those fossils.¡±


    But a metal disk, with a uniform thickness of about nine inches and a diameter ¨C in a perfect circle ¨C of just over four miles had sailed through the solar system forty years before. It had entered near Neptune, passed by Earth within the orbit of Mars, and exited the orbit of Neptune again over the course of four years.


    ¡°So it was clearly made by aliens,¡± Perry asked Tolliver.


    ¡°Clearly. It wasn¡¯t natural.¡±


    ¡°So there is other intelligence in the universe.¡±


    ¡°There is.¡±


    ¡°But nothing more was learned about it?¡±


    ¡°Nothing. It simply passed through. It was inert. As far as we could tell.¡±


    ¡°And there has been no communication with anyone else? No alien beings anywhere?¡±


    ¡°None. There has been no one out there to converse with. That whole time you were away, no news in that regard I¡¯m afraid.¡±


    *


    Tolliver learned that Auburn University was conducting a dig at the site of a tiny, centuries-old camp further north in the state.


    ¡°Tiny?¡± Perry repeated.


    ¡°Tiny, but it might be from de Soto. And they have room for a laborer.¡±


    ¡°I can¡¯t thank you enough for setting that up for me.¡±


    ¡°I hope it brings it all back to yeh, Perry.¡±


    ¡°We will see.¡± He was outside, in the back yard, holding an empty watering can. He rotated it in his hands.


    ¡°This may not sound very humble,¡± he said, ¡°but I would have guessed that someone ¨C someone like me ¨C who had been asleep for two hundred years, and then woken up, would have garnered more attention. But the extent of my fame is, what, one or two doctors who found my story curious. And not really my actual ¡®story,¡¯ you understand; but just the fact that I have this gap in my memory but still seem sane.¡±


    Tolliver just kept listening.


    ¡°Do you know what I mean? Imagine if you were to go asleep for two hundred years and then wake up still your age. You would think that would be at least as impressive as ¨C building a dome on Mars. At least worth some notice, no? Some attention? You know?¡±


    ¡°The talk of the town,¡± she said.


    ¡°That¡¯s right.¡±


    ¡°Well, yeh don¡¯t know exactly what the future holds for yeh. You¡¯ve seen that depository of articles I sent you?¡±


    ¡°I did, yes. Thank you. I haven¡¯t had time to look into them yet. All of them are old archaeology papers?¡±


    ¡°They are. They seem to go back through the right years. Yeh can check them, and their notes. Maybe you¡¯ll find your name. Then we could find out more about you.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ll search them for a Perry. Until then, I¡¯ll be screening dirt and taking free food.¡± He turned the pitcher in his hands one more time. ¡°Well, it could be worse. It¡¯s better than drowning out in the Gulf would have been.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s the spirit, Perry.¡±

 Nine - The Good, part one of two

    Coming out of the blackness, into light, was pleasant for a moment. Perry felt like he was waking up on a Saturday morning after a long sleep.


    He became aware that he was in a case, and immediately saw that it was opening.


    Then something hit it, hard, and he fell to the ground. The drop surprised him, but he had no time to think about it because he heard screams and also realized he was covered in slime. He rolled out onto the dirt.


    His hands went to his face but then a furred arm slammed into him. He tried to stand up; it hit him again. He rolled away, or tried to, and again attempted to stand. He looked up.


    It was a bear, standing. It flashed teeth, and roared ¨C more like a low squeal ¨C but he realized that wasn¡¯t the screams he¡¯d heard a moment before; those came from behind him.


    The bear lunged at him. He managed to get to his feet and back up. The bear stepped forward and swiped. Its claws would have torn his side away but for hands behind that grabbed him around the waist and pulled him backward.


    He looked down at them. These hands ¨C paws ¨C were also furry.


    ¡°Yaw-yaw!¡± yelled a voice behind him. Another figure hopped forward then, next to him, and thrust a spear at the bear.


    Perry turned toward whoever it was defending him, and saw it was a tall, brown animal that walked on its hind legs. He realized it looked something like a kangaroo, but with cropped ears and smarter eyes.


    It was one of several, but the only one that stepped forward. Behind it was another one wearing a bone breastplate, and carrying a staff.


    A shaman, he thought. This seemed oddly significant, despite his ignorance of where he was or how he had arrived there.


    His eyes blurred as the slime sloughed off his hair.


    The bear thing ¨C it was still upright, Perry saw, so it wasn¡¯t exactly a bear ¨C darted toward the white case. It grasped the top half. Some of the kangaroo-thing warriors surged up to grab the other half.


    Perry supposed he should feel some ownership of the case, because he had evidently spent a lot of time in there until just now, but he was content to let these creatures fight over it themselves.


    The sides tugged the case back and forth. The bear-thing was taller, and apparently stronger, even though at least four of the kangaroo-things had now joined.


    Another kangaroo grabbed Perry¡¯s arm and pulled him back. It spoke to him, but he could hear no words; he realized how loud this fracas was with all the creatures shouting and squealing. And there were more of both of them around, he realized, than just the ones fighting over the case. More bear creatures stood behind the one fighting over the case, but they did not join. He seemed to be their champion, and they cheered for him.


    The kangaroo nodded its head away from the fight, indicating that they should leave. It seemed sensible.


    But then a new group surged up, rushing up to the contested case and knocking it down.


    People. There were dozens of them.


    They looked different than anyone Perry had seen before (although he couldn¡¯t exactly remember how he knew that, or whom he was comparing them to): their skin was tinged slightly blue, and they were largely expressionless. All Perry noticed about their faces is that the ones now picking up the white case were bulging their eyes at the bear and kangaroo creatures.


    One of the people came up and pulled Perry away from the kangaroo, slapping the animal¡¯s hand off his arm. Perry was struck that this person was dressed much the same as the shaman who was now in the tussle by the case: he wore a similar kind of bone-decorated vest.


    With Perry in hand, the people retreated back where they came from. All of this had taken place in a sort of large gully, with high walls. It was night, and Perry could see stars and the moon.


    The moon.


    This answered a question which he hadn¡¯t been aware yet that he was thinking: Was he even on earth? He clearly was; it was the moon, nearly full, with the usual whiter areas and grayer areas.


    The people hustled him off. They seemed to have the numbers to win the white case, if they had wanted it, but they abandoned it to their opponents and trotted away from the gully.


    None spoke. They wore long, flowing clothes, many of them in simple robes. Only the one who struck him like a shaman wore anything remarkable.


    They looked Iron Age, somehow, to Perry. A few carried spears. Many wore sandals which would have looked appropriate on a Roman legionary. There were no lights, no instruments of any kind. No eyeglasses.


    Many of them were bald. All were male, as far as Perry could see.


    They had a certain smell about them, Perry noticed. Like pine sap. It may have been something in their hair. The night air was fragrant with it as he ran along behind the main group.


    The one who had pulled him ran next to him now, his hand still on Perry¡¯s upper arm.


    ¡°Who are you?" Perry asked. "What¡¯s going on?¡±


    He didn¡¯t answer.


    ¡°Anyone? Who are you?¡±


    Despite their effort to rescue him, he was ignored.


    They continued to trot down a dirt road. Now Perry heard some of them talking, but this was only low sounds which he couldn¡¯t make sense of. None of them looked at him as they spoke.The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.


    Soon the group came to a sort of fortress of stone. There were no towers or buildings visible within; just the walls.


    Most of them turned off to the right as they neared it, taking their leave from him without a single one even looking back. But his escort and one other person steered him to the left. He wondered if they were leading him in through a main entrance to be introduced to someone.


    But he was not taken inside at all. The two walked him to a field some distance from the walls, but still in sight of them.


    Then he saw the chain.


    It was heavy, lying on the ground and attached to a pole that looked to be well-anchored. It had a fetter at the end, and before Perry caught on to what was happening, one of his escorts picked it up and slapped it on his ankle while the other pinned his arms down.


    ¡°What are you doing?!¡±


    The two men ignored him, just staring at their work with their heads down. One snapped the fetter shut, and then tested the chain and stake. Then they turned to walk away, back toward the fortress.


    ¡°Who are you? What is this? I¡¯m a prisoner? Outside?¡±


    The men did not look back. They dwindled in the darkness and distance as they made their way toward the fortress.


    The night was warm, for now, but Perry could feel the air moving and worried it might get cold. He was still naked, although he had lost all the gel except some in his hair, and he was now largely dry.


    In addition to the moon, he now realized that the stars looked the same as he remembered, also. He did not know the constellations well, but at least knew the Big Dipper; it was up there, and the North Star was still over it by the usual seven or so lengths of the cup. And Cassiopeia was the usual W. He remembered seeing projections of how these stars would move, over tens of thousands of years, but that had not happened yet, or at any rate they hadn¡¯t moved enough for him to notice.


    For the first time since being dumped out of the case, he had a still moment to try to remember where he had come from.


    He pictured . . . a living room. He¡¯d lived in a house. He¡¯d had some sort of job.


    And a wife. And a daughter. Black-haired, both of them. He had a memory of them in rays of light through the windows in that living room.


    Now, back on this new earth, he heard growls.


    Actually, squeals. Low squeals, like the one he had heard from the bear creature. But these seemed louder; maybe from larger animals.


    He discerned that not far off, surrounding the fortress, there were dark hills. The growls and squeals were coming from them.


    He looked back at the fortress; and now, atop its walls, he noticed figures. They appeared to be on patrol. They were looking toward him. He guessed they might have held bows, or crossbows; and they would have been in range of him. And in range of any growling animal that would come to attack him.


    ¡°I¡¯m bait,¡± he thought. ¡°Not just a prisoner. Bait.¡±


    And it was not long before he heard creatures approaching. The patrol up on the fortress walls was watching him carefully, he assumed to be ready for the bears.


    His visitors, though, turned out to be the kangaroo group again. The shaman wasn¡¯t there, but the one who had pulled him aside back in the gully was.


    Sure enough, the humans on the walls let loose volleys of arrows toward the rescue group. Perry heard them hiss through the air. One clanged off the pole he was chained to. The kangaroos worked fast, and one had a tool that popped open the fetter. Perry realized he hadn¡¯t even tried to open it; he might have been able to do so barehanded. But momentarily he was freed, and they rushed him off. The one who had paired off with him before led him again.


    They ran from the fortress and the hills, back to woods where they lived.


    *


    Over months, which became a year, then two, Perry learned the language and customs of the kangaroo people, whose word for themselves was The Good.


    ¡°Why did you rescue me?¡± he asked, when he was able. ¡°From the case, and then from the people?¡±


    Karante ¨C that was the name of the one who had spoken to him ¨C shrugged. ¡°We thought you were special. A sign, a messenger. A portent. That¡¯s why our shaman was so interested in you. Same for the Orsines; they thought the same.¡±


    ¡°How long had you known I was in that case?¡±


    ¡°As far back as I can remember. Same for our grandmothers.¡±


    ¡°But you don¡¯t think I¡¯m special anymore?¡±


    Karante managed to shrug again without interrupting her scraping of hair off a boar hide. He was doing the same chore with another hide, right next to her.


    ¡°Well, I suppose we are all special, Brother Perry.¡±


    So his stock had clearly plummeted, with them, but he was still welcome.


    The Good lived in simple log cabins which they could disassemble and move if needed. They gathered wild grass grains that grew around lakes and ponds. They kept chickens for poultry and eggs. They also raised fruit, but in what struck Perry as a lackadaisical manner ¨C they kept an eye on apple trees, and other fruit trees, and grape vines, and blackberries, and they gathered from them all, in season, but they didn¡¯t bother very much with thinning, or weeding, and certainly not grafting. Good enough was good enough.


    There were plenty of turkeys around the woods and fields where they lived, and The Good hunted those with bows and arrows. There were many boars, also; The Good used spears for those.


    The boars were regular boars. Bears and kangaroos were sentient, and the bears were bipedal; and the apparent humans had turned blue; but boars were still boars, chickens were chickens, crows were crows, turtles were turtles.


    For months he went back and forth between guessing that he was either in some alternate reality, or else in the far future. The alternate reality explanation just seemed unbelievable, to him ¨C


    I¡¯m surrounded by intelligent, talking kangaroos, but I¡¯m rejecting an explanation because it¡¯s too much of a stretch, he acknowledged to himself ¨C


    But for months he had no way of verifying if this was earth in the future. Perhaps the white case ¨C which had been broken in the tussle between the Orsines and The Good, that night, and now sat in the gully in two pieces which no one any longer seemed interested in ¨C was a suspended animation device. Or perhaps it was just some science fiction-type portal between his old reality and this new one. He didn¡¯t know the answer to that for some time. He had returned to visit it, several times, but he couldn¡¯t glean any information from it other than that it had obviously been made by a far more technologically advanced culture. He remembered his first life fairly well, by this time, but didn¡¯t remember any inventions that would either put him in suspended animation nor send him to another dimension.


    He saw no ruins anywhere, here with The Good in his second life; no stumps of skyscrapers, no weed-overrun roads. No artifacts he would recognize from his own time. Nothing. The kangaroo people lived a pre-industrial existence and made everything they needed from the natural resources around them, not from mining pre-apocalypse ruins.


    *


    He probed the memories and folktales of his hosts to see if he could learn any clues to their origin that way, even if they themselves did not realize where their stories had come from. This did not turn up anything. The Good had two origin stories, which blithely contradicted each other but were still retold. In one, they had always been present on earth, having found themselves aware one day in the far past along with rock spirits, water spirits, and so on. In another, they had been sent from beyond the horizon to live among, and tame, the humans and the Orsines.


    ¡°I¡¯m turning into an archaeologist impersonating a folklore ethnologist,¡± he said to himself.


    ¡°Do your tales talk about why the humans are the way they are?¡± he asked Karante.


    ¡°We have no creation story for them, no.¡±


    ¡°You¡¯ve never seen a human like me?¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m afraid we have not, Brother Perry. Only the blue."


    ¡°Not even ¨C stories of any? Far away?¡±


    She shook her head. ¡°Again I¡¯m sorry, Brother Perry. It must be so hard to be ¨C one of a kind.¡±

 Nine - The Good, part two of two

    Perry didn¡¯t want to let himself believe that he truly was one of a kind. He hadn¡¯t dwelled on this, and did not now.


    ¡°I assume I¡¯m related to these blue humans. But we¡¯re so different.¡±


    ¡°Very different,¡± Karante agreed. ¡°You know, we Good fight with the Orsines, while we seldom do with the humans; but the Orsines, ironically, are more like us. It¡¯s hard to say why the humans are the way they are.¡±


    *


    As if to emphasize their idiosyncratic nature ¨C that was the kindest spin that Perry could put on their behavior ¨C a group of the blue humans approached a group of the The Good, coincidentally very soon after this talk he had had with Karante, and left him what was apparently an odd gift, or invitation.


    He, Karante, and four other adult Good had walked an hour to a small lake around which grew what Perry knew as wild rice from his first life. Several Good children scampered along with them, helping gather the grass seed with varying degrees of usefulness once they had reached the shore of the lake.


    It was one of those children who noticed a knot of the blue humans approaching them from across the largest stretch of the open field that surrounded that side of the lake. She called to Karante, and then Perry and the others stopped to watch the little procession.


    The blue people walked straight toward them. Once they came within a reasonable crossbow shot distance, the one who led the way lifted up both of his hands to display something white.


    ¡°It¡¯s a figure,¡± Karante told Perry. Her eyesight, like that of all the Good, was better than his.


    She waited, and then added:


    ¡°It looks like a figure of a human. But no blue shading to it.¡±


    As the human group came nearer, still sticking together, the Good began calling in their children, and shouldering their half-full grass seed bags. They prepared to flee.


    But the humans suddenly stopped. The lead one lifted the figure even higher in the air, and then apparently set it down in the grass. The group then bowed, all together, and turned and walked off. They disappeared into the woods.


    ¡°What on earth was that,¡± Perry said.


    ¡°They were intentionally peaceful,¡± Karante said. ¡°They didn¡¯t want to alarm us. Had they wanted to ambush us, they could have left those woods much closer to us, on either side of that field. Over there, or over there.¡±


    After waiting some time after the humans had filtered back into the woods, Perry eventually said:


    ¡°Well, I want to go see what they left. If they left it there. It looks like they did. You all can stay here.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ll go with you,¡± Karante said, and two other of the adults went along too.


    The offering, if that¡¯s what it was, turned out to be a human figure, carved out of wood and then painted white. It was about a foot and a half high. It had black hair. It had no clothing.


    ¡°It must be intended to be me,¡± Perry said.


    ¡°Must be,¡± Karante agreed.


    ¡°This is good quality coloring,¡± he added, rubbing the paint. ¡°I wonder how they make it.¡±


    ¡°Some sort of chalk wash,¡± Karante guessed.


    ¡°Why would they do this?¡± Perry asked. ¡°I find this very, very odd. If they are trying to ¨C reach out to me, this is a strange way to do it. Although I suppose I don¡¯t know how they would try, if they wanted to. After they left me out as bait for the Orsines, I¡¯m not inclined to trust them. This ¨C ¡± he turned the doll around ¨C ¡°I mean, back in my day, this could have been interpreted as a sign of ¨C witchcraft. Dark arts. Not a friendly message.¡±


    ¡°It could mean that today, too,¡± Karante answered.


    Perry and the group gathered some more wild rice and then returned home. He left the white wood figure where he had found it.


    *


    Perry went for walks away from the kangaroo settlement, longer and longer ones as they explained to him how to avoid the bears and the humans. After a time he began to take along a hide tent and spend nights out away from the town. He covered miles, and looked around river junctions and other spots that seemed likely to him to have been population centers in his world, but he saw no ruins for months.


    Until, on one walk, of several days¡¯ duration, he came out of woods to an expanse of rubble. It was flat, and weathered, but clearly not natural stone; it was fallen concrete. Blocks of it, piled waist-high in places.


    He stopped at one of these piles and pulled away the blocks. Some of them were stained with rust where iron must have deteriorated.


    He pushed them away. He felt he had a professional obligation to note down each one¡¯s original position, but pressed ahead.


    In a wreck of an Eighteenth Century sailing ship which he had helped dig up from a beach in North Carolina, it had been coins and shards of pottery that helped his colleagues determine its age. But now he did not imagine that he would find any convenient nickels from 2030, nor desk calendars, nor discarded office papers, et cetera, in this pile to help him out.


    But it had been at least an organized stack of concrete at one time. Perhaps in his first life. And he found a few others, in months to come. Plus a very battered plastic handle to . . . something, once. But nothing that told him about the demise of his people.


    Eventually he stopped looking for more ruins. But the very weathered chunks of concrete convinced him that he was indeed in the future, not any alternate universe. The white case must have held him in a sort of coma for some centuries. This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.


    *


    Alone outside his cabin, by a fire, upon his return from that walkabout, he talked to himself.


    He had constructed a single cabin for himself, smaller than everyone else¡¯s, all of which held families. He¡¯d built it near Karante¡¯s. Karante and her partner, Durol, had three children, the smallest of which, a female, had still been spending time in her pouch off and on when Perry had arrived the previous year. Now she hopped around all day and would come visit Perry to have him watch her jump very high.


    Past Karante¡¯s family¡¯s cabin lived an older couple with a sprawling main cabin and several lean-tos which held an extended family. Karante¡¯s cabin had a lean-to, also, which housed just one male cousin of hers, whom Perry took to be a family ne¡¯er-do-well; he didn¡¯t have the eye contact or industriousness of the other Good Perry observed, and would apparently spend entire days either asleep in the shelter or wandering in the woods. His name was Rarakan.


    Now Perry sat outside his own house by the fire and spoke aloud. These occasional talks he had with himself were in lieu of writing a journal. The Good were not literate. He had thought about teaching them all to write their language, but making papyrus or vellum would have been difficult and was just not something he had gotten around to.


    Ink would have been easy enough; there were black walnut trees around with their dark ink in their husks. But the papyrus, or prepared skins . . . and there just didn¡¯t seem to be much occasion to write, anyway. This surprised Perry, after spending so much time writing in his first life. But he realized that population size was related to the usefulness of literacy, and the population of The Good was small. There were some other groups of them around, other tribes, and his settlement did some trading with them, but there didn¡¯t seem to be much need to send messages to them. What else would he show them how to write down? Their folktales? Those were oral. Their history? Also oral. Land records, trade agreements, contracts? They didn¡¯t have nor need any of those.


    He had drawn in the dirt in front of his cabin, one day:


    ¡°Marooned in the future. My story. Chapter One.¡±


    ¡°What are you drawing?¡± Rarakan had asked. Perry had jolted; he hadn¡¯t been aware that his neighbor had been looming behind him, watching.


    ¡°Just some symbols of ours. From my time. I''ll show you what they mean someday, if you like.¡±


    The young male hadn¡¯t responded.


    ¡°I could still do it,¡± he said now. ¡°The boar hides would be easier than figuring out how to weave papyrus.¡±


    But for now in front of his fire, he just spoke, to himself, what he would have written down in a journal.


    Karante and her family were used to him doing this, and he got the impression they didn¡¯t mind hearing the incomprehensible murmur of his English if they were outside themselves.


    ¡°I believe this must be a future earth,¡± he said, ¡°and not some other dimension or reality, because of the ruins I found.


    ¡°Also, The Good and the Orsines seem to have been manipulated genetically by humans; by my people. They are not races that arose independently in some other reality. Because all the changes they exhibit, compared to the kangaroos and bears I knew, are human traits. The kangaroos have more human-like eyes, and ears. The bears walk upright. These are deviations toward a human norm. Humans must have caused them.


    ¡°And the blue people must have descended from people as I knew them. I just can¡¯t believe that a race so like me would have evolved independently. Despite their differences, I think they are clearly just changed humans.


    ¡°So. What happened to humans.


    ¡°Maybe we created the Orsines, who then killed us off? (The Good don¡¯t seem like a genocidal people, so I doubt it was them.) Or they killed off all of us who weren¡¯t blue, at least? Or maybe it was coincidence that after we engineered the Orsines and The Good, some sort of virus wiped us out? Except those of us who were blue? Maybe the blue humans were some sort of hybrid made to be immune?¡±


    *


    Eventually his second winter of his second life was coming to its end. The climate was not particularly cold ¨C he guessed that he was living somewhere well to the south of Virginia ¨C but the nights had been chill enough that he had been glad to sleep in his cabin rather than out of doors in a tent. But now any threat of snow seemed over, and the nights were milder.


    ¡°Karante, I need to leave you. To travel.¡±


    This time they spoke as they built a fire outside their cabins.


    ¡°I thought you were done looking for ruins.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s not ruins,¡± Perry said. ¡°I know you¡¯ve said you¡¯ve never seen any other humans like me ¨C but I need to look around more. I¡¯m still curious.¡±


    Also, he thought, you said you had never seen ruins before, either, but you didn¡¯t know about the fields of rubble I found.


    Karante nodded.


    ¡°If you want to be sure, you must look, I know,¡± she said. ¡°And also, of course we didn¡¯t know about those fields of rubble you found, either. So obviously there is more out there than what we Good have seen. Or have noticed, at least.¡±


    ¡°I ¨C suppose,¡± he said. ¡°Well, I want to travel for some time. I think as far as the ocean. And up or down its coast for some time.¡±


    Karante nodded.


    ¡°That will be a long time. A season, or two.¡±


    ¡°I know.¡±


    ¡°You have to come back.¡±


    ¡°I will.¡±


    ¡°When will you leave?¡±


    ¡°Soon, I think. I¡¯ve been gathering things over the winter. A bag. I have that new bow.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ve seen.¡±


    ¡°And that good spear. And I¡¯ve dried a lot of grain, and some fruit. I made spare boots.¡±


    ¡°You¡¯ve been busy in your cabin.¡±


    ¡°All winter.¡±


    ¡°Do you think you want to just go alone?¡±


    ¡°Well, I assume so. I don¡¯t think any of you really want to look for different humans. I wouldn¡¯t ask any of you to.¡±


    ¡°Someone might want to see the ocean, though. No one here alive has been.¡±


    ¡°You think so? Who would want to do that?¡±


    ¡°Rarakan. He¡¯s always interested in what you¡¯re doing.¡±


    ¡°Really?¡±


    Karante nodded.


    ¡°He¡¯s young,¡± Perry said.


    ¡°Not too young,¡± she said. ¡°And this would be a memory to hold for a lifetime. He could then be the elder who walked as far as he could.¡±


    ¡°Well. It would be good to have a companion. You think he can ¨C take care of himself?¡±


    ¡°We certainly don¡¯t take care of him. You know he disappears for days at a time, so he can fend for himself. If you can wait a day or two, I¡¯m sure he¡¯ll go. We can help him gather supplies.¡±


    ¡°I can wait.¡±


    ¡°I feel it will be a worthwhile journey, Perry. And we knew you wouldn¡¯t just stay around here for the rest of your life. You need to see more.¡±


    ¡°I do.¡±

 Ten - Drift (after part two of The Video Message)

    The Video Message - part two


    After they had recorded the video, and had spoken again with Dr. Saars-Tomlin, and returned home; and after she had dropped Araceli off at her soccer practice ¨C where the other girls, and the coaches, still grew solemn when they saw her, even now, months later; she hoped that would end, eventually, and not continue throughout her childhood ¨C Jennifer sat down at their dining room table, before the picture window that looked onto the backyard.


    She thought about adding a coda, with just her, not Araceli, to the recorded message:


    ¡°Perry, my love. My love. Among everything else going on ¨C losing you, helping Araceli, parenting by myself . . . I wonder. I wonder if we were cruel to put you in that thing. If I was cruel. Everyone else ¨C Bill and Connie; the doctor ¨C the doctors, all of them; and Ara, of course ¨C think it was the right thing. That you may come back. But.¡±


    She stared out the window into the back yard. She was speaking aloud.


    ¡°But what if this was cruel. It was me, all up to me. I could have said no. And you may be in that thing for . . . who knows. Who knows how long. If what Saars-Tomlin says is true, who knows when someone might pull you out of it. If they ever do. Or if you ever do manage to heal in there on your own. Maybe I was wrong. Should I just have let you go. Should I just have let you go.¡±


    She wrung her hands together; pulled them apart; made fists.


    ¡°And what if you are dreaming in there. What if you need to pull out of a nightmare, and you can¡¯t. Oh my god. I hope, I so hope you are gone until you¡¯re back.¡±


    This story to be continued


    Drift


    Araceli was before me in a mist, a blurred vision, perhaps close enough to touch; and then gone, again. I had reached out toward her during that moment, like waving my hand into fog, hoping to touch her, but once again there had been nothing. I could not tell if she had been too far away, or if her form had been only an illusion. It struck me how pathetic my hope was: I hoped not that we meet, nor that we might speak; not even that she was seeing me¡ªit seemed she was meeting my eyes with hers, but I could not be sure¡ªbut rather that she was really there. I dreamed and hoped she was present in that haze, lost in that dimension, and not just a vision or an echo. My daughter lost in a fissure between realities seemed the best I could wish for.


    She looked like she had the last time I had been together with her. Or was it the last time? Ten years old, her hair in a bandanna, thin tan legs below white shorts. She was not appearing as a five-year-old all in pink, nor a toddler keeping one hand out in case she needed to reach me; in other words, she was not appearing as I sometimes remembered her. She was not the four-year-old in the sun-soaked memory on our sidewalk on the summer day when we had put out a wide roll of paper, and puddles of paint, and let her make a Pollock with her bare feet. Nor was she the six-year-old in pink¡ªyes, there had been many pink shirts and dresses in her early childhood¡ªtaking off from me on her first bike ride, in her huge helmet, wobbling away while she left my reach. These were memories always in my mind; but I saw her now at ten years old. This had been her age when we had such a thing as time, such a thing as months. This gave me hope. I thought it made it more likely that my visions of her were real, not dreams or addled hallucinations.


    I stepped back into the room. A hardwood floor, this time, with high ceilings and tall windows covered by thick green drapes. I did not bother pulling the drapes to look out. I knew it would be only the milky white nothing, like clouds seen through the window of an airplane.


    I sat down on the floor. In this space there was no furniture; no chairs or anything else. I lay down, and at some point slept.It was difficult to tell the difference between sleep and the mindless waiting.


    And then I drifted, again. I felt off balance, and then surrounded by fog. And then, though seeing nothing, I heard her voice:


    ¡°Daddy.¡±


    This was the first thing I had heard from her since the fall. It was from far off, with a bare echo. It was nearly tangible, for me. Her lovely voice, musical and clear.


    There had been virtually no baby talk for Ara; once she had started speaking, it had been in a bell-clear voice with something to say.


    And then I tumbled back into light, and then onward into the dark room. But it was a darkness that was a real darkness, and not just a void. This was reassuring. Again, it was striking now what simple things gave me hope. Darkness was clearly better than void.


    I thought of her voice; I held it. It filled my ears, still. I did not need to eat, any longer, in these places; and I had no occasion to talk; but I could still hear. I could hear Ara. Her voice stayed with me.


    *


    What had I been doing when the world ran out? Ran out; that¡¯s what it seemed to me had happened. The grains of sand of reality falling through the hourglass of our universe had run out. That seemed to explain this disaster. Had it happened just to me and Araceli, or to everyone? Whatever the answer, it seemed there was a pause in the universe, or in our piece of it.


    And maddeningly, I could not remember the moment when I had begun to drift. Perhaps I was worried on a train, or speaking on a cradled phone while reading an email on a screen. Maybe it was my lack of attention to any particular action that had made all of them fade out. It was because of this gap in my memory that I suspected the pause was my fault. Since the only human I ever saw now was my daughter, the one I was bound to care for; and because I had failed her like no other human had ever failed a daughter before, I blamed myself. It must have been my lack of attention. I must have missed something.


    What had I ignored? The fact that I could not remember my final actions was damning. My lapse had pushed my daughter off an edge, and perhaps the rest of the world with her.


    I had tried to put this out of my mind, this searching for a final memory of the old world. But this was difficult with so much monotony, now, and nothing to do.


    There was more clarity in my mind about my wife. Whenever this disaster had happened, Jen had been away. I remembered that much. We had parted as always; I think it had been in a morning. She had likely been in her office, or traveling that day, when everything stopped.


    She might be alone, now, drifting through her own cracks in reality. Or perhaps she was along with us, right behind us¡ªor before us¡ªin the fog. But I saw only Ara. Once a week, perhaps once a day¡ªonly when these shifts occurred, but not at each of them¡ªI would see her as a faded presence. She would seem to fall toward me through the air, but never close enough; and then she would be gone.


    Araceli. I remembered holding her for hours when she was a baby, smelling her hair. I remembered her falling asleep in my arms, her fine arching eyebrows turned toward my shirt. I remembered carrying her in a backpack as I walked errands, talking to her over my shoulder. I had spent so much time with her, and worked so hard to check all the right boxes; providing what she needed and holding back what she didn¡¯t. But it had not been enough.


    The dark room was the quietest. All the others had some sort of ambient sound, white noise. But in this one I could hear my heart beat, and the stretching of my lungs. I wondered that my heart still needed to beat, and my lungs breathe, now that time was over. But they did.


    If my heart beat, and my lungs breathed, then there had to be some energy to make them do so. But there was no hunger, in this place. No food, and no need for it. Perhaps causes and effects had vanished, along with time, and rational space, and so the heart and lungs were free to work at no cost, forever.


    I sat and thought. Eventually I closed my eyes. I dreamed of ice cream with Ara and Jen, the three of us at a white table, long before the drift. Jen had been laughing, and Ara raising herself up on her knees to better dive into her bowl with her spoon. Jen was present only in these dreams, now; I had no glimpses of her. This narrative has been purloined without the author''s approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    *


    After one particular shift back into the room with hardwood floors, a fall in which I had not seen anything of Ara, I heard something. It came from what might be called the rear of the room.


    What was at the rear of the rooms? Nothing. Their walls extended back a few feet and disappeared into a blur. Or not even a blur; they were just not there anymore. If I tried to walk out the back of the room, I was stopped by a resistance without pressure. It was not quicksand, not a web, but I could not move. Perhaps it was only gravity¡ªa wall in which gravity pooled and stopped me from exiting.


    But this room had something in back, something beyond the disappearance. I heard sounds, something like far-away voices. They may have spoken a different language. It may even have been the lowing of animals. It was maddeningly faint, but there.


    When I slept in that room I was heartened by these barely perceptible sounds. Perhaps I was stranded inside a prison, but there was an outside. At least in this room, at this moment. And if this was a moment, there would be other moments.


    I despaired about what Ara was thinking about me. I could only assume that she was seeing glimpses of me, just as I was of her, and probably wondering if she herself had done something wrong. It felt likely to me that she was blaming herself for failing to learn something; failing to pay attention to an alarm bell or an error message that had led to this. I had to assume she was walking in her own spare rooms, building anxious pressure in her head as she tried to remember what the adults had told her about this lapse, this slip.


    I was pulled backward, out of the room, as if I were immersed in a dry undertow. I felt my arms rise up from my body as I fell.


    Then Ara was before me. She was achingly, infuriatingly close. She had to be in reach. I put out my hand, trying to touch her, but it was as if I was lowering a stick into water, tricked by refraction. There was nothing. She was in white, right before me, her brown eyes seeking mine, but I could do nothing.


    Again she spoke:


    ¡°Daddy. I left you¡±


    -were the words. My heart surged, and then sank: so this was a dream, and she was simply telling me what my brain knew: She was gone. She had left me.


    I fell backward, and kept falling.


    But I was wrong about her sentence. I fell back into a bright room, a room with a long table. It was not quite a normal table, for it grew out of the wall; but it had legs, and it was the right height, and had a chair before it, so it was good enough.


    And on it was a paper. It was a note from Ara. ¡°I left you a letter;¡± that¡¯s what she had been saying.


    Her writing was print, of course, not cursive. I wondered if she felt self-conscious about her printing. I had always given her a hard time about it, joking but serious too. Schools barely taught cursive writing anymore, only a few months of it in the third grade. That had been the previous year, for her, and she had soon reverted to printing. I would shake my head at the sticks and curves of her wind-blown writing. I would show her the letters we received from her grandmother, all composed in beautiful cursive. I had teased her¡ªI now hope she took it only as teasing¡ªthat her printing looked like a patch of dandelions and candy canes.


    It was that printing I read now:


    Daddy,


    I found a pencil. I will try to leave it for you. There were many other things, too, when I was here, in the back of this room.


    I can see you, but I can¡¯t hear you. I don¡¯t know what happened. I haven¡¯t seen Mommy. Or anyone else.


    I think we are going in and out of the same rooms, in turns. I saw your footprints in dust in one room.


    Tell me if you know how to make this stop. I don¡¯t know what to do.


    I love you


    Araceli


    Again my heart surged, but with hope, this time¡ªreal hope. I stood and looked behind me, still holding the letter (which I would never let go). This room was long, as long as a hallway, and far down it there were more furnishings, more objects. I could move toward it, this time, and I did.


    It was a classroom. Not precisely one I had ever seen, neither mine nor one of hers; but a classroom, with desks, books, and papers. Pencils and a smartboard and a teacher¡¯s desk.


    The books in this room had no printing, no titles, and the desks were misshapen and stuck to the floor, but I found paper and pencils. I wrote back to her, and left the letter on that same table.


    Araceli,


    I am glad you checked this room and discovered this.


    You are very brave. I don¡¯t understand what has happened, either.


    I told her that this seemed to be getting better. This seemed ridiculous, based as it was on just this half-formed room and a few sounds I had heard, but I could not get away from my perceived paternal duty to be hopeful and to try to show that there was some sort of order in the world.


    I told her I would keep reaching for her.


    The next shift happened while I was writing. I was pulled out of the chair, or the chair was pulled away from me, and I saw the pencil fall onto the letter.


    She appeared before me again. This time I saw her in profile as I was blown away. She was a blur, and despite her calm letter to me she looked frightened.


    What had gone wrong? It was most likely, I thought, that nothing had gone wrong, that this was just the nature of our universe. We had now learned that the laws of time and space¡ªand gravity¡ªin our universe could change instantly. It had been presumptuous of us to think otherwise. I have read that physicists have been reaching a consensus that there are likely an infinite number of universes. Why should we be living in one that does not change? Who could point to any guarantee that this unlikely tower of balanced stones that allows rational life would never topple over?


    Perhaps our collective consciousness had had something to do with the stability. Perhaps the energy of our minds was a glue that kept reality bound by natural laws, and when too many of us removed ourselves, the universe became unmoored just like a ship slipping away from its anchor. But this was foolish anthropocentrism; the planet had evidently been governed by a consistent physics for billions of years before our arrival. No, I believed that this particular universe had simply ended its run of predictability. The sand had run out. But perhaps it would trickle back. Or perhaps the hourglass would flip and start again.


    The next shift was to the dark room, with no sign of Ara and nothing from her waiting for me there. I looked for dust on the floor of the room, anything she might have disturbed, but there was nothing. She was teaching me, with this. It had not occurred to me to look for a sign of her in these rooms the way she must have done for me.


    *


    I do not know if I was asleep or awake when I relived a moment I had had with Jen. We had just met, and we were sitting next to each other in the back of a friend¡¯s car. There were three of us, back there, across that seat, with the windows down, and as the wind blew in, it threw some of her hair into my face.


    ¡°Sorry,¡± she said, with a smile. She pulled back her hair. We were young, and close, and her hair was brushing me on a balmy, sun-washed day. She did not have to apologize.


    *


    I awoke back in the classroom. It was more developed, this time. The main table was free from the wall, and some of the books in the rear were real. There was a dictionary, and a stack of French textbooks.


    I thought of the new vocabulary I was inventing, as the days¡ªor lack of days¡ªslid past: Rooms were developed, or not. Shifts took me from place to place. During those shifts, I would drift. I hoped that at some time I would be able to speak to Ara, to Jen, to others, and settle on terms.


    In the rear of the classroom, one desk stood apart from the others. On it was another letter, and a book.


    Daddy,


    I saw you from a distance, the last time we moved. I saw you move away like you were in water.


    I still have not seen anyone else.


    I hope you are not hungry. I have never seen any food. I have not been hungry.


    I hope this ends soon.


    I got your letter. I wish I knew what was happening.


    Love


    Araceli


    The book on the desk, beneath the letter, was a bird guide; a Peterson guide. Ara knew that I had a copy of this book, or had had a copy, always in reach on a windowsill by the dining room table. Now she had found it here and left it for me.


    I opened the book to a page of accidental seabirds; birds out of their range. Ara was familiar with these. Perhaps we were now accidental, ourselves. It was the best I could find to hope for. I turned the book upside down, open to that page, and left it there for her.


    *


    At the next shift I saw her for a minute, or more, and we came very close. It seemed to last an hour. It was a miracle, for me. I was with Ara, or almost with her.


    We faced each other in air that was not clear but not the cloud-like fog, either; it was just nothing. But we were close.


    Ara smiled. She mouthed ¡°Daddy,¡± and I could not hear her, but she was within reach.


    And then we touched hands. Fingertips to fingertips, we touched. Her hand was warm. I could not reach out far enough to grasp her, but we had touched, and we were getting closer every time. I hoped, I believed, now, that the sand was filling back into the hourglass.

 Eleven - The Airship; or, The Healed Column

    It was ¨C is ¨C just impossibly beautiful. The smiling sky. The treetops, the countryside. The people. Everything, all of it.


    They put me on an airship before I had even risen out of bed. They just moved the whole thing ¨C a hospital bed, its back raised ¨C onto the ship and ascended.


    ¡°I¡¯m not Frida Kahlo,¡± I said.


    ¡°We don¡¯t know what you mean, Perry.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s a joke. I can tell you about her later.¡±


    The craft was something like a Viking longship, but gold, and with no sail. It had been docked, if that¡¯s the word, at a deck that wrapped around the hospital. They loosed its line and the craft lifted. We rose into the air and the breeze washed over us. Over the top of the building, and then as high as the trees, and then higher yet.


    All of them with me had long hair that blew around. And they all smiled. These were staff from the hospital, all of whom had the time, apparently, to come out on a ride with me.


    We glided over the landscape, ranges of forest interrupted by clearings. Some of the clearings were cut through by streams.


    ¡°Why have you brought me out here? Up here?¡±


    ¡°We thought you would like it,¡± a woman near me said. She was the one who had spoken to me, primarily, since I had awoken. Her voice was so warm; almost better than this sky ride all by itself. She was tall, with wide shoulders. She had gray eyes that I found entrancing. She was stunning. But all of them were.


    ¡°You have been through so much, Perry. Perry Doran,¡± she repeated, apparently wanting to make sure I knew my name if I¡¯d missed it earlier.


    ¡°I remember that,¡± I said. ¡°What you told me. A thousand years.¡± This last bit was really to myself more than them.


    ¡°And your name?¡± I asked her. ¡°Forgive me, I¡¯ve forgotten if you told me.¡±


    ¡°Of course. There is so much coming at you, we know. My name is Tara.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s a name from my time. After all these years.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s a very, very old one,¡± she said.


    We glided just above the treetops. The air alone was unforgettable: cool, dry, crisp, seeming somehow to hold the sunshine.


    The quality of the light in the place ¨C up in the sky, but on earth too ¨C was something I had never seen before. The sunshine just seemed to come at me from every angle. The closest thing it reminded me of that I could remember was the air in Guatemala, when I had been at a higher altitude; but this was fresher, somehow.


    ¡°Talk to us more,¡± Tara said. ¡°You¡¯ve been alone for so long.¡±


    ¡°You are all so gorgeous,¡± I blurted.


    It was true. I couldn¡¯t help saying it. Every single person I had seen so far, man or woman, was as handsome as Tara. Perfect rich dark skin on all of them. Their eyes were all colors ¨C brown, blue, brilliant green.


    They just smiled at this, and looked back out over the landscape. They may have been on such trips a thousand times, but they still leaned up against the railings, taking it all in one more time.


    The ship rousted a cloud of birds. They burst out of a stretch of trees beneath us and then flew up and around. They were brilliant blue, green, and white. There were thousands of them, or tens of thousands. They cried as they drifted around us.


    ¡°What species is that?¡±


    ¡°Sky swallows. You would not know them, Perry. Well, now you do.¡±


    They had even improved birds.


    ¡°Are you enjoying the ride?¡±


    ¡°Very much.¡±


    ¡°Shall we go a bit faster? And we could climb.¡±


    I nodded. The ship rose, and banked. The stream or river I had seen running through clearings became a ribbon that twisted off toward the horizon. The patches of forest from this height were a calm, dark green. I saw buildings, evidently houses. They were of one and two stories, clean white among the green fields, with rolling red roofs.


    I felt intermittent rushes of the air grow colder, but I was still warm there in the bed although I had only a sheet over me.


    ¡°Are you heating this ship, somehow? Outdoor heat?¡±


    ¡°We are. It would be chilly at this altitude.¡±


    ¡°How is it that you¡¯re speaking my English? If it¡¯s been a thousand years? It would have changed.¡±


    ¡°We learned. As soon as you came out of the case and spoke, we learned your language.¡±


    ¡°You don¡¯t even have accents. I mean what I would call a foreign accent.¡±


    ¡°You spoke enough words for us to know what to learn,¡± Tara said.


    A man next to her had been listening, and now spoke.


    ¡°You know, Perry, we do not speak of accents any longer.¡±


    He looked a little older than Tara, but just as strong. His hair was the same length as hers. It blew around in the high altitude breeze.


    ¡°No accents? You all speak alike?¡±Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.


    He shook his head. ¡°No, I mean it went the other direction. We consider each person¡¯s language unique. To speak of a group¡¯s accent is to ignore each individual¡¯s peculiarities. And to speak with anyone is to learn that person¡¯s language.¡±


    The ship now banked slightly again. We started to head back toward the hospital, but in no rush. We cut a lazy, zephyrous arc through the sky.


    *


    We have a strange visitor? Well, why don¡¯t twenty of us move his bed onto the gold hovership and take him on a sky ride for an hour or two. It was how they lived life, now.


    *


    I was given an apartment with a wide terraced balcony, and a lovely view; but every dwelling had lovely views. The largest buildings were only five or six stories high, always built in a broad pyramid style, stepped to allow for open areas outside each apartment. The landscapes below were wide fields and green woods stretching back, in my case, to low hills far off.


    I learned that agriculture was largely automated, with exceptions of farms run by people who wanted to work the land. The automated farms used giant machines to plant and harvest, while the small farmers tended toward hoes and shovels. Much of the world functioned this way: either with very high tech or virtually no tech at all. Most buildings were constructed by machines ¨C not much different from 3D printing I knew in my first life ¨C but some people baked their own bricks, cut their own roof shakes, and so on. It was all or nothing. Parks were the same way, in a sense; either manicured lawns and trees that looked like old European gardens, or else enormous ranges of wild.


    Tara came to see me in my apartment. We walked out onto the terrace.


    ¡°Do you like your home, Perry?¡±


    ¡°Of course. Thanks for arranging it for me.¡±


    ¡°Other staff did that.¡±


    ¡°I suppose if I didn¡¯t like it, you¡¯d give me a different one?¡±


    ¡°Of course.¡±


    I talked to myself in a mumble, then:


    ¡°It¡¯s like a paradise. It¡¯s paradise.¡±


    ¡°What did you say, Perry?¡±


    ¡°This place. Your time. It¡¯s like a paradise. It is one. If it¡¯s not, it¡¯s close enough that no one from my time would have worried about any differences. Do you have any dark secrets? Anything horrible you need to tell me?¡±


    ¡°You¡¯re joking with me, Perry.¡±


    I nodded.


    ¡°But in the stories about the future, in my time, whenever a society was too perfect, there turned out to be something horribly wrong. Maybe people died young. Or there were white cave monsters that attacked ¨C ¡±


    ¡°Morlocks,¡± she said.


    ¡°Yes! That book is still known?¡±


    She nodded. I continued:


    ¡°But I don¡¯t see that there¡¯s anything like that going on now. You just have a ¨C paradise, I suppose.¡±


    She shrugged.


    ¡°Well, Perry, why shouldn¡¯t we live this way. We finally decided to do so. You know ¨C you could have lived just as well, in your own time. Your people.¡±


    ¡°Not as long as you,¡± I said. Life spans had increased to three hundred years or more, was one thing I had learned. It had to do with cell manipulation.


    ¡°No, but that would have come.¡±


    ¡°And we didn¡¯t have flying ships like yours.¡±


    ¡°I know. But apart from the technology. You had the means to welcome every guest. Our ancestors ¨C you¡¯re one of them ¨C hoarded that power for so long. But after your time, slowly, people finally decided to ¨C ¡± she shrugged ¨C ¡°live as they deserved. As they were able to. Becoming ¨C ¡± she stopped again, to search for a word ¨C ¡°magnanimous was a decision. It was just a decision to make. Humans could have done so far earlier than they did. We had the means ¨C I mean our race had the means ¨C for so long.¡±


    *


    Jen would have loved it here. That was all I could think about, sometimes when I was alone. Araceli too, of course; but Jen would have appreciated everything more, having seen more. Ara might have taken it for granted that people would look out for one another, and care for the land, but Jen would have been amazed at the differences.


    I kept finding myself wanting to show them things. The sky swallows, the mile-long landscaped public lawns, the fish pond in the lobby of my apartment building. And the gold hoverships, of course. Five times, ten times a day I wished they could be there to see what I was seeing. I couldn¡¯t dwell on it, though. It was too much. What had happened to them was not fair, but I had to move on.


    *


    I continued to be struck by the glow and vigor of the people I met; but eventually everyone, here in the Thirty-First Century, chose to give up life and die. Their cell rejuvenation treatments just didn¡¯t work after a few centuries; and when people stopped them for good, they would very quickly wither and die. And so that¡¯s what they did. A person, say after three hundred and fifty years on earth, would know that that his cells were just too far gone to reboot; and rather than become enfeebled and fade away over years, he would just make the decision to stop healthcare, and would be gone in a matter of weeks or a month. It surprised me that some people didn¡¯t press this, and try to live as long as they possibly could; but they apparently did not, and my hosts seemed confused at the very thought of doing so when I asked about it. Society was clearly different, now. People were different. One explanation for this, I think, was that people who had become so accustomed to living in perfect health for decades and centuries felt sickness and weakness very keenly when it eventually came. No one wanted to live like that; it wasn¡¯t what life was.


    I had wondered, in my first life, as an archaeologist, if prehistoric modern humans were completely unlike us. Because nasty, brutish, and short does not come close to really getting across the casual trauma and violence of their lives.


    They chopped off the tips of their fingers; we knew ¨C we know ¨C that this occurred across many cultures. Why? Well, no one could be certain. But I don¡¯t know which was worse: the idea that they were losing their fingertips to their enemies when they were tortured, or that they were choosing to cut them off themselves due to group identification behavior or religious rituals. But one way or another, they were cutting off their fingertips.


    And they beat the hell out of each other. It may have been ritualistic skull fracturing, or maybe just good old fights. In the Pacific Northwest, in prehistory for a stretch of at least hundreds of years, a majority of skulls we recovered showed healed fracture lines. A majority. Most people were apparently getting their heads cracked at some point in their lives.


    And they sacrificed humans; maybe enemies, maybe their friends. Certainly their own children. We found them in mass hillside graves in South America, beneath pyramids in Central America, in bogs in Europe. Stabbed, beaten, strangled, hanged. And in graves, too: apparent servants, spouses, children. In Africa, Asia, Europe, everywhere. Murdered to be accomplices on the trip.


    So, had those people from thousands of years before my first life been fundamentally different? Could they really be called modern humans? Yes, we ourselves certainly had our wars in which we killed more humans than had been alive in the entire world at times of our prehistory; and we still inflicted pain on ourselves through tattoos and a hundred different ways; but we were no longer chopping our fingertips off.


    Were these behaviors just varying manifestations of common modern human behavior across time, geography, and culture? Were our ancestors¡¯ painful fingertip removals just their version of our painful tattoos? Were their ubiquitous skull fractures just their version of our ice hockey fights? Were the base behaviors the same? Or had we truly changed? Had something permanently changed in our brains when we decided to start dedicating our buildings and temples by carving cornerstones for them, rather than murdering our own children and burying them in the foundations?


    I had never known. But now, a thousand years after my first life ¨C people seemed to have changed. Sure, some men and women throughout history, before my time, had volunteered to be sacrificed, whether in a ritual or to save a group; but the vast majority wanted to live as long as possible. One need look no further than me, for proof of that. I couldn¡¯t remember what landed me in the white case, but obviously my culture was one that assumed I would not want to die, even if I was very nearly ¨C apparently ¨C done with my life. But my new neighbors were different. When their time was up, it was up. Humanity, as far as I could see, had experienced a core change.


    What will I choose to do, when my time comes? I have three hundred years to think about it.

 Twelve - Trenton Thurning; part one of two

    My first memory was just a feeling; a feeling of being ready to get going. Ready to get up.


    It felt like ¨C this was nuts ¨C it felt like I was in an oven, a warm oven, and a timer had gone off, and I¡¯d had to push open the door myself.


    Wherever I was, I was ready. I was something that was ready to exit.


    The hatch of the casket thing I was in must have opened automatically. I had risen and realized I was covered in some sort of gel. I pressed it off my body while still standing in the bottom half, as if I were getting out of a shower.


    I had a sort of haze of a memory of having been in the case for a long time, possibly a very very long time, but I felt ¨C good. I wasn¡¯t sore. I could stand easily, and I was steady. This was another odd sensation, just like the feeling of having been shut in an oven was. Mentally I felt like I had been unconscious for perhaps years, but physically I felt as if I had just lay down twenty minutes earlier.


    I was outdoors, underneath a bridge, next to a stream. This was not some pleasant rural covered bridge over a quiet creek; everything was large, and dirty. The stream was wide and brown. The bridge was very large, made of weathered concrete and steel. The bank of the stream ran up at an easy incline, and under the ends of the bridge there were shadows that may have concealed who knows what. My casket had evidently been thrown up from the water somehow onto this stretch of gravel and dirt.


    The bridge was quiet. It didn¡¯t seem to host much traffic, not right now anyway.


    ¡°Welcome to Trenton Thurning,¡± a voice said.


    It startled me, literally. I jolted, and nearly lost my balance.


    A man had been squatting next to a pillar of the bridge. He hadn¡¯t been hiding, but I hadn¡¯t noticed him. He stood up, holding out a gray blanket to me.


    ¡°Saw you¡¯d need this. Couln¡¯t find shoes yet sorry. Whyn¡¯t you put this on and we¡¯ll pull your machine there up to hide.¡±


    His speech was clearly American English, but it sounded sped up. Words ran together.


    He approached, holding out the blanket. As I took it and thanked him he adjusted a shoulder bag he wore and looked down at the casket.


    He was young, maybe early twenties, and dressed in clothes that struck me as being unusual, although I couldn¡¯t immediately pin down why. I had a sense that people didn¡¯t usually dress this way, but then I realized I couldn¡¯t remember exactly how people did dress.


    They certainly didn¡¯t stand around naked as I had been doing. I remembered that much.


    But he looked to be dressed for the outdoors. That was it. Boots, and a green shirt with its sleeves rolled up, and green pants too. The clothes made me think of ¨C


    Teddy Roosevelt. That was who. And this man here also happened to wear wire-rimmed glasses.


    ¡°Havnt seen no handles.¡±


    ¡°No handles on what?¡±


    ¡°Your case, there. No way to pull it. To hide it.¡±


    ¡°You¡¯ve looked at it? Were you watching me for some time?¡± I asked.


    He nodded.


    ¡°I pulled yup this far. Saw you comngdn the stream. Sat here a while. Seemed like that door was ready to open, and surenough here you are. Let¡¯s hustle this thing up into those weeds.¡±


    ¡°Why? Is the water going to rise?¡±


    ¡°To hide it.¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t know that we need to,¡± I said.


    ¡°There¡¯s other people around. Someone might take it.¡±


    ¡°Maybe they could have it. I don¡¯t know what they would do with it.¡±


    He looked at me, perplexed.


    ¡°Serious? You don¡¯t want to take care of this vehicle? Well I do if you don¡¯t.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s not a vehicle. I don¡¯t really know what it is.¡±


    ¡°Well you should. You must have rode it a long way. Come on, won¡¯t do no harm. If you don¡¯t want it youdn¡¯t needa get it again. But if you changermind it¡¯ll be here.¡±


    I draped the blanket around my shoulders and bent down to help him shove the case up the slope.


    ¡°And like I said,¡± he added as we heaved. ¡°You don¡¯t want it, I might.¡±


    ¡°What¡¯s your name?¡± I asked.


    ¡°Stennis. Yours?¡±


    ¡°Perry. I remember that much.¡±


    ¡°Sorry ain¡¯t found you shoes,¡± he said. ¡°For this gravel. I¡¯ve some food though once this is up there. If you want it.¡±


    The casket crunched over the ground as we pushed it into tall grass.


    The food turned out to be a bread roll he pulled out of his shoulder bag. I wasn¡¯t really hungry, but ate to be polite.


    ¡°Can you tell me again where I am?¡±


    ¡°Trenton Thurning.¡±


    ¡°Trenton, you¡¯re saying?¡±


    ¡°Yeah. Trenton Thurning.¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t know what that is. I know of a city named Trenton, are we near there?¡±


    ¡°Just Trenton Thurning.¡±


    ¡°The one I know is in New Jersey.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s the old-time name, sure. This is a city. Outside a capital.¡±


    ¡°The old-time name?¡±


    ¡°Right.¡±Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    ¡°I didn¡¯t know anyone wasn¡¯t just calling it New Jersey.¡±


    I looked at him more closely, then. He had first struck me as just an oddly-dressed young man, but now I noticed more. I hated to judge, since he had helped me with the blanket and food, and may have actually released me from the case, for all I knew, but ¨C his clothes were not in good shape. The boots were worn. His hands were dirty. He wore a brimmed hat ¨C again, something that would not have looked out of place on Teddy Roosevelt ¨C and it was not clean, either. He had a very patchy beard. He may have had some problems, I thought.


    ¡°I¡¯m thinking Trenton,¡± I said, ¡°is the capital. If I¡¯m remembering right.¡±


    ¡°Trenton Thurning ain¡¯t. I mean a capital, a dome city. Vyou been in that thing a long time?¡±


    ¡°Maybe I have been. I don¡¯t really know, Stennis. I can¡¯t remember. Not yet, anyway.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯ll come back to ya, I¡¯m sure. Woulnt have come all this way if it woulnt. I know where to get shoes, you want to go do that now?¡±


    ¡°That would be good,¡± I said. I was reeling a bit, what with my lack of memory, and my lack of understanding about what was going on. Focusing on shoes was helpful; I couldn¡¯t argue with that plan.


    He turned and started walking, further along the bank for a moment and then up into trees and down a trail.


    ¡°Stennis,¡± I asked. ¡°How long had you seen that case for? Had it floated down that stream?¡±


    ¡°It did. Couple days ago. I pulled it up. The light on the screen was flashing. Slow first, then faster and faster. Seemed like something was going to happen.¡±


    ¡°There was a screen?¡±


    ¡°Yes. That little ¨C panel. On the side. Blank now, though.¡±


    ¡°Well. Thanks. For pulling it up. You kept an eye on it for a few days, then?¡±


    ¡°Yes. Went home a couple times and came back. Thought about moving it, but it was heavy. If anyone else had seen it, well, who knows. But no one did, and I want to hide it now.¡±


    ¡°I wonder how long I was in there. And what happened to me.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯ll come back.¡±


    We left the short tract of woods and crossed a field of weeds. Things were green, and the day was warm enough, fortunately, but the land we were passing through was littered and tired. There were piles of scrap metal, overgrown patches of asphalt, and a long rusted-out section of something that looked like it might have once been an aircraft fuselage. We eventually came to a ditch, on the other side of which was a cultivated field, planted with corn.


    ¡°We have to go around this,¡± Stennis said. ¡°Council land.¡±


    ¡°Council?¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s right. Belongs to everyone, but look out if they find anyone actually on it. Heh. We¡¯re almost there.¡±


    ¡°There¡± turned out to be a long, ramshackle wooden building I took to be a storage shed, at first, but which I then saw doubled as a residence. An older man emerged. He was Black, with a gray beard. He wore overalls.


    Behind him, leaning against the building, were all sorts of tools. A wheelbarrow, shovels, a post hole digger, a cluster of machetes. I realized this must be not his unkempt house, but rather a store.


    ¡°John,¡± Stennis said.


    ¡°Stennis. This is the fellow from that case you mentioned?¡±


    ¡°It is.¡±


    ¡°I should¡¯ve come seen it, then.¡±


    ¡°What, you didn¡¯t believe me?¡± Stennis said this as if he knew well that what he had said had been unbelievable.


    ¡°How was your trip?¡± John asked me.


    ¡°Well,¡± I started. ¡°It¡¯s hard for me to say. I¡¯m not remembering much.¡±


    ¡°I wonder what happened to you, then. Your name?¡±


    ¡°Perry. Perry Doran.¡±


    He turned to Stennis.


    ¡°Suppose you¡¯re looking for shoes?¡±


    ¡°Yes.¡±


    ¡°What¡¯s he got forem? Well, let me ask him.¡±


    He turned back toward me.


    ¡°What you got forem?¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ll spot him,¡± Stennis said. ¡°I don¡¯t think he has anything. Not now.¡±


    ¡°Well,¡± John said. He paused. ¡°You know what, man like this thrown up out of the river. Almost in a basket. I can spare shoes.¡±


    He turned back toward the doorway. I heard him mutter something which I guessed was along the lines of ¡°Things aren¡¯t so bad I need to be holding back shoes.¡±


    He came out with a pair that looked to have been handmade, with pieces of a rubber mat as soles. The upper parts were canvas. They had cord laces. They were large, but they fit and were comfortable enough.


    ¡°They¡¯re good,¡± I said. ¡°Thank you for these. I¡¯m not sure when I¡¯ll be able to pay you for them.¡±


    He waved his hand.


    ¡°And I¡¯ll set you up with some better clothes, too. So, Perry. Where all¡¯ve you been?¡±


    ¡°Well, nowhere for a long time. I was knocked out in that case for a long time, I think. It may have been years.¡±


    ¡°So ¨C what year do you think it is, now?¡±


    ¡°I really have no idea, John.¡±


    ¡°Well. It¡¯ll come back. I hope. But it¡¯s 2251.¡±


    This guy was standing in front of what looked like a frontier trading post that could as easily have been in 1851.


    ¡°Really,¡± I said. ¡°Twenty-two hundred?¡±


    ¡°And fifty-one. That woulntve been your guess?¡±


    ¡°No.¡±


    ¡°Can you remember where you came from?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s ¨C hard. Hard to say exactly. But I¡¯m from ¨C was from ¨C Virginia.¡±


    ¡°All right then. You from a capital?¡±


    ¡°I still don¡¯t know what you mean by that.¡±


    ¡°You must be from one,¡± Stennis said.


    ¡°Must be,¡± John agreed. ¡°Where else¡¯d that thing have come from.¡±


    ¡°No other way. But we mean the cities, Perry. A city. Are you from the inside?¡±


    ¡°Again, I¡¯m not sure what you¡¯re saying. I lived in a city, once. But I¡¯m thinking that was very long ago. And I don¡¯t know what you mean by ¡®inside.¡¯ ¡±


    ¡°Well you can see ours from here, from in back,¡± John said. ¡°Let¡¯s go show you.¡±


    He led me around his house, with Stennis following. Some yard birds that looked like guinea hens scattered before us. In back he had a clothesline with enough laundry for a large family hanging out. Past it, a woman about John¡¯s age, also Black, sat in a chair, talking with a girl who looked to be about eight or nine. Again their clothes struck me as more Nineteenth Century than Twenty-Third; loose, off-white garments that looked like linen.


    ¡°Ma¡¯am,¡± John said.


    ¡°Who¡¯s this?¡± she asked him.


    ¡°Visitor. Showing him the dome.¡±


    The girl leaned into her grandmother and watched me, the vagrant in a blanket traipsing through her grandfather¡¯s yard.


    ¡°There it is,¡± John said.


    In the distance, across fields that were cultivated near us but then appeared to run wild further on, there was, sure enough, a domed city.


    It was blue. It was silent. At ground level it shimmered a bit with some heat currents rising off the fields. It was maybe a mile or two wide. Its glass, or whatever it was, rose a few hundred yards into the air, it looked like; it was difficult to judge from the distance.


    ¡°It happened,¡± I said.


    ¡°What do you mean?¡±


    ¡°I just remember people in my time guessing that some would eventually build these things. To get away from ¨C something. Poor air, maybe.¡±


    I turned to them.


    ¡°So that¡¯s a capital. Why were they built? Was it polluted out here, something like that?¡±


    ¡°Why were the cities built?¡±


    ¡°The dome, I mean. Why is it covered up?¡±


    Stennis shrugged.


    ¡°I don¡¯t believe it was bad air. They just ¨C shut themselves away. When they could.¡±


    ¡°But away from what? Some sort of danger? Was there a war?¡±


    ¡°They¡¯re just ¨C keeping to themselves,¡± John said, shrugging. ¡°They have more, you know. More food, more instruments. They just ¨C separated themselves. But I think you must have come from one yourself.¡±


    ¡°Why do you say that?¡±


    ¡°The way you talk. And you¡¯re educated. Right? Went to university?¡±


    ¡°I did.¡±


    ¡°There you go.¡±


    ¡®You don¡¯t have universities out here? Outside that thing?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s very different out here, Perry. And that case of yours, especially ¨C it had to have come from a capital. No one out here could have invented that thing.¡±


    ¡°Well, if it¡¯s as old as I think it is, they didn¡¯t invent it either,¡± I said. ¡°Have you been inside that dome?¡±


    ¡°I never have been. They don¡¯t tend to invite us,¡± he said, with some sarcasm. ¡°Once in a long while they may trade something with us, but that¡¯s well away from the dome, out in the field.¡±

 Twelve - Trenton Thurning; part two of two

    We stood silently for a minute, gazing at the dome. It did not change. It didn¡¯t emit a hum, nor majestic music, nor graceful flitting aircraft.


    ¡°Oh Stennis, before I forget,¡± John said. ¡°I found the wheels.¡±


    ¡°Did you?¡±


    ¡°Nice ones.¡±


    ¡°Let¡¯s get them?¡±


    ¡°Come on then.¡±


    John led us past his granddaughter again ¨C his wife had disappeared ¨C and then around the building. He went in, then returned with a pair of spoked wheels. They were handmade, of wood and some rubber which might have come from the same mat that had produced my shoes.


    ¡°These¡¯ll work,¡± Stennis said.


    ¡°Yes they will.¡±


    ¡°I want to get these to her right away. I¡¯ll bring back a jar.¡±


    ¡°Fine, that¡¯s fine. Perry,¡± he said, turning toward me. ¡°Would you want to come back to eat with us?¡±


    ¡°Very much, thank you.¡±


    ¡°And Louise should be ¨C¡± he said; and then his wife appeared, holding a pair of folded overalls.


    ¡°Are you sure, John?¡± I said. ¡°I ¨C ¡±


    I was going to protest that I was just fine wearing the blanket, but I realized that was ridiculous and possibly insulting. I changed into the overalls inside the big storage room that held his wares.


    *


    Stennis¡¯s house lay across several fields. My shoes held up well for the walk. Stennis held the wheels one in each hand as he led.


    One field he identified as further Council land; the last two belonged to his family, although I noticed that he said they were ¡°farming¡± it rather than that they ¡°owned¡± it.


    ¡°So,¡± he asked me, ¡°do you intend to travel more? In that case? After you¡¯ve seen whatever you want to see?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s not a vehicle I had any control over,¡± I told him.


    ¡°But do you want to get back in?¡±


    ¡°No. Stennis, I think I may have been placed in there when I was very sick, or maybe even worse. That would be my guess.¡±


    ¡°You were sick?¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t remember. But that would be my guess. I think people in my time may have ¨C frozen me. Frozen me because something had happened to me. To see if I would have better luck in the future. And now here I am.¡±


    ¡°I never heard of anything like that. Not even from our capital people. Anyway, would you mind if I used it? To go somewhere?¡±


    ¡°Where do you think you would go?¡±


    He raised his shoulders.


    ¡°I suppose you can¡¯t tell? But I might try. Anywhere away from here. Somewhere different. Do you think it has to be full of all that wet stuff?¡±


    ¡°Stennis, I just can¡¯t imagine it would work that way. If you want to take all your clothes off and get in, well, I¡¯m not closing that lid on you.¡±


    ¡°Would you have to be naked?¡±


    ¡°Again I don¡¯t know, but I would assume so. If it wasn¡¯t necessary, I think they would have left my clothes on. I certainly would have if I got in there myself.¡±


    ¡°And you don¡¯t remember?¡±


    ¡°I just don¡¯t.¡±


    ¡°Well then,¡± he said. He walked some distance in silence, and then said:


    ¡°I suppose it might not work.¡±


    He sounded very disappointed, as he said this, and I swear he actually deflated a bit, or slouched. He didn¡¯t say anything more. His reaction sort of roused me from something, and I felt bad for him. I had been thinking just about myself, which I hope I might have been forgiven for doing, given the day I¡¯d had; but I realized now what he must have been thinking about the case. He was a young man who had apparently grown up in this weary town, never far from that elite domed whatever-it-was where he wasn¡¯t welcome, and presumably bogged down here with few opportunities. And then the stream had coughed up a vehicle with an exotic foreign traveler who had just lay down and then woken up in a new world. And maybe that machine was waiting for another passenger . . . but now I had ended that illusion for him.


    I asked him:


    ¡°Have you been outside of Trenton Thurning?¡±


    ¡°Near here. The other side of the capital, and a bit farther. Just to trade. I¡¯ve been out to the shore a couple times. But it¡¯s hard to travel if you don¡¯t have something to do. If you¡¯re just a ¨C wanderer, hoping to be put up. I mean, people do it, but it¡¯s hard. You see them through here once in a while, but no one¡¯s glad to see them. I don¡¯t want to do that.¡±


    ¡°Almost sounds like what I¡¯m doing,¡± I said. I realized that maybe I shouldn¡¯t have put it that way, but he looked back at me:


    ¡°Well now you may not want to really say that, Perry. Maybe tell people you¡¯re from another capital and are heading toward ours. Something.¡±


    He added:


    ¡°And I don¡¯t want to tell my mother exactly how I found you, either. She has enough to worry about. And the fewer people know about that case, the better. For you.¡±


    *


    The wheels turned out to be for a wheelchair that Stennis¡¯s mother used. She was seated on a bench outside their house, when we arrived. She was thin, but seemed well, apart from being unable to walk.


    ¡°This is Perry,¡± Stennis told her. ¡°He¡¯s passing through. On his way to ¨C the capital, I think?¡± he asked me.


    ¡°That¡¯s right.¡±


    ¡°He¡¯s had a little ¨C incident by the creek and was doing some trading at John¡¯s. We¡¯re going back there in a bit. John invited him back.¡±


    His mother nodded to me and said hello. She looked to be in her early forties; it looked like she must have had Stennis young.


    Their house was much smaller than John¡¯s, but had the advantage of not looking like it doubled as a trading post. It was made of wood planks and was set up on posts.


    The planks were uniform, smooth, obviously milled. I had been wondering how advanced, exactly, their technology was ¨C or, I suppose, how stunted it was ¨C but they weren¡¯t living in log cabins or mud huts.This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.


    Stennis had gone into the house and returned with the wheelchair. It was made of wood, basically looking like a comfortable porch chair on wheels; except it was on just one wheel at the moment. He lined up one of the new ones next to it.


    ¡°These will be perfect,¡± he said. ¡°I¡¯ll put them on tonight.¡±


    *


    I was back at John¡¯s before dark. Stennis had walked there most of the way with me and then pointed me across the remaining fields.


    Louise was there, this time with three grandchildren, not just the one girl I had seen earlier.


    ¡°Our son and his wife don¡¯t live far,¡± he told me. ¡°These kids are here and there, you never know. So we cook extra. And we have a bed for you, in the shop. Let me show you while it¡¯s light enough.¡±


    The bed was along the wall of the storage room where I had changed, earlier in the day. It was tucked in between a large barrel at one end and a stack of chests by the other.


    They did have a lamp; it was on the table where we ate, which was just off the kitchen. They served me a lentil soup and bread. The kids ¨C two girls and a boy, the youngest ¨C had multiple bowls of it. John and Louise seemed to go easy on me with the conversation, politely not prying about things I wasn¡¯t remembering. We spoke in generalities about Trenton Thurning and other villages around. They didn¡¯t seem to be suburbs of the dome; it was just a coincidence, apparently, that John could see it from his back yard.


    The children kept their eyes on me as we talked, but they didn¡¯t stop eating.


    One of them had especially dark eyes, and held them on me for a moment a certain way.


    And then I remembered Araceli, and Jen.


    We had been talking about the Underground Railroad. Ara had been small. Too small to understand the term at all? Well, I had pressed ahead.


    ¡°So it wasn¡¯t really underground,¡± I had told her.


    ¡°But they would hide people.¡±


    ¡°Yes.¡±


    ¡°And sometimes in basements? Cellars?¡±


    ¡°Yes, basements and cellars, sometimes. The slaves might spend the night there. And then the next day, they would travel some more.¡±


    ¡°So part of it was underground. At least a little.¡±


    She had kept her eyes on me closely, and I knew she really wanted the railroad to be truly underground.


    ¡°A part of it,¡± I said. ¡°A little. Hiding places.¡±


    ¡°And you¡¯ll look at them?¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s one thing I may see when I go away for work, yes.¡±


    ¡°And not far from here?¡±


    ¡°Not too far, no. Plenty of slaves ran not too far from here. They would go up to Pennsylvania and Ohio.¡±


    ¡°Do you think you¡¯ll find something new?¡±


    ¡°I never know, Ara. A lot of times, we don¡¯t find anything, you know.¡±


    I knew she was a little entranced with my field, or her idea of my field; but I was always ¨C right or wrong ¨C reluctant to encourage her to follow in my footsteps. I had been so lucky to secure my job. So many of my friends in the program had had such rocky careers if they had been able to find one in the field at all.


    ¡°I often feel like I need to shatter her dreams,¡± I had told Jen.


    ¡°Oh, let her dream. She doesn¡¯t have to pick her major anytime soon.¡±


    And Jen had said this because Ara, at the time, had been ¨C how old? Six? Eight? But I had ¨C known her ¨C when she was even older than that? Right? My mind raced.


    I realized I had been sitting there at the table silently, detached.


    ¡°Long day,¡± John said. ¡°I¡¯ll lead you back to the bed.¡±


    *


    The next day John put me to work smoothing out a spare shovel handle with a fat shard of glass. One of his daughters walked off down the yard, out of sight, holding a basket, and later returned with eggs. Louise and the grandson walked hand in hand down the dirt path before the house, off past a bend, apparently visiting neighbors. The guinea hens wandered the yard, making their rounds.


    Stennis eventually returned. He carried a large jar of honey and handed it over to John. They chatted in low voices and eventually turned to me.


    ¡°Stennis and I think you may as well head to the capital today. No use waiting.¡±


    ¡°You think so?¡±


    ¡°You sound like you don¡¯t want to?¡±


    Stennis added:


    ¡°I didn¡¯t think anyone who was able to get in there would pass up on the chance.¡±


    ¡°Why would they want to deal with me?¡± I said. ¡°What would I do ¨C tell them I¡¯m from the past? They won¡¯t believe me. They¡¯ll just think I¡¯m crazy.¡±


    ¡°Well, we dress you a little better,¡± John said. ¡°And we get that case. We put it on a cart. Stennis and I here help you push it. We take it up there, to one of their gates. They¡¯ll come out. I¡¯m sure they¡¯ll let you in. At least for a while to talk.¡±


    The two of them looked at me. Both seemed surprised I wasn¡¯t jumping at the chance.


    ¡°Let me think about that,¡± I said. ¡°If nothing else, I could use another day to rest. If I can impose on you for another night.¡±


    John just motioned toward the inside of the shop, letting me know the bed was still mine if I wanted it.


    *


    I ate another dinner with John¡¯s family ¨C four grandchildren were there, this time ¨C and spent another day trying to not be in the way in the shop, and wandering around a bit.


    They had a school, a long wooden building that didn¡¯t look too much different from John¡¯s house and store. They had horse carts, and wagons; I saw those moving up and down the main dirt road.


    I walked down toward the creek again, not in the same spot where the case was, but close to it, and saw that the area looked more ¨C ruinous. Where the people had built their houses, it was more pleasant with no heaps of rusting metal or concrete around.


    Further down the creek, around a bend, there was an expanse of overgrown rubble. Piles of broken concrete, in blocks and slabs, rose up ten and twenty feet high but were covered with vines, trees, grasses. It reminded me of old Nineteenth Century drawings I¡¯d seen of obscured Mayan temples before they had been cleaned off.


    The children were still around the house when I returned. They didn¡¯t seem very busy; for a time in the morning they played marbles out by the road. I wondered when the school was open.


    Talking more to John, I learned that many of the people of the town spent some time tending the crops on the community land. It sounded like I¡¯d have an opportunity to hoe out some weeds and make myself useful, if I stuck around. There were carpenters, coopers, blacksmiths. I didn¡¯t know how to do any of those, but I could learn.


    *


    The next day Stennis again came to visit in the morning. He and John spoke to me.


    ¡°Well, what do you think? Should we walk you to the capital in the morning?¡±


    ¡°Let me ask you,¡± I said. ¡°There will be work to do in these communal fields you have, soon?¡±


    ¡°There¡¯s always some work,¡± John said. ¡°Plenty of weeding to do.¡±


    ¡°And ¨C you know, I walked down to the stream again today, near where my case came up. Little different direction, though, more upstream. And there was one field with old iron in it, big fallen iron structures, rusting. Big ones. Old towers or something.¡±


    ¡°Sure,¡± he said.


    ¡°And I saw a shed there. It didn¡¯t look like anyone was living in it.¡±


    ¡°I know the one. Metal one?¡±


    ¡°Yes.¡±


    ¡°Well, if you¡¯re looking for a place of your own, there are better things around than that.¡±


    ¡°Okay. You know, gentlemen, if I¡¯m welcome here, I don¡¯t think I want to try to get into that dome. I¡¯ve seen this movie before.¡±


    They were silent a moment. John then repeated:


    ¡°This ¨C movie.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s right.¡±


    ¡°Well, I suppose I take your meaning. Just as well. We can help you find a place. I don¡¯t imagine the capital is going anywhere.¡±

 Thirteen - The Ferryman

    The case, my coffin, my transporter, whatever it was, was not going to be any further help, I could tell. I was standing outside in darkness ¨C it felt like the middle of the night, somehow, though I couldn¡¯t be sure ¨C but I could see enough to know that the case was dead. There was a tiny black screen on its side that looked like it may have displayed something useful at one point, but it was shut down now. The thing had no warmth, no hum.


    I knew I had been asleep in that thing for many, many years. I could feel it, somehow. I couldn¡¯t explain it then, and still can¡¯t now, but ¨C I felt the way I would feel after waking from a long dream. Very long, this time. And that case must have been made to keep me alive; and it was certainly turned off now.


    The dead black screen helped prod me onward. Had the case been making any sounds, or showing any life; or if I could have remembered where I had come from in it, or where I was ¨C then I might have sat there and waited for some next step. But I had nothing, so I felt I had to just move. I was in the dark in a strange place.


    There were fallen leaves around and I used them to wipe off the gel which covered my body, and which I¡¯d been lying in. This took some time, and didn¡¯t leave me feeling very clean, but I got it all off except what was in my hair.


    I was stranded in a stretch of woods. Maybe I should have gathered yet more leaves, piled them up, and bedded down until dawn. The night was not particularly warm, for one thing; I would have been warmer underneath a leaf pile than wandering around naked. But I wanted to move out of there. And anyway I wasn¡¯t tired at all. I just felt like I had been asleep for ¨C again, a very long time.


    As I was going to step away I noticed a small bundle of branches, bearing white blooms, on the ground on the other side of the case. It looked like it must have fallen off the lid, when it opened. There were no other blooms like them around that I could see.


    I picked them up. The branches had been tied together with twine. So someone must have been around that case, and very recently; but maybe not right before it opened, necessarily, because the blooms were dry. They were something like a hydrangea, still white but not new.


    I carried them with me, I don¡¯t know why. I guess I thought that if someone felt they were important enough to leave on that case, I should hang onto them. I certainly had no other possessions crowding them out.


    A dim light that came down into the woods through the largely bare trees, although I couldn¡¯t see the moon. The ground was clear and I walked in a direction that seemed just slightly less dark than the rest. There were fallen branches, and mud beneath the carpet of leaves.


    Eventually the silent wood did begin to thin. Soon I was able to smell water ¨C the rot of a marsh ¨C further ahead.


    The woods gave way to an open area leading down to a shore. Along the bank there were bare trunks of trees, and stumps. I kept thinking that some or others of them were people; the forms and shadows played tricks. It was not hard to think that these were stranded travelers, longing to cross the water.


    I turned to my left, and kept walking. The marsh cleared and gave way to deeper water, a slow-moving river. It was wide, but I could see the far shore.


    There were no sounds; no splashes from fish, no water birds. I imagined I would be there until daylight and looked for a spot to lie back down.


    But then I made out a boat, low in the water. Slowly it came across, straight to me. It was long, and flat; it reminded me of depictions I had seen of several Roman river barges which had been discovered ¨C


    Discovered? When? I realized I couldn¡¯t remember.


    ¨C but it reminded me of those; but smaller. A long, flat platform on the dark water.


    It held, I saw, a single man, standing tall and holding a pole or a long paddle.


    He seemed to see me, but lowered the pole into the water in order to stop. He stayed at a distance and, as far as I could tell, faced me silently. I raised my arm in greeting, with no result. I lowered it.


    Eventually he raised the pole again and approached closer. He came up to within maybe twenty yards.


    ¡°Traveler,¡± he said. It was a greeting, but his voice seemed sharp. I got the impression he didn¡¯t think I belonged there. And I suppose I did not, as a naked stranger carrying nothing but a bouquet of  dry blooms.


    ¡°Yes,¡± I said. ¡°I have just ¨C found myself here. I need help. I¡¯m alone.¡±


    ¡°You are not well prepared for this trip.¡±


    ¡°No, I¡¯m not,¡± I said, looking down at myself stupidly, as if I were going to see something new. ¡°I ¨C woke up in the woods back there.¡±


    ¡°And you have nothing but that bough.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s right.¡±


    I added:


    ¡°I don¡¯t know why I¡¯m carrying it.¡±


    ¡°Well then,¡± he answered. ¡°I suppose I may take you.¡±


    ¡°Where to?¡±


    ¡°To help. The other side.¡±


    He just stayed there motionless for another minute or two, oddly, but then he did finally put his weight on the pole and close the distance to me.


    His boat had a very shallow draft and I was able to walk out into the water just a bit ¨C which was useful, actually, in washing off the mud I had picked up on the walk ¨C and then step up and in. The ferryman waited for me, keeping both hands on the pole to hold the boat in place. He didn¡¯t step toward me. This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.


    ¡°What time is it?¡± I asked him, once aboard.


    ¡°We seldom speak of time here,¡± he said. ¡°It is time to ¨C cross the river. To be on the other side. For a passenger of mine.¡±


    He poled off. The quiet river was slow and shallow, and he was able to push us along and not end up too far downstream.


    He took the flat boat across the water, nearly to the shore, but we did not land. Once there he turned to the right and followed the edge for some distance. We were moving downstream, now, and he no longer had to push us along. He only guided the boat to keep it straight as we drifted.


    To our left the riverbank rose up to fields with clumps of trees. Everything I saw was in black, or grays. Somehow this all seemed darker than night. Or not darker; just, not night. The darkness was different.


    On that shore I could see tall grasses very gently waving back and forth in a slight breeze. They were barely silvered, just barely, so I could see them, although there was still no moon. I saw no stars, either.


    Then I noticed, in the distance, up on that land, people. There were crowds of them.


    And now that I saw them I could hear some quiet speech. The talk was far away, and difficult to hear, but it sounded ¨C discontent. It was as if the people were snapping at each other.


    ¡°What is this?¡± I asked the boatman. ¡°Who are those people?¡±


    ¡°People on the outskirts,¡± he said. ¡°I don¡¯t believe you will be a part of that gathering.¡±


    ¡°But who are they?¡±


    ¡°The disconsolate. Some for a reason, some not. Some of them bear blame which should never have been levied upon them. Some wait for others, although they may not see them for ¨C a time. And some have lived in such anger for so long that they cannot escape it.¡±


    ¡°I am not understanding where I am,¡± I said.


    ¡°You are not anywhere, yet. Your landing is still ahead.¡±


    The land on our left, as we passed it by, sometimes rose, and sometimes fell; was studded at some points with trees, and copses of trees, but in other areas was just the waving grass; but all along, there were masses of these people, standing there in the darkness and carrying on their apparent hard conversations. They were now closer to the shore, and I could hear occasional phrases:


    ¡°¨C behind my back ¨C ¡±


    ¡°¨C I didn¡¯t need anyone ¨C ¡±


    ¡°¨C I could see that he had never ¨C ¡±


    Now I noticed that the sky was lightening, although I could see no obvious sign of a sunrise, just as I had not been able to see the moon. We continued, rounding a bend that was bordered by trees that looked to be mangroves. As we passed them I saw, on higher ground, a single form standing.


    There was no mass of people around him; just one person. And he was close enough that I could see it was a man.


    The ferryman leaned on his pole to shove us toward the bank.


    ¡°Are we stopping here?¡± I asked.


    ¡°This is someone for you to speak to,¡± he said. ¡°Wait, I will get closer than that. Right up to shore.¡±


    Now I realized I had not needed to wade through the water to get to the boat, its draft was so slight, and the ferryman had probably thought I was a fool for doing so. He did bring the prow to the bank, and I stepped out.


    The man up on higher ground started walking down toward me.


    He looked familiar; part memory, part mirror.


    It was my father.


    I walked up to him, closing the distance. I saw that he was crying; I was, too.


    I put my arms around him;


    But there was nothing to hold. They passed through his image. I tried again, knowing it would fail.


    ¡°Dad.¡±


    He looked at me, but didn¡¯t try to touch me.


    ¡°Are you here, or not?¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m here,¡± he said. ¡°As much as I¡¯m anywhere. You made it. For a moment.¡±


    He had died a few years ago; or what seemed just a few years ago, from what I could remember. He¡¯d had cancer, and had not made it to seventy. But now he looked good; the way he had looked before we knew he was sick. He had lines on the sides of his eyes, but they looked like smile lines, not worry lines.


    He wasn¡¯t completely smooth-shaven. His beard had been rough and thick, and he¡¯d always had a hard time keeping his face smooth.


    I asked:


    ¡°How long have you been here?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s hard to say, Perry. I feel like I just arrived. But time passes quickly here.¡±


    ¡°Is Mom here?¡±


    ¡°Not yet.¡±


    ¡°She must be coming, though?¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m sure she is.¡±


    ¡°You¡¯re not ¨C stuck with all those bickering people, are you?¡±


    ¡°No,¡± he said. He smiled. ¡°I don¡¯t choose to be with them. It¡¯s not hard to avoid them.¡±


    ¡°They ask for that?¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m afraid they do. Tell me ¨C what is new? Out there in the world?¡±


    ¡°I ¨C I don¡¯t know much,¡± I said. ¡°I don¡¯t know how much time has passed, but I think I¡¯ve missed a lot of it myself. I¡¯ve been in a case, I¡¯ve been asleep.¡±


    He didn¡¯t seem to be understanding me. His face looked blank, and I was afraid I would lose him.


    ¡°Ara is good, Jennifer is good,¡± I said. ¡°From the last I remember. Ara is ¨C her own person now. She was four when you left.¡±


    ¡°Yes.¡±


    ¡°I wish you could see her. She¡¯s like Jen. Like Mom. She¡¯ll make us all proud.¡±


    ¡°And our work?¡±


    ¡°It was going well, Dad. I don¡¯t know how long ago I stopped. I think something ¨C ¡± and I had to pause. ¡°I think something may have gone wrong. I feel something. I can¡¯t know, for sure.¡±


    ¡°But you were a scientist. A man of science.¡± And with that, he raised his hands to rest them on my shoulders. They sat there, but I didn¡¯t feel them.


    Then the ferryman spoke, his sharp voice again that would carry across water:


    ¡°We cannot stay.¡±


    My father kept his eyes on me, and gave just a very slight shake of his head.


    ¡°You can¡¯t stay here, Perry. Not yet.¡±


    ¡°But I¡¯ll come back?¡±


    ¡°Yes. Sometime. After your mother.¡±


    He pulled his hands off my shoulders, lowered his arms. He took two steps back.


    ¡°Perry Doran,¡± the ferryman said. ¡°You cannot stay.¡±


    I walked down the slope and back into the boat. My father watched me; neither of us said anything. I felt that no more words belonged in this place.


    The ferryman poled off, again downstream. Further along the river, past a few more banks that protruded into the water, I saw that there was a white arch. That¡¯s where the ferryman was taking me; it was obvious. It was my gateway to ¨C whatever was next. Whatever had to come next.

 Fourteen - Torpor

    The nurse waved a small white device in front of my forehead, looked at it, pushed one button on the pad she held on her lap, and said:


    ¡°You¡¯re released. Metro, country?¡±


    ¡°What?¡±


    She then did a sort of hard blink combined with a very slight shake of her head ¨C more of a shake of her face, is what it looked like. I had seen the staff do this twitch several times before, always when they seemed impatient with me. She repeated:


    ¡°Metro, country. Rural. To live.¡±


    Was she asking me my address? She must have known I¡¯d been there since being revived.


    ¡°I don¡¯t live out there. You know I¡¯ve just been here these past days.¡±


    ¡°Release to metro, country?¡±


    ¡°To live? Are you asking me where I want to go? Or where I lived before?¡±


    ¡°This is release. Re-entry.¡±


    She was silent. She peered at me as if she had just delivered a two-hour lecture. She was young, of striking looks but very off-putting to me, what with her rush. I felt like her head might explode, she seemed so anxious to get on with . . . whatever was happening.


    Her name was Nurse Su Do, I had seen earlier. It was pronounced Do as in ¡°doe,¡± but even the ¡°e¡±s I would have expected on her names seemed to have been shaved off. Given how rushed she was, I imagined they had been cut in the interest of brevity.


    ¡°If you¡¯re asking me where I want to live, and I have any choice in that, I¡¯d say just near here. If I¡¯m being discharged. You¡¯re sure I¡¯m fine to go? I still feel weak.¡±


    She did the shake/blink/twitch again.


    ¡°You are released. There are no effects. Near here means metro. Eh one more thing.¡±


    She reached into a pocket and pulled out something small. She displayed it to me in her open hand; it was a plastic bead.


    ¡°This is yours,¡± she said.


    I picked it up. It was just a very dark purple plastic bead, the size of a pea. A large-ish pea. A small marble?


    ¡°Mine? What is this?¡±


    ¡°We did a cleanse of you. This was all the plastic in your body.¡±


    ¡°What?¡± I rolled it around between my fingers.


    ¡°I have to ask you Perry we have records that in your time sizable numbers of scientists and nonscientists understood that plastic particles were entering human bodies.¡±


    ¡°Particles. Well, that¡¯s right. I remember that.¡±


    ¡°All of this was in you. I have to ask ¨C ¡± and now she finally paused, which seemed an effort for her ¨C ¡°did you ever consider using fewer plastics?¡±


    ¡°Well. Many of us did. There was a growing awareness, I would say.¡±


    ¡°Rolph will direct you.¡±


    Apparently we were done with the plastics conversation.


    ¡°I¡¯m sorry ¨C Rolph? I¡¯m not sure who that is ¨C ?¡±


    ¡°The one who directs you.¡±


    I could not argue with that. Outside her office doorway a sort of hovering platform appeared, then, driven by a staff person in a white uniform who must have been Rolph.


    ¡°Safe trip,¡± she said. She rose and disappeared through a door behind her, while Rolph reached over, grabbed my arm, and lifted to goad me up.


    I was continually struck by how this society¡¯s speed in their speech was matched by their movement, whether this was walking, trotting, or transportation like their hovering platforms. Over the past two days everything with them had been full speed; except when I had been left alone to sleep, but even then I could see staff hurrying up and down the hall through the open doorway.


    ¡°We are off,¡± Rolph said. ¡°You don¡¯t need to help lift.¡±


    ¡°Help lift? Lift what?¡±


    ¡°Your bags,¡± Rolph said.


    I had no bags, of course. I realized this was an attempt at humor, but we were moving already and Rolph was looking ahead. He stood at the controls, me behind him. By ¡°the controls¡± I mean just a stick that rose up from the platform. He kept one hand on it. We traveled at some speed down the hallway but I felt no inertia. There was no need for me to hang on to him or anything else.


    The hallway was on the building¡¯s second or third floor, and emptied out onto a landing that overlooked a large lobby. We plunged ahead and right off it, into midair. Rolph dropped us down gently ¨C of course this was probably not his steering skills but rather just the nature of the platform ¨C and we then continued outside through sliding doors which opened for us and slid shut behind.


    Out on the sidewalk the lack of inertia, of any feeling of movement, was even more odd. Rolph swerved past pedestrians, and then around some sort of large information screen, but I felt as if I were just standing on a floor in a room. The disconnect between what my eyes were seeing and what I was feeling ¨C nothing ¨C was beginning to make me queasy, when we arrived at my door.


    It opened with a wave of Rolph¡¯s hand. He then raised that hand in front of me, and I saw he was holding a small white device very similar to what Nurse Do had used in her final scan of my head.


    He held it there.


    I didn¡¯t know what to make of it.


    He jiggled it, once.


    I then understood he wanted me to take it. It was my key, apparently.


    ¡°There¡¯s food,¡± Rolph said. ¡°Key on bed. Door com serves for Nurse Do. Mates Sven, Maya, Elle.¡±


    He had stopped the platform but made no move to disembark. His few words were it, as far as any tour and orientation I would receive, I realized.


    I stepped off.


    He turned the platform and sped away.


    *


    There was no front door after the main one which he had waved open. Further inside was an open area, which I guess was just a large foyer. It was completely unfurnished. Then next was the kitchen.Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.


    In the kitchen was a man, at the sink with the faucet running. He turned to face me as I entered. I¡¯d been hoping I had misunderstood Rolph¡¯s mention of ¡°mates,¡± but Sven here¡¯s presence must have meant that I was living in a group of four.


    I learned that Nordics still looked Nordic. He had blond hair and eyebrows, blue eyes.


    ¡°Yes,¡± he said. ¡°Perry?¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s me. You¡¯re Sven?¡±


    ¡°Must be. Not Maya or Elle.¡±


    He shut off the faucet, dried his hands quickly, and walked out past me without saying any more.


    I turned around and watched him walk through the foyer, then through the main door, and out. The main door swished shut again.


    I turned around, kept going, and stepped into a large room which was next after the kitchen.  In it was a sort of very large hologram ¨C I don¡¯t what to call it ¨C swirling around in midair, floor to ceiling. It displayed a picture of what I took to be a space station, rotating. A disembodied voice was narrating something about it. It took me some time to even recognize the chatter as English, it was going so fast.


    ¡°Entranceinsouthquadrant and capacityfourthousandthreehundred, redlines bluelines risetosixteen perthecapacity¡± ¨C it was jabber like that as the image of the station or whatever it was continued to rotate. I couldn¡¯t make head or tail of it. The hologram was bright, and the voice was loud, and it was accompanied by fairly frenetic music. I took all this in bit by bit, I suppose because all of it was so foreign. The music, I realized, played in a pattern that matched the rotation of the image; it occurred to me that it may have been conveying information about the scene just as the narration did.


    The depiction of the structure kept rotating. Parts of it would flash blue or green.


    I basically felt as if I had walked in a giant roaring projected disco ball that was going to drive me deaf.


    I said aloud:


    ¡°Can I turn this off?¡±


    And it disappeared. That was easier than I¡¯d guessed.


    ¡°How about back on?¡±


    And it was back.


    Only then I noticed two women seated in corners of the room, each on a chair. They were looking at me.


    ¡°Sorry, were you ¨C watching that?¡±


    They said nothing.


    ¡°You must be Maya? And Elle?¡±


    ¡°Maya,¡± one said, nodding toward the other.


    That was apparently it for the introductions.


    They looked to be about my age. Maya had black hair with thick eyebrows, and earrings which were very large, crescents wrapping up nearly all the way around her ears. She sat with a book open. Elle had brown hair, long and tied back. Both were wearing clothes that looked plain, just pants and shirts, which may have been linen and were in earth tones.


    Well, at least they still read books.


    Elle wasn¡¯t doing anything in particular that I could identify. Maybe she had been watching the hologram thing.


    ¡°So, I¡¯m Perry. Someone from the hospital just dropped me off.¡±


    ¡°Rolph,¡± Elle said.


    ¡°So you know him.¡±


    Neither said anything.


    ¡°Well then. I suppose I¡¯m staying here? I hope there¡¯s room?¡±


    Maya stood and pointed me down another hallway.


    ¡°Your room. Door¡¯s open.¡±


    ¡°Okay then.¡± I felt like I should go drop a bag there, but I didn¡¯t have anything with me.


    They just sat motionless, still staring at me.


    After some moments of this, for lack of anything better to do or announce, I said:


    ¡°I¡¯ll go look at the room.¡±


    Elle still didn¡¯t move or say anything. Maya, for her part, then walked out entirely, just as suddenly as Sven had done.


    I watched her go. I then looked to Elle to see if she had any reaction to the sudden departure, but she just continued to gaze at me.


    Down the hallway were four rooms, each with its door open. Three were obviously lived in, with some clothes and other things draped about, and art on the walls. The last, mine, was extremely small, just a narrow bed barely long enough to hold me, and a desk. It had a closet.


    In the closet was one towel. On the bed, two sheets and a small pillow. Nothing else.


    Sven then stepped into my room from the hall. He held some folded clothes.


    ¡°A few more clothes,¡± he said. He placed them on the desk.


    ¡°You¡¯re back. Thank you.¡±


    ¡°You are from the past, then?¡±


    ¡°Apparently so. I was in something like a coma for about a hundred years. That¡¯s what I¡¯m told.¡±


    ¡°Okay then,¡± he said.


    He turned and left.


    After a moment I walked after him, into the hologram room, for I had nothing better to do. But the room, and indeed the entire apartment, was now empty. All three of them had apparently left ¨C Sven for the second time.


    *


    I eventually learned that Elle had a job producing those holograms; the one I¡¯d seen first was indeed a depiction of a space station that orbited the Moon. Maya, for her part, wrote; reviews and commentary that appeared on holographic screens that one could project at arm¡¯s length. She earned very little for this, and lived on basic income payments. Sven was an engineer at a water treatment plant, working full-time ¨C which meant three days a week.


    *


    I considered, that first afternoon, taking my key and leaving to go for a walk. I could check out that large display stand thing we had passed on the way here, and I could explore and feel the ground below my feet rather than the odd floating platform. But suddenly I felt tired; fatigued nearly to the point of lying down right there on the floor. I returned to my room and collapsed on the bed.


    I pictured ¨C very briefly ¨C a plow cutting through sod. A large steel plow, behind a tractor. This is what I used to focus on, in my past life, when I¡¯d wanted to fall asleep. Something about the blade cutting through the sod, flipping it over, yard after yard after yard, would knock me out.


    Or a hard rake being drawn through sandy soil. With rocks, pebbles, dragging through the tines. Fifteen or twenty furrows left behind, just running it from one end of the garden plot to the other.


    Plowing; or digging. These would plunge me into sleep. I might picture a mole, its wide hands struggling through dirt. I would picture myself as that mole. There was something welcoming, down there in the tunnels, the warrens. The mole would be enclosed; safe. Excavating a little tunnel, because . . . that¡¯s just what it needed to do.


    A mole in the dark. Digging, content.


    Just like pulling up a heavy blanket. A wool blanket, or two or three, stacked atop a sheet. Or sheets. I used to pile up clothes on the bed just to be able to slide under them, and feel their weight.


    Just lying there in bed with the soft weight pressing down.


    Tired. Enervated. Drained.


    Enervated and drained were similar words. Enervated; you had been hobbled because you had lost your drive. Drained: hobbled because your energy had spilled out.


    Weary. Drowsy. German-derived words.


    Latin-derived words: Soporific, torporific. Soporific, from the Latin for sleep; torpor ¨C the Latin for numb.


    Torporous seemed like it should be a word.


    I was torporous in my bed as my housemates ¨C my silent housemates ¨C presumably flitted about on their hover platforms, and the holographic space station whirled silently in the living room.


    *


    I woke up the next day, having slept for sixteen hours or so.


    I learned what time it was only after lying in bed for a while wondering about it. Then I remembered how the hologram had been voice-activated, and I said aloud:


    ¡°What time is it?¡±


    I had thought I might get a voiced answer, but numbers appeared on the wall across from me. It was past four.


    The apartment was quiet, although I realized my roommates probably never made much noise even when present.


    I noticed a slip of paper on my desk. It was folded. I reached for it.


    Perry.


    Fatigue is part of culture shock.


    Su Do APRN


    I held it and still lay in bed. I felt it was pathetic of me to think this, but it seemed touching that she had sent a message like that. Despite the terse communications, the hospital staff apparently did care about me.


    When I look back I still remember what a lifeline that little note was.

 Fifteen - Bloomer

    Perry and Jen and Araceli had lost one of their rabbits too young. Perry knew that Bloomer had been approaching the lead edge of the earliest bands of the predicted life spans for rabbits ¨C she had been about to turn six ¨C but she had been healthy, and bright-eyed, and still leaping in the mornings. He couldn¡¯t believe it was really her time to depart.


    She had spent an entire morning in one spot, tucked into a cautious loaf, and had not eaten; but she had done that before. She had always snapped out of it by later in the same day, or at the longest by the next morning.


    But this time, she did not start eating again, and barely changed positions. She only shifted around to press herself more closely up against the wall.


    She ate a bit of banana but left the rest of the slice on the floor untouched, which was unprecedented for her. She would lap from a bowl of water set before her, but just for a moment.


    The second day, a Saturday, all three of them drove her to the vet. They were nearly silent, Ara in back with her arms draped over the carrier. They came home with motility medications and packets of concentrated rabbit food. Bloomer would eat those as they slowly fed them to her from a feeding syringe, swallow by swallow, but she was clearly failing.


    Toward the end of the third day it was clear she was not getting better.


    ¡°Do we keep doing this?¡± Jen asked. ¡°She doesn¡¯t even look comfortable now.¡±


    ¡°I want to know we gave her every chance we could,¡± Perry said.


    They¡¯d had a rabbit actually die far younger, at only two, but that one ¨C Selkie ¨C had had an apparent heart attack. Somehow his instant passing, which was unmarked by them when it happened ¨C he had died overnight inside his area, his teeth frozen clamped down mid-chew on a strand of hay ¨C made Perry feel like that particular rabbit had simply been destined to be short-lived. Something had been congenitally very wrong, clearly. Very soon after the initial shock of finding him, Perry just thought of him as the rabbit who was doomed to live a short life. They also simply hadn¡¯t had time to get close to him; and Araceli had been very young, not interested in interacting with him.


    But Bloomer had been their covid isolation rabbit, so they spent days on end with her. They included her in conversations, and asked her advice about jigsaw puzzles, and masks, and boosters. Araceli interacted with her. She would make her tiny leis and garlands and have her parents try to take quick pictures before Bloomer tossed them off.


    At the end of the fifth day, Bloomer¡¯s breathing was labored, rasping. Perry sat on the floor and cradled her on his lap, at the very end.


    *


    They buried her in their back yard next to a patch of sedge. Perry dug the hole. Jen brought out a potted flower which she and Ara planted on top.


    ¡°Look!¡±Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    Ara pointed to a deer which was standing in the yard, having entered unnoticed while the three of them tended to the burial. It just stood and looked at them.


    ¡°It¡¯s like he came to pay his respects,¡± Jen said.


    *


    There was a hole in their home. Bloomer had left them too soon.


    Perry would stop and regard the grave when he took out compost or just went outside to get away from a screen.


    ¡°We miss you, Bloomer. We all do.¡±


    He would add:


    ¡°We¡¯re still here. We¡¯re right inside.¡±


    Sometimes he would tell her:


    ¡°Selkie¡¯s next to you. You would have liked him.¡± They had buried him just a few feet over, on the edge of the same sedge patch.


    And someday Whistler will join them, he said to himself.


    Perry felt he was spending an unreasonable amount of time reflecting on their departed rabbit¡¯s condition. But he couldn¡¯t stop thinking about her alone in the yard when she had spent six years with them on their rugs, beneath their beds, in their kitchen.


    Now she was outside. Forever. So he hoped that somehow she could feel the presence of Selkie. And of the living animals that passed by; the squirrels, raccoons. Even the foxes. And all the birds overhead. And the deer. He stopped by her grave to stand quietly, often, but he thought about the day, someday, when they would move away. She would then be out here alone.


    He hoped she would take solace in the presence of the others. Animals must have an awareness, he thought, that there were others all around them, and above, and maybe below. He and Jen had had a running joke about Bloomer¡¯s interactions with the mice that infiltrated their home in the winter. ¡°Welcome back, guys. Food¡¯s in the kitchen,¡± she would tell them.


    He hoped she would feel a presence nearby when she was buried, immobile, underground.


    As he himself might come to feel if he were ever locked away, immobile, underground. If he would someday be lost to everyone still living. If he would be forgotten to even his descendents, though they lived right above him.


    People would pass over him, very likely, unaware that he was beneath.


    People did pass over. It would have to happen. No graveyard was forever. No white case was guaranteed to be remembered.


    How long does it take people to forget?


    Somehow he would have an awareness of vibrations. He was immobile, and not precisely living, but he felt movement. Everything from patter which must have been footsteps, to longer waves which might have come from vehicles, to ¨C occasionally ¨C tremors and shocks. Those might have been from actual earthquakes, or very heavy machinery, or building demolitions.


    And he felt that there were others around, not far from him, also immobile. Some had been there long already, he felt. They might have been surrounded by scattered arrowheads. Others, from closer to his time, but also forgotten. And still more recent companions, maybe laid down into that earth in tragic circumstances.


    Animals?


    Yes, there were animals. Their running had been stilled; they wanted to continue to run.


    Some had had four legs, he could feel. Others, wings. Some would have been inclined to follow him; others would have ignored him, and ignored him now.


    The beings above were not everything there was to the world. They had forgotten him, but he had not quite departed. He felt he would never be taken away completely.

 Sixteen - Sarcophagi Warehouse; part one of three

    I could not remember much, but I did recall photos I had seen of a burial chamber in Egypt. It had catered to middle-class people three thousand years earlier who could afford sarcophagi but who could not pay for ¨C or did not merit ¨C ornate tombs. The sarcophagi were just stacked on one another; piled up like suitcases on an airport tarmac luggage trolley. This is what I thought of as I looked around now. Cases were all around me, stacked four, five, six high and stretching away for rows in some giant warehouse.


    And I had been in one, too, but mine had just opened. It was on the top, fortunately, of a stack of five. I had been covered in a clear slime that I tried to shake off, once I lowered myself down to the concrete floor. I dropped down into a gap between ¡°my¡± stack of sarcophagi and the one next to it.


    The warehouse wasn¡¯t particularly warm. I pressed off the gel the best I could and then walked to a space amid the stacks. It turned out to be a cleared path that led to either end of this long, spare building. This warehouse was made of metal, painted red down at my level with a gray roof above. I began walking what I assumed was a route toward an exit.


    All I could remember at that point was that something traumatic had happened to me. I remembered falling into darkness, and people around me ¨C trying to help, working on me. Doctors, nurses, maybe paramedics.


    That was about all I had. Prior to that ¨C I could remember Jen, Ara, our house. I also had the sense that a long time had passed.


    The stacks of cases loomed on either side of me. Some were white, some black, some gray. Mine had been white. They came in different sizes; mostly as long as an adult coffin, but a few smaller. Each one had, now that I looked for it, a screen on the side with a number. They did not hum, but were clearly functioning. I assumed each one held another person.


    (What on earth would happen if some poor guy on the bottom of the stack woke up suddenly, as I had just done? I had no idea. Maybe someone checked on them? Or maybe a lot of them held dead persons ¨C I mean truly dead ¨C who had done just this and been trapped?)


    Walking along, I made out a man standing in the pathway. He heard me and turned toward me. He was Black, and about my age. He wore dark blue pants, a lighter blue shirt, with a bag over his shoulder which I took to be a tool bag. He was holding a long tube that looked something like a bazooka but struck me more as a tool, perhaps a medical device.


    ¡°Didn¡¯t hear yih,¡± he said. ¡°Just out?¡±


    ¡°I . . . believe so,¡± I said.


    ¡°Got a shirt for yih.¡± He reached into the bag and took out a long shirt; very long. It looked like a Dickensian sleeping gown. It struck me that these cases must have opened up often enough for it to make sense for him to carry clothing for the naked newcomers.


    He didn¡¯t seem surprised to see me.


    ¡°Had you been ¨C waiting for me?¡± I asked.


    He shrugged and raised his eyebrows.


    ¡°I¡¯m waiting on all yih.¡±


    He saw me looking at the tube he held in his left hand.


    ¡°And working on some of these cases. Hurryin things up for some. But look, yih just keep going, down this corridor here, and then at that far wall make a right. You¡¯ll see an office door. They¡¯ll help there.¡±


    The door of that office was open. Inside, a woman sat at a sort of drafting table, preoccupied.


    ¡°Hello,¡± I said.


    She ignored me. I saw that the surface of the table was a giant screen. Not exactly a video screen, but there were lights on it she could manipulate and move around.


    ¡°Hello, a man out there sent me in,¡± I tried again. This time she looked up. She looked young. Her hair was piled up in a towering top knot.


    ¡°Yes? Are yih just out?¡±


    ¡°I am, yes.¡±


    ¡°What number?¡±


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°There was a number on your case. On front. Do yih remember it?¡±


    ¡°No. I didn¡¯t know to look.¡±


    ¡°Can yih recall yer name?¡± she asked.


    ¡°Doran. Perry Doran.¡±


    ¡°Hyang on then.¡±


    She slid her fingers around the desk. Green and yellow lights activated and darted around. The thing struck me as an abacus, but for words.


    ¡°Aye,¡± she said, almost to herself. ¡°Yih were an early one. An early one.¡±


    She slid a finger around some more and then added:


    ¡°Well my goodness.¡±


    Then, to me again:


    ¡°Did yih have a file?¡±


    ¡°I ¨C no. I just got out of the case thing. I didn¡¯t have anything in there with me.¡±


    ¡°I mean running,¡± she said. ¡°It wouldn¡¯t be in the case.¡±


    ¡°Running?¡±


    She just looked at me.Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    ¡°Well, no. I don¡¯t have anything, I¡¯m afraid.¡±


    She dropped her eyes back down to the table.


    ¡°This would be yih, then,¡± she said. ¡°Yih¡¯re one of the very first put down we know of.¡±


    ¡°Put down?¡±


    ¡°All of yih out in those cases. I suppose yih didn¡¯t know how many others would do it, did yih. Since yih were one of the first.¡±


    ¡°I have to tell you ¨C I¡¯m not even clear what I did, much less anyone else.¡±


    She didn¡¯t answer this, but instead retrieved a small ball, like a toy rubber ball, from underneath the desk. Apparently it had just been printed. It was green, and I guessed it would bounce. She handed it to me.


    ¡°Take that to the Dwelling Office. Through that door there, first door on your right.¡±


    ¡°This?¡± I held it up.


    ¡°Yes.¡±


    I would have assumed she¡¯d give me a form, or an identification card, or something, but it turned out to be ¨C a rubber ball.


    ¡°I will. Can you tell me ¨C where am I? How long was I in that case?¡±


    ¡°This is Toronto. And yih must have been in that case at least two hundred years. This is 2242. First of March.¡±


    *


    In weeks to come I seriously wondered if that rubber ball they gave me was a comfort object rather than anything really necessary for my processing. They had seen thousands ¨C tens of thousands ¨C of people like me, woken up from comas with few memories and no clothing; they had probably learned it was helpful to hand us something to squeeze as we took the very first steps to reenter society. I never saw those little balls used anywhere else as identification or keys or anything else.


    *


    The Dwelling Office looked like, I would eventually learn, the dwellings themselves in which they placed us. It was very basic, cheaply built, and filled with fake wood paneling and a few plastic plants. I couldn¡¯t decide if it was oddly familiar ¨C looking like an outdated dentist¡¯s office from my childhood ¨C or just odd.


    There was another bureaucrat in this office, again behind a desk which had a top like a very old video game. Similar to the first woman, he dealt with me quickly enough but had clearly done this a thousand times before and was ready for a different job.


    Again I had to greet him, since he just sat at desk silently after I entered.


    ¡°Ball,¡± he then said.


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°Yih must have been handed a ball by the sorter.¡±


    ¡°Ah.¡± I handed it to him.


    He took it and supposedly checked it by waving it underneath the table.


    ¡°Do you have a file?¡± he asked me.


    ¡°I suppose you mean a running file? But no, I don¡¯t have anything.¡±


    ¡°Yes, running. But that¡¯s all right, we¡¯ll get yih somewhere.¡±


    ¡°Let me ask you ¨C it became common for people to place themselves in those containers?¡±


    ¡°To preserve themselves,¡± he said. ¡°Yes. You don¡¯t remember that? Hasn¡¯t come back to yih, yet?¡±


    ¡°No. I don¡¯t think I ever knew that. I am remembering a bit more from when I was alive, but I¡¯m pretty certain that was not happening yet, back then. You know, the previous woman I spoke to said I was one of the first to be put in one.¡±


    ¡°Eh, is that so. So yih didn¡¯t anticipate how big that became. Well, no matter. We have a room for yih.¡±


    ¡°A room here?¡±


    ¡°No. A complex. It¡¯s pleasant, yih won¡¯t mind staying there.¡±


    This time they did hand me something in writing; a card with an address.


    ¡°There¡¯ll be a transport out in the yard. It will take yih there.¡±


    ¡°Do I ¨C get the ball back?¡±


    ¡°Ah, yes. Of course.¡± He handed it over.


    *


    The apartment building they placed me in was six stories, and it didn¡¯t look like it had taken very long to build. It was a dull sandstone outside, with a 1970s low-budget legal office feel inside as I said. It held nothing but revived old-timers like me. I had an unremarkable apartment midway up; all the apartments were unremarkable.


    The front door had a mail slot, and I was astounded to learn that communication with me was handled with just paper postcards, rather than with some successor to emails or to the internet, or by direct transmissions into my brain, et cetera. A card would just drop in, from time to time. I never managed to see the postal carrier who brought them.


    ¡°Occupation to be determined,¡± one said. ¡°Await further instructions.¡±


    That sounded a bit Orwellian to me. Would they order me to report to the Ministry of Surveillance to maintain the pneumatic tubes, or something?


    *


    If anyone would have told me that I would be essentially dead for several hundred years and then brought back, I would have guessed that there likely would have been a fair amount of celebrity involved; because how often could a society receive this sort of time-traveling resurrected visitor?


    Well, plenty often, it turned out. I gradually met a number of people on my floor, and elsewhere in the building, and learned their stories.


    An older guy named Walter ¨C who was quite overweight; apparently those caskets didn¡¯t shave off any pounds even as decades passed ¨C had been a hover-taxi driver, or pilot I guess, with a side gig of farming a patch of hillside land in southeastern Ohio somewhere. He¡¯d been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, he said, before there was a cure for it.


    (Which brings up a point of order: Most of these white case things, including mine, did not merely put their occupants into stasis; they cured them. That was the case [pun unintended] for Walter. For others, the cases did just keep them alive for decades or centuries until a cure was found for their illness. Of course, there had been mountains of instances of lost records in which no one knew who the person was or why he or she had been enclosed in the first place. That was some of the work going on in the warehouse where I had emerged ¨C simply diagnosing the illnesses.)


    ¡°I¡¯m so lucky,¡± he told me, ¡°but it¡¯s strange that I¡¯m celebrating all on my own, you know? So many miracles here, no one even notices. Ah well. It¡¯s all good, I¡¯m just not sure what I¡¯ll do. Everything is self-piloted, now, and it looks like people don¡¯t fly around like they used to anyway. I wish I could get my land back, but of course it ain¡¯t my land any longer. What big heads we have, thinking we ever own the land, you know?¡±


    Another neighbor, Bud Silverman, had had prostate cancer that had spread through nearly his entire body, apparently.


    ¡°My spine, liver, kidney ¨C I only had one, by then ¨C lungs, colon, everywhere. Why bother calling it prostate cancer at that point, right? The pain was something else. And I wasn¡¯t a guy who would usually complain about that.


    ¡°The only bright side of it was that I felt better about giving away the kidney. I had given it to my wife¡¯s sister, eighteen years before. Ex-wife thereafter. But that wasn¡¯t the issue, you know ¨C the issue was that the sister had still died, well before I got sick. Even with my kidney she lived only eight, nine years. And when I heard it, I asked ¨C this is awful ¨C ¡®Well, can I get my kidney back?¡¯ Ha, not really. I wanted to, though. But of course when I got so sick, I knew I wouldn¡¯t need the thing after all, so it¡¯s just as well someone else had gotten it. I think it helped her out, for some of her years afterward anyway.


    ¡°I think it was the bovine antibiotics in Brazil. The cause, the trigger. I was in shoes, you know. Shoe factories. Made them in Brazil, the Caribbean. Cheap labor back then. Cheap too back in your days, eh? I wasn¡¯t there so much later than you were. A few decades. Maybe more. But how much did things really change? But anyway, I sourced the leather, did some other related tasks, procurement. And I would go to these ranches, these cattle farms. Cut into the Amazon. That was an awful thing, I admit. But they did it more for the beef than for the hides. The beef was where the real money was, for them. So I didn¡¯t sweat the trees, you know? But anyway, they didn¡¯t want ¨C we didn¡¯t want, I admit ¨C any blemishes on the hides. For the leather. For the shoes, you know. So they medicated those cows something fierce. There were probably rules against some of that stuff in the U.S., but not down there. Who knows what all they shot into them. Smooth skin, smooth hide, you should have seen it. And I think that was what made me so sick. I think a lot of those ranchers were sick, too. So many drugs around, and the pesticides and whatnot. Revenge of the trees, you know? Or the revenge of the indigenous guys who had lived there. What a mess that was.


    ¡°So they closed me up in one of those cases. Docs told me it was my best bet. My only bet, really. And these clowns here pulled me out three months ago. I shouldn¡¯t call them clowns; they brought me back. But the bureaucracy, you know? Am I right? You went through those offices? It¡¯s a miracle anything gets done in that place. And they¡¯ve still got those cases stacked up six, eight high. We¡¯re the lucky ones, I guess. A lot of guys still behind us, you know.¡±

 Sixteen - Sarcophagi Warehouse; part two of three

    Another person down the hall was Cathy. She, too, had suffered from cancer; breast cancer in her case.


    ¡°I had always been so healthy. I really was. No milk, no fluoride, no nightshades.¡±


    (Many of these people really wanted to talk to me. They were in sort of a perfect storm of having had health problems, being bored, and having few others to talk to. And I was willing to listen. There wasn¡¯t much else to do, at that point.)


    ¡°I had a distance doc I timed with occasionally, but it was a shaman at a festival in Mexico who first diagnosed me. He was the first person who noticed something was wrong, and he did it before even I really knew. I felt fine. I had driven out there with my boyfriend. That was ¨C well, he was seventeen years younger than I was, the boyfriend. People thought that was odd, you know. He was twenty-four. He was barely younger than my daughter, actually. But he treated me so well. I always looked young for my age, I have to say. Honestly, you know.


    ¡°Anyway this shaman, it wasn¡¯t even at a ceremony of his that he noticed my illness; nothing like that. I was just holding a crescent lunge with eagle arms by a spring, a pool fed by a spring, when he came up and told me that he sensed a disturbance in me.


    ¡°I assumed he meant that I was under stress, which I was ¨C for one thing, my pressure points had been drifting for three moons, at that point ¨C but actually he meant the cancer. He just, noticed it. He was so good. Many cats can do that too, you know. If you watch them, if you really observe them, they can tell you all sorts of things.


    ¡°He invited me to a beach near his home, to heal. He said there was a bungalow there I could stay in. He was at his home, his camp, with his people. He had a lot of people always attached to him. They could sense his ¨C power. He was very good. Danny didn¡¯t want me to go. He was jealous, you know, and he had an ideology about the shaman. Danny hadn¡¯t quite yet matured the way he would. The way he must have. I really wonder what happened to him, how he turned out. When he was older; my age. I want to try to find out. Suleiman said that Danny was welcome to come along, and stay in the bungalow, but he didn¡¯t want to. He said he wanted to keep working his job, even though Suleiman said we could come by and get everything we needed at the camp with everyone else.


    ¡°Well, the sea didn¡¯t work, unfortunately. It would have worked, but there wasn¡¯t enough time. The cancer was advancing too fast. So a man at the camp who was on his way out told me, he told me this while he was packing up his car to leave, that I should try going into suspension. He said the pod would either keep me alive until there was a cure, or else it might clear up the cancer on its own. Of course. I don¡¯t need to tell you. And here I am, here we are. You¡¯re so quiet.¡±


    Many, many people like this hung out in that building, and wandered the streets. There seemed to be a surge of revivals going on, but no one I met there knew why. I wondered about it as I got to know my surroundings, but didn¡¯t manage to talk to anyone about it in depth for a couple weeks.


    I didn¡¯t have much to do ¨C basically nothing at all ¨C and yet we weren¡¯t given any direction about where we might go and what we might do as we awaited further instructions. I had the apartment, and food was delivered to it regularly, which of course was good but took away any need to get anything done.


    One place to go was a catch-all social services building, evidently geared to us ¨C the revived ¨C which was called the Medlife office. There were a few beleaguered workers in there, toiling away at their video-game desks or whatever they were, just like those of the couple people I had spoken to the day I climbed out of my case; but the lines to see them were too long. The place had a cavernous waiting room in which you had to take a number ¨C an actual hard copy number printed on a little slip, which surprised me ¨C and wait. The one time I went, my number was 3,056 and they were calling only number 422.


    I had actually sat down anyway to wait, but then I noticed that everyone else there was holding one of the postcards that were used to communicate with, evidently, all of us. I was next to a forlorn woman and asked her about hers.


    ¡°Ohithink you need it,¡± she said. ¡°Youjuscame without one? Norder?¡±


    ¡°No order, no,¡± I said. ¡°I just thought I¡¯d see what they might tell me. Any updates.¡±


    ¡°Updatesonlyonthe cards.¡±Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.


    She spoke very quickly, obviously, but I understood her. She was Black, and younger than many of the others. Like me, in that regard.


    ¡°When are you from?¡± I asked her.


    ¡°Twenty Ninety.¡±


    ¡°Well then, I didn¡¯t miss you by too long.¡±


    ¡°You¡¯re older than that.¡±


    ¡°Yes.¡±


    ¡°You do sound a little old-fashioned. Pardonmysangso.¡±


    ¡°No worries. Why did you enter into stasis, back then?¡±


    ¡°I didn¡¯t,¡± she said. ¡°I don¡¯t know what happened. My family did it for me, or somebody. I don¡¯t remember.¡±


    ¡°Same with me.¡±


    ¡°There¡¯s a few of us like that,¡± she said. ¡°More than a few. I hope you can find out what happened. I hope I can find out too.¡±


    *


    I also spent time along the lake waterfront. There was a promenade there, and several parks. The weather was cold, but not bitter, so I could walk around for much of the day. And I did strike up a few short conversations with local people there ¨C ¡°local¡± meaning local to this time, i.e. not more revived persons like me ¨C but they seemed reticent. The clothes I had been provided, along with the apartment and food, were plain, mostly browns and grays, and we returned folks stood out for that reason.


    ¡°I hope I¡¯m not, we¡¯re not, a burden on your system,¡± I told one man. ¡°It seems like there are a lot of us being brought back. In my day, this many new people might have been hard to accommodate. Like refugees.¡±


    He waved this off.


    ¡°Oh no, no. Yih¡¯re all welcome here. Taking some time to find useful things for all of yih to do. It¡¯ll come, though. Fiwereyou I¡¯d just enjoy my time out of that case. Breathe in the air.¡±


    ¡°What do you do?¡±


    ¡°I run a bar. With mih wife.¡±


    ¡°There are still bars.¡±


    ¡°Oh yes.¡±


    He just looked out over the lake. I asked:


    ¡°Are you from here? Toronto?¡±


    ¡°Oh yeah. Grew up right around here.¡±


    That seemed to be all; he said no more. He didn¡¯t ask me where I was from, or when, or what I had done for a living. He seemed bored, not curious at all about this two-hundred-and-sixty-year-old in front of him.


    *


    I didn¡¯t try to find his bar, but there would often be a sort of mobile one down by the water, which handed out drinks to me for free. I tried not to over-indulge or take advantage.


    It consisted of very large kegs mounted on a platform, surrounded by stools. The thing was mounted on small wheels, and it had some sort of silent propulsion that allowed the driver/bartender to move it around as she walked alongside.


    I had watched customers sidle up to it, get their drinks, and either seat themselves on the stools or wander down toward the water to other benches for a couple days. Each person would wave a small disk, like a poker chip, toward the bartender¡¯s pulpit on the thing after taking their drink from her; this was obviously how they paid. I had no such chip, but after a couple days of watching this just approached the woman.


    ¡°I¡¯m one of the revived,¡± I said. ¡°As I¡¯m sure you can tell.¡±


    ¡°Indeed. Welcome back.¡±


    ¡°Thanks ¨C so I see people getting drinks here. You know, the city has given us everything we need, but I don¡¯t have one of those chips everyone seems to pay you with.¡±


    ¡°Connects, we call them. No problem for you folks, though. What will you have?¡±


    ¡°You still have beer,¡± I told her.


    ¡°Been around for five thousand years, at least,¡± she said. ¡°Not something that¡¯s going away anytime soon.¡±


    She turned back to her taps, not making any further eye contact with me although there were no other customers around. She had a tattoo across her knuckles ¨C it may have been a stylized snake ¨C that I almost asked about, just for the sake of conversation, but I decided against it.


    So I would get a beer which I could open-carry along the Toronto waterfront during the day as the temperature rocketed up into the forties. I tried to make small talk with some of the people I saw around, but none of them wanted to talk. A guy standing next to his bike, two women on a break from their offices, an older man walking a dog ¨C none of them wanted to talk.


    There were other revived people down there ¨C we stood out due to our clothes, again ¨C and I had much more luck with them. I guess the native Torontonians just saw too many of us to want to bother. The days wore along, and I continued to wait to be assigned something to do.


    *


    One day while I was in my apartment there was a knock, which was rare. I opened the door. Outside in the hall stood a young Asian man. He wore denim ¨C always in style, apparently ¨C and a beard and mustache. His eyes looked knowing and friendly.


    ¡°Great-times-seven Grandfather,¡± he said.


    ¡°What?¡±


    He smiled, bobbed his head, and explained.


    ¡°Perry Doran. I am your great grandson, times seven. They told me yih¡¯ve been awoken.¡±

 Sixteen - Sarcophagi Warehouse; part three of three

    I just stared, unfortunately, trying to comprehend. It should not have been that hard. I felt bad about it, once I had absorbed what he was saying.


    ¡°Yeah, I don¡¯t look much like you, I know,¡± he said, still with the smile. ¡°One of your grands married into a Korean family. Obviously. My name¡¯s Tae-Gun Kim.¡±


    ¡°I ¨C come in.¡±


    We sat down on the two chairs I had. I started up, then, remembering my manners.


    ¡°So, Tae-Gun, it is.¡±


    ¡°Yes.¡±


    ¡°Can I get you a ¨C I don¡¯t even know what it is, some sort of fruity drink thing they put in my fridge ¨C I think it may be carbonated? And it may also have some narcotics in it? I haven¡¯t tried one.¡±


    He laughed.


    ¡°Probably a Sarsa. No, no narcotics in that. But I¡¯m fine, thanks.¡±


    ¡°Pardon my gaping,¡± I said. ¡°I didn¡¯t expect to meet any descendents. I guess my daughter must have had children of her own, eventually.¡±


    ¡°Araceli, yes.¡±


    I started. ¡°You know that name?¡±


    ¡°Well, they told me. The people at the bureau. My times-six great grandmother.¡±


    ¡°Did they? And they told you I was back, too? I didn¡¯t realize they were actually doing that much.¡±


    ¡°Yeah, well, the bureau people work when yih least expect it.¡± He smiled, again.


    ¡°Oh, I don¡¯t mean to criticize them,¡± I said. ¡°They just looked so busy. It didn¡¯t seem like they would have time to do much more than find me this place. There are so many people returning. But they let you know I was back?¡±


    ¡°Yeah, they let me know you were up and about, just yesterday. They do track down family, when they can.¡±


    ¡°You live around here? Did you have to come far? I don¡¯t even know how I wound up in Toronto. I was from Virginia, as best I can remember.¡±


    ¡°Yeah, we live here. Me, and I have a brother here. They did have you down in the States, I mean in your case, for most of these years, but they transferred it up here when they knew they were going to bring you back. They did that months ago, but didn¡¯t tell us until just yesterday.¡±


    ¡°Not until yesterday?¡±


    He nodded.


    ¡°Had you known at all that I was out there? In stasis?¡±


    ¡°No, I¡¯m afraid not. I suppose some other grandfather or grandmother ¨C who knows how far back ¨C assumed  you would not return for a long, long time, and just never told anyone else.¡±


    ¡°How long does it take to forget, and who¡¯s the last one to remember,¡± I said, basically to myself.


    ¡°What¡¯s that?¡±


    ¡°Just ¨C I ponder, often, how history forgets things. Not that I was very memorable myself, I¡¯m sure.¡±


    ¡°Well, someone remembered you, right? That¡¯s why they called me.¡±


    When I looked at him, I did not feel I was looking at myself. I knew, academically, that for a descendant this far removed from me, my DNA would be so diluted that it would be extremely unlikely there would be any resemblance, even had he been white rather than Korean. But I couldn¡¯t help look for something ¨C a jaw line, a gesture, an expression ¨C that would remind me of what I saw in the mirror, or in my parents or aunts and uncles. But there was just nothing there. He was just a nice-looking young man of obvious Korean heritage, nothing more.


    He did make me wonder what my son would have looked like, had Jen and I had one. I found myself looking at his shoulders, especially; somehow it was shoulders like my own that I pictured in my hypothetical son, more so than a certain face or stature.


    Araceli had come along quickly, actually conceived before Jen and I were married, but then we couldn¡¯t get pregnant again. We hadn¡¯t exactly planned to have a child that soon, but as the years passed we were glad that we did; referring to Araceli a few times ¨C not in front of her ¨C as our apparent ¡°just under the wire¡± offspring.


    ¡°Well,¡± I told him, ¡°thanks for coming by. Nice place to be, I mean for me at least. I had never traveled to Canada, before.¡±


    ¡°Some way to visit.¡±


    ¡°Indeed. Anyway I¡¯ve walked around a bit. Seems nice. Not sure I¡¯ll love the winter, once it starts.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s not so bad. Of course, I grew up here though. Yih¡¯re so much better off than most of these folks who have come back, yih know. I think so, anyway.¡±


    ¡°Because they¡¯re older?¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s right. This putting down ¨C what?¡±


    He had seen me flinch at that.


    ¡°That term, for this,¡± I told him. ¡°I¡¯m surprised it was taken up. I don¡¯t think they could have called it that when they did it to me.¡±


    ¡°Why not?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s what we said for . . . euthanizing animals.¡±


    ¡°Eh, is that right. Put down? Well that¡¯s pretty bad, isn¡¯t it? At any rate, this, uh, process here was done more with the very aged, in most cases.¡±


    ¡°So why are so many coming out now? That¡¯s something I¡¯ve been wondering about. And some other people in this building, too. I mean other revived people I¡¯ve spoken with. No one has told us why.¡±


    ¡°Well, we should be clear there are still many who are not coming out. As yih must have seen in the storage.¡±


    ¡°I did, yes. Stacks of those cases.¡±


    ¡°But yes, we have an influx. We¡¯ve made some advances, so we¡¯re able to bring some people out.¡±


    ¡°So it worked, for them.¡±


    ¡°Well, perhaps. They won¡¯t be immortal. We¡¯re just curing more things, but we¡¯re not living particularly longer. So would it have mattered to them? They may have bought themselves ten more years before they get the next disease, the next thing, whatever it is. But does that really make so much of a difference to someone who has lived ninety, a hundred, hundred and ten years?¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s the lifespan, these days?¡±If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    He nodded.


    ¡°Perhaps we should have left everyone in their cases until we, or whoever it is, further down the line, can promise them immortality. Or at least a much longer lifespan. Longer than a tortoise, let¡¯s say, or a sturgeon. Who knows. It¡¯s a debate that¡¯s raging right now, yih know.¡±


    ¡°I didn¡¯t. But ¨C still, why are they bringing back so many people now?¡±


    ¡°Well, there have been some advances in science, medicine, you know. People realizing we could bring back many of you. Cell therapy, damage reversal, whatnot.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m surprised it¡¯s taken this long. Back when I was alive, the first time around, things were advancing leaps and bounds. A lot of people thought aging would be reversed within that century.¡±


    ¡°Well . . . there have been amazing advances. Along the lines of what you were expecting, it sounds like. I have to say.¡± He had slowed down his speech, choosing his words, and now he grimaced.


    ¡°What do you mean?¡± I asked him. ¡°What¡¯s the problem?¡±


    ¡°Well, actually,¡± he resumed, ¡°a lot of you could have been brought back some time ago. The technology has been around for a while. Some decades. But bringing all of you back sort of became a political question.¡±


    ¡°How so?¡±


    ¡°Just, you know, how to integrate so many people at once. And if we weren¡¯t going to bring all of you back at the same time, well then, how to choose. So ¨C honestly, you might have been able to come back forty, fifty years ago. Maybe even more. We don¡¯t know how you all will feel about this.¡± He seemed truly concerned.


    I shrugged. ¡°That doesn¡¯t really matter. Jennifer and Araceli were already long gone. I mean, right? You¡¯re not talking that far back, are you?¡±


    ¡°Oh no, no, you¡¯re right about that. This was long after Araceli had passed. But still, you¡¯ve missed out on the last several decades.¡±


    I shrugged again.


    ¡°Well, I don¡¯t know what I missed. Literally. Was it ¨C some golden age or something?¡±


    He smiled.


    ¡°What, Great Grandfather, you don¡¯t think it¡¯s a golden age now?¡±


    ¡°Could be, I suppose. But I have to admit ¨C I thought a golden age would be more exciting than what I¡¯ve seen so far. Some, I don¡¯t know, some Twenty-Third Century version of Belle Epoque Paris, something like that.¡±


    ¡°No, no. We¡¯re still just Toronto, I¡¯m afraid. But seriously ¨C I don¡¯t know, we¡¯ve had our ups and downs. Now is as good a time as any to come back, if you ask me.¡±


    ¡°That sounds good. I¡¯m glad to be back. But listen ¨C I¡¯ve found it¡¯s hard to talk to the local people here. At any length at all, I mean. Not to the other revived people, but the ones, you know, from this time. In my first life I could ¨C keep a conversation going, you know, but now it¡¯s like pulling teeth.¡±


    ¡°Pulling teeth,¡± he repeated.


    ¡°Difficult. You know.¡±


    He laughed. ¡°I know. We don¡¯t pull teeth anymore, though, so that¡¯s a really old expression. But yih¡¯re right, of course; there are just so many people coming back, that the novelty wore off some time ago. You¡¯re one of the oldest ones, if not the oldest, but people don¡¯t know that of course. But for most of the returned, the huge majority ¨C ¡®Okay, you¡¯re another seventy-year-old cancer patient who nearly died a hundred years ago.¡¯ And they¡¯ve been coming back for some time, now. The novelty is off.¡±


    ¡°I see. Well, I can understand, then.


    ¡°And there¡¯s just so many of you. For many years, yih know, decades, everyone with a terminal disease was opting to be put into stasis. It added up.


    ¡°You know,¡± he continued, ¡°what I can¡¯t help thinking about: how many little nuclear generators are out there between all those cases? They¡¯re being disposed of properly, supposedly, but you have to wonder.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s what powers them? Powered mine?¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s right.¡±


    ¡°Hey, speaking of something else going on with these: what are these files I¡¯ve heard people talk about several times? Running files? People seem surprised that I don¡¯t have one. And these files seem to help clear a path, if you have one, but I don¡¯t see how much good any more old paperwork would do.¡±


    ¡°They¡¯re investment accounts, bank accounts,¡± Tae Gun said. ¡°Many people who were put down ¨C I mean, placed into stasis ¨C set up accounts for themselves to have when they were brought back. With a hundred years or more of interest, many of them are very well set now even if they didn¡¯t start with much.¡±


    ¡°The accounts all held up?¡±


    ¡°Most of them. They had ups and downs along the way, of course, but this is truly investing for the long term. Set it and forget it.¡±


    ¡°Well, I don¡¯t have one. I¡¯ll need to work.¡±


    He shrugged. ¡°Not really. They¡¯ll deliver food to you and let you stay in this apartment for as long as you want.¡±


    ¡°Really? We can all just ¨C be on the dole?¡±


    He nodded. ¡°Although ¨C as I mentioned, for a lot of these people coming back, honestly they won¡¯t be on it very long. These folks who are a lot older than you, I mean.¡±


    ¡°Hmm. Well, I still need to do something. I can¡¯t just sit around. What do you do?¡±


    ¡°I work for government. The water office.¡±


    ¡°Just ¨C the water utility, you mean?¡±


    ¡°Yep. Monitoring quality, quality controls, that sort of thing.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s excellent. You must feel useful. I¡¯m still waiting for them to tell me what I can do.¡±


    ¡°You were an archaeologist?¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s right. Still am, I guess. Just with a very large hole in my work history, now. It will be an interesting resume.¡±


    ¡°We still have archaeologists, but it¡¯s not easy to find work in that field.¡±


    ¡°Oh, I¡¯m sure. It wasn¡¯t easy in my first life, either. But regardless I just have to wait and see what they come up with.¡±


    He shook his head. ¡°You don¡¯t really need to wait.¡±


    ¡°Is that right?¡±


    ¡°I mean, you can, and they¡¯ll come up with something eventually. It might possibly be in your field, you never know. But you can just start working. So, I actually know someone who works at the city stadium, and she says there¡¯s a spot there she could get for you. It¡¯s just two or three times a week, but that¡¯s something.¡±


    ¡°The stadium?¡±


    ¡°Yes.¡±


    ¡°What sorts of sports do they play there, these days?¡±


    ¡°Soccer, and hurling, and disc.¡±


    ¡°Disc?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s descended from what you called ultimate frisbee. It¡¯s just ushering, but, you know, it¡¯s fun.¡±


    ¡°So there are still spectator sports.¡±


    ¡°Oh yes. Bread and circuses are still with us.¡± He smiled. Actually I¡¯m not sure if he ever stopped smiling.


    ¡°So, I need to go, Great Greatfather,¡± he said.


    ¡°You can really call me Perry,¡± I said. ¡°Grandfather sounds strange. And I¡¯m not sure if I¡¯m even ten years older than you, going by years awake.¡±


    ¡°Well, okay then. Perry. I¡¯ll have my friend call you. Her name is Constance.¡±


    ¡°How will she call?¡±


    ¡°What, you mean you haven¡¯t received any calls yet?¡±


    ¡°No. Just those postcard things from the bureau.¡±


    ¡°Really? It will be a light in front of you, a pale light. Just say hello when it appears. You just talk. If you want to see each other, you can turn on sight.¡±


    ¡°How do I do that?¡±


    ¡°You just say ¡®Turn on sight.¡¯ I suppose you were used to pressing buttons, eh?¡±


    ¡°I was, yes.¡±


    ¡°This is very intuitive. You won¡¯t have any problems.¡±


    He stood up then. As he did so, first placing his right hand on his knee, I saw the silver ring he wore on his right ring finger. Actually, I knew it was white gold.


    ¡°Tae-Gun. That ring.¡±


    ¡°What, this?¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s mine. I mean it was mine. Past tense. My wedding ring.¡±


    He lifted up that hand. It was definitely it: It had an engraved pattern of tiny ripples, like what you would see looking over an ocean or a lake.


    ¡°Really?¡± he said. ¡°You and ¨C Jennifer?¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s right.¡±


    ¡°I had no idea. It came down through the family. I liked it, so I wear it. I didn¡¯t know the story behind it, just that it had been in the family.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s definitely the one,¡± I said. ¡°It¡¯s ¨C fairly unique. Was in my day, at least.¡±


    ¡°Definitely is. That¡¯s why I liked it. Reminds me of Lake Ontario out here.¡±


    ¡°You wear it on your right hand?¡±


    ¡°Yes, for the time being at least. No wife yet. Do you want it back?¡± He made to take it off.


    ¡°No, no. You go ahead and keep it. I¡¯m so glad it¡¯s still around. I was annoyed actually that it didn¡¯t come along with me in that case. Maybe they thought it would have corroded. But here it is.¡±

 Seventeen - The Tooth and the Tanker; part one of six: conversational life

    The probe cruised the atmosphere of the alien planet searching for conversational life.


    (The people who sent the probe had debated for decades about what exactly they were looking for: self-aware life? Intelligent life? Communicative life? All those terms could apply to beings which they had right at home which were wild animals, or pets. They eventually settled on life forms with which they could carry out a meaningful conversation; that seemed to cover it. Even if a species might fail some other test of intelligence, the probers would be content with this. And the wiser among them had remarked that this attitude acknowledged that some alien life forms might be so advanced that they themselves would not want to bother carrying out a conversation with the probers; that was fair enough, they thought.)


    The probe pursued its slow flight in the planet¡¯s atmosphere through daylight, darkness, gales of wind, water precipitation. Eventually it found one being ¨C just one ¨C who was deemed capable of holding a conversation, although it was currently not able to.


    The probe was automated. It had searched the planet for forty years. It would need to signal its home planet and summon a much larger ship to begin the conversation.


    *


    Perry became aware that he was floating in a cavernous space, a void. At first he thought he was in outer space itself, naked and soon to die; then, perhaps in freefall; finally he realized that he could see curved walls in the distance. There was light, from a source he couldn¡¯t see, but also these dark walls. He was floating in an enormous cylindrical space.


    He felt he had been there for some time, but couldn¡¯t say why.


    He discovered that he was able to twist himself around to get a better view of his surroundings, but it all looked the same in any direction; except that above himself he saw, also floating, a very large open white case.


    A white light appeared before him. It started as a graying of the void, and then brightened. It became a sphere, smaller than he was; but it then lengthened, took shape, and turned into a reflection of himself.


    He looked pale, and had no muscle tone. His reflection¡¯s midair float looked even more jarring than it felt doing it: his arms were slightly outstretched, legs apart.


    The reflection opened its mouth and made a sound, but it was only a hum. It varied, ranging higher and lower.


    ¡°What are you?¡± Perry asked.


    ¡°What,¡± the reflection repeated.


    ¡°And where am I? What is this?¡±


    ¡°You are,¡± the reflection said.


    Perry did not answer; the reflection then refined it:


    ¡°You are? Where are?¡±


    ¡°I am . . . Perry. My name is Perry. And this is . . . ¡± but he didn¡¯t know what to answer.


    ¡°Perry is what?¡±


    ¡°Perry is me. Something happened to me. I don¡¯t understand. I don¡¯t understand where I am. Or what that case is.¡±


    ¡°Perry is where case.¡±


    He said nothing for a moment.


    ¡°You¡¯re saying I was in that?¡±


    ¡°Perry was in that case. What you found Perry.¡±


    ¡°You let me out of it?¡±


    ¡°What you let Perry out of case.¡±


    He paused. Had he been in a chair he might have leaned back, at this point, to consider; but as he was floating, the lean just made him a bit more horizontal. He straightened back up.


    ¡°So you need to build your . . . vocabulary. Very good. Yes, I am Perry and I am floating here in the air. In this huge cylinder. You found me in that case, very good. But I don¡¯t know where I am. I want to get out, to get down. Down there. Not up here. And I don¡¯t understand who you are. I am a person, a man, a human. I guess you are not.¡±


    ¡°I am not a human,¡± the reflection answered. Now it paused, and seemed to think about something; Perry wondered if he looked that blank-faced when he himself stopped to choose words.


    ¡°I am zhranmin,¡± the reflection said.


    ¡°Zhranmin. Nice to meet you, Zhranmin. I would like to get out of here. And down.¡±


    ¡°You are in the air. Zhranmin float here to found you in case.¡±


    ¡°Floated through what? You flew here?


    ¡°Zhranmin flew in air. Air air air.¡±


    Perry stared at his reflection.


    ¡°Lots of air. Are you saying you are some sort of alien? Aliens? You flew through space? Here to Earth?¡±


    ¡°Zhranmin aliens flew through space to Earth to found Perry.¡±


    ¡°To find Perry ¨C but what about everyone else? Am I still on Earth? Where are all of my people? All the other humans?¡±


    ¡°Aliens find Perry on Earth. Perry, Perry.¡±


    ¡°No one else? No other humans?¡±


    ¡°No one else.¡±


    *


    Perry tried to ignore the implications of this. It was too much to think about, now, here, floating naked and talking to an automated reflection of himself.


    ¡°I am on Earth right now? It feels like I¡¯m in space. I shouldn¡¯t be floating.¡±


    ¡°Perry floats in zhranmin here. Zhranmin case.¡±


    ¡°This is a ship of yours? A spaceship? Or airship ¨C something like that?¡±


    ¡°This is a zhranmin spaceship on Earth.¡±


    ¡°On Earth? Or above it? In space?¡±


    ¡°On Earth.¡±


    ¡°Can I get out, then? I want to get out and walk around. See the Earth.¡±


    ¡°Perry get out, walk around the Earth.¡±


    ¡°Okay, good.¡±


    The reflection did not respond.


    ¡°May I do that now?¡±


    ¡°Not now. Perry get out and walk around the earth.¡±


    ¡°Later, you¡¯re saying? Not now?¡±


    ¡°Later.¡±


    ¡°Are more of you here? Real zhranmins, not just this reflection?¡±


    Before the reflection answered, Perry heard a dull groan from below him. He then started drifting down toward the floor of the ship. It must have landed. The ¡°later¡± the reflection promised apparently meant just a moment.


    He noticed that the white case, which had been floating up and behind him all this time, was also slowly falling.


    His feet reached the floor, which was warm, gray, and soft. It curved up into darkness on either side of him. The cylindrical ship must have been many hundreds of yards wide, he realized.


    The case landed a short distance behind him, coming to a soft touchdown. It lay open, silent. Perry thought it looked ¨C spent. Its job was done.Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    The reflection, too, had descended along with Perry.


    ¡°Perry can walk to Earth,¡± the reflection told him. It started drifting straight ahead, looking back to see if Perry was following. (Although it struck him that this automated guide would not actually have to turn its eyes toward him in order to sense him moving. It was clearly mimicking his behavior.)


    ¡°You guys are sticking to the illusion, aren¡¯t you.¡±


    ¡°Sticking to the illusion?¡±


    ¡°Never mind.¡±


    The image had been floating a few inches above the ground, until it observed how Perry walked. It then imitated him, awkwardly at first but then quickly copying his gait very accurately.


    ¡°Perry can walk to Earth,¡± it repeated.


    ¡°You¡¯re taking me to a door? An exit? A way out?¡±


    ¡°To a door.¡±


    ¡°Why is this ship so large? There¡¯s no one else in it?¡±


    ¡°Large?¡±


    ¡°Big.¡± He raised his arms, gestured around. ¡°This is big. A big zhranmin ship. As big as a tanker. But it¡¯s just me here?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s just you here. Zhranmin are not on earth.¡±


    ¡°Not here on earth.¡±


    ¡°Not here.¡±


    ¡°You¡¯re on a different planet. This is all automated?¡±


    ¡°This is automated. Zhranmin are not here.¡±


    They continued to walk down the padded floor-wall.


    ¡°Can you show me what you look like?¡±


    Again there was a pause before his reflection answered.


    ¡°Zhranmin will show Perry what look like, later.¡±


    The reflection then spoke a sentence with the sound of a question:


    ¡°Perry: I, you, you guys. One, no one. Zhranmin zhranmin. Human. Human human?¡±


    He didn¡¯t understand what his guide was trying to say.


    The reflection repeated:


    ¡°Perry: I, you, you guys. One, no one. Zhranmin zhranmin. Human. Human human?¡±


    ¡°Are you asking me for more pronouns? You are. You¡¯re learning English. All right.¡± He nodded.


    ¡°We are here, you and I. They are not here, the other humans, or the other zhranmin. Who, what, where, when, why. Who is here? Perry and you are here. What are we? A human, and a reflection of one made by zhranmin. Where are we? On Earth, is what you¡¯re telling me. When? What time is it? How many times has the Earth revolved around the sun since I have been in that case?¡±


    He gestured, with both hands, something suggesting a ball making large orbits.


    ¡°I don¡¯t know that one. I would like to. Maybe you can tell me. And why? How did this happen?  I don¡¯t know. Maybe you can explain that to me too.


    ¡°Need, want, have,¡± he continued. ¡°The three most important words. A linguist told me that. I need water, and food. Well, not right now. But I will need water and food to drink and eat. I have ¨C not much. I have a case back there. I have black hair. Want ¨C I want to get outside. I want to, I would like to, get outside and see Earth.¡±


    He saw now that they were reaching the end of the cylinder. A giant wall rose up before them. He didn¡¯t see a doorway or hatch.


    ¡°We are here,¡± the reflection said. ¡°You want to get outside.¡±


    ¡°Indeed. You¡¯ve got a magic doorway here?¡±


    And then the wall did indeed dilate open.


    Outside, Perry saw a broad meadow. He half-closed his eyes from the sunshine. It must have been early afternoon in the summer. Tall grasses rolled away from him. At the far edges of the meadow, a treeline surrounded him on every side.


    A warm breeze blew up and over him. The green vision before him was stunning.


    ¡°Is this real?¡± he asked.


    A ramp led down from the ship. At its bottom he stepped off into the grass. Turning around, he saw that the ship was indeed about the size of an oil tanker. A large gray cylinder, sure enough. It looked massively incongruous in the quiet field.


    The zhranmin reflection still stood at the top of the ramp.


    ¡°Are you coming down?¡±


    ¡°Automated here in ship,¡± it answered.


    ¡°You can¡¯t be projected out,¡± Perry said. ¡°Okay. You will stay up there. Up, down. Left, right. Ahead, behind.¡±


    With the last word he motioned behind himself with his thumb. He then turned and walked toward the treeline.


    The walk took a few minutes. The trees were mostly maples, vivid green. Their leaves barely swayed as breezes drifted through. He saw ants several times, and there were occasional gnats. The world was not dead. Only all the people, apparently.


    Some way further down the treeline he heard birds not far off.


    ¡°The dinosaurs continue to be survivors.¡±


    He returned after making a circuit of the meadow. Beyond the treeline to might what have been the north ¨C the sun was too high in the sky for him to really guess ¨C the land ran downhill, and he thought he might have heard running water. Hugging the treeline and circling back, he eventually came even with the edge of the alien ship again. He thought about walking all the way around it, but it was very long, and his feet were starting to get irritated from the field grass. The reflection was still in the doorway when he returned.


    ¡°It¡¯s beautiful,¡± he said.


    ¡°This is Earth,¡± the reflection answered.


    ¡°Does that mean you agree? Very courteous, thank you. But you¡¯re telling me there¡¯s nowhere to go? There are no towns, no other humans?¡±


    ¡°Reflection need to learn English,¡± it said.


    ¡°You need more vocabulary to explain it. Very well. There¡¯s no rush, it sounds like.¡±


    ¡°You need to drink and eat.¡±


    ¡°I do.¡±


    He heard a hum in the air behind him, and turned to see two objects approaching. They were silver, metal. He couldn¡¯t see what was keeping them up in the air.


    The first was about the size and shape of a bath sink. It lowered itself down to his chest level. It was full of water. The second was also bowl-shaped, but oblong. It, too, lowered itself, and Perry saw it was full of pears. They looked wild ¨C small and tough. But edible.


    *


    Later, as the sun dropped, Perry explained the concept of sleep to the reflection, and arranged to spend the night just outside the ship. The reflection caused what looked like a huge tarp to be flown out of the doorway by the hovercraft robots.


    ¡°Thanks for this. I don¡¯t know if it''s supposed to be a tent-sized blanket, or a blanket-shaped tent.¡±


    Regardless, it was warm and comfortable once he wrapped himself up in it.


    *


    He spent two more days in the meadow, just outside the ship, the reflection always present in the doorway. The robots brought him more water, many more pears, and a pile of raw grains of wheat. He thought for a time about asking for a lighter, and a pot, and more water, but eventually realized he could simply explain ¨C at some length ¨C that he needed the wheat to be cooked. And after a short time the robots flew him a basin of cooked wheat.


    All along, the English of the reflection improved.


    ¡°How did you find me?¡±


    ¡°A probe of ours detected you, in the case. It was unable to establish contact with you, of course, so we sent a recovery device. This ship. Large enough to revive you and open the case.¡±


    ¡°Far larger than needed to do that. But the initial probe was not equipped for that?¡±


    ¡°The probe was smaller than your smallest tooth.¡±


    ¡°Where was I found? The case, I mean?¡±


    ¡°In this field. Beneath where this ship is now.¡±


    ¡°Just on the ground?¡±


    ¡°It was mostly buried in the dirt.¡±


    ¡°No one built me any sort of temple? The nerve.¡±


    ¡°Temple?¡±


    ¡°A building of respect.¡±


    ¡°Sometimes your words are intentionally and unreasonably incorrect. The word for that?¡±


    ¡°Humor. So do you travel faster than light?¡±


    ¡°No.¡±


    ¡°So you¡¯re from a star close enough to do all this. Send the probe, then send the recovery ship.¡±


    ¡°That depends on what you mean by ¡®close,¡¯ Perry. These steps took four thousand years.¡±


    *


    Perry felt unmoored; as if a dock line had come unknotted, or an anchor chain had snapped. He had been hoping all along, he realized now, that he was not too far removed from his time; not too far from 2025, from Jen and Araceli. Even if they were gone, somehow it seemed it would be less final to him if he was still living in something that could be considered their time. The instant he heard ¡°four thousand years¡± that hope vanished, and it was like a pleasant hum that suddenly ended and was felt only in its absence.


    ¡°So I am four thousand years past my life,¡± he said.


    ¡°Or more,¡± he added. ¡°Maybe much more. That was just your transit time after you found me.¡±


    ¡°You were in the stasis device for over two hundred thousand years.¡±


    *


    This struck him silent for a long stretch.


    Involuntarily he had a vision of the years that passed shown as a bar on a graph, or an animation of a rising tower; the tower piled up levels higher and higher, exponentially faster, stacking them on top of each other by the tens, hundreds, thousands.


    ¡°That¡¯s ¨C epochs. Ice ages could have come and gone. The Holocene may be over. It must be.¡±


    *


    ¡°Do you have any idea of what happened to humans?¡±


    ¡°They did not survive long after your first life. Relatively speaking. We have found some of their residue, and dated it. It dates to only several hundred years after your life.¡±


    ¡°And two hundred thousand years have passed since.¡±


    ¡°Yes. More like two hundred and forty thousand.¡±


    Perry paused.


    ¡°Well then.¡±


    He thought to himself for a while.


    ¡°The advances in technology that made my survival possible in that case,¡± he eventually said, ¡°were accompanied by others that killed everyone else. It¡¯s ironic.¡±


    No response.


    ¡°I suppose you¡¯ve also come across some of the spacecraft we sent out? Our own probes?¡±


    ¡°We have seen several.¡±


    ¡°Nothing like yours. But we made something that lasted. A couple fancy cameras we blasted to nowhere. No settlements of ours on the Moon? Or Mars?¡±


    ¡°A few were made, but they lasted no longer.¡±

 Seventeen - The Tooth and the Tanker; part two of six: the aliens offer

    Days passed and Perry learned more about his far-away neighbors.


    For one thing, he learned where the flying tubs, which the reflection called ¡°gathering devices,¡± came from: simply an aperture on the far side of the interior of the cylinder. It did not open up into a space that he could enter, but it was the exit of a fabrication device, a giant one, that could produce the blankets, and shoes, buckets, whatever, along with the devices. The devices, too, could come in an endless variety. One had a saw; another, a lasso capability. The zhranmin referred to all of them as ¡°gathering devices.¡± They could all fly, and they could exit the ship either through the interior and out through the door he used, or straight through the hull on the far side.


    As for the zhranmin themselves, they were humanoid. They were from an Earth-like planet; and in the process of natural selection there, as here on Earth, it had been the creatures which had first become bipedal and used two hands which had had the spare calories to develop conversational brains.


    Eventually the zhranmin decided that Perry was ready to see them, so they changed the appearance of their avatar ¨C what had been a naked reflection of himself all along ¨C to look like one of them. The resulting humanoid was tall and had smooth, gray skin. It looked to Perry as if it had evolved from a reptile rather than a mammal.


    ¡°Are you ¨C warm-blooded?¡± he asked it. ¡°I mean is your blood as warm as mine? Do you have to ¨C warm up in your sun? Pardon my asking.¡±


    ¡°We are warm-blooded.¡±


    The zhranmin¡¯s face was quite human-like, but obviously not human. It had very large, black eyes, the smooth skin and scalp, and an elongated jaw. It was not quite uncanny valley, but it could look strikingly like a very odd human depending on the angle and its expression.


    ¡°I¡¯m surprised you¡¯re just a bipedal, two-armed creature,¡± Perry said. ¡°Like me.¡±


    ¡°Most conversational life that we have seen developed on rocky planets, with gaseous atmospheres warmed by a star,¡± the reflection said. ¡°In such environments, life tends to generate the same solutions to problems of self-sufficiency and procreation. What you call humanoid forms are one of them. Another is coastal creatures with multiple arms, multiple eyes, and, initially at least, hard shells.¡±


    ¡°Crabs,¡± Perry said.


    ¡°Crabs, very well. And then some similar beings evolved in water, again with multiple arms but more amorphous bodies. You have them here in your oceans.¡±


    ¡°Octopuses, it sounds like. Or squid.¡±


    ¡°Eight arms, yes. These are common forms which we have seen.¡±


    Perry later asked it:


    ¡°Are you still reflecting my own emotions, but on your face? They look so similar. Your frowns, your attention. It¡¯s like reading a human.¡±


    ¡°We are reflecting your own expressions. We believe you would find our faces confusingly blank.¡±


    ¡°Fair enough. And are you the reflection of a certain individual? Back on your planet? Or are you just ¨C generic?


    ¡°This avatar is representative of our entire race. No one individual.¡±


    ¡°And am I ¨C speaking to one of you at this moment? Is my voice being transmitted to your planet? But I don¡¯t think that would be possible.¡±


    ¡°You are speaking to an automation. We are sending your voice, and information about you, to our planet, but that will take hundreds of years.¡±


    ¡°So your planet is hundreds of light-years away.¡±


    ¡°That is correct.¡±


    ¡°And you are just ¨C alien artificial intelligence. A very smart Siri or Alexa.¡±


    Perry began referring to the updated reflection as Z. And he decided the avatar was indeed still a reflection ¨C that was an accurate term to use ¨C since it was reflecting his own expressions and mannerisms.


    The zhranmin did not die, apparently; they lived as long as they wanted to, and they wanted to live for a very long time. The individuals who had sent out the initial probe had died before news of the discovery of Perry had been relayed back to their planet; but by the time the revival ship had been built and sent out, it was the same people who had sent it ¨C two hundred thousand years before ¨C who would receive the ship¡¯s transmissions.


    ¡°Are new people still born, among you?¡±


    ¡°Yes.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s not too crowded?¡±


    ¡°We control how many.¡±


    ¡°But even so. You don¡¯t need to colonize habitable planets, that sort of thing?¡±


    ¡°We create new surfaces around our star. We are capable of creating as much surface area as we need.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m sure you are.¡±


    ¡°You need not worry about us taking away the Earth.¡±


    Perry looked at Z. It seemed suspiciously blank-faced.


    ¡°Look who¡¯s using humor now,¡± he said. ¡°That was a joke, wasn¡¯t it?¡±


    ¡°Yes, it was a joke.¡±


    ¡°Very good. But no, I¡¯m not worried. It¡¯s not as if I am short on room. You¡¯d be welcome here.


    ¡°Hey, by the way,¡± he added. ¡°Did you visit during my time? Did you send probes? I guess no one would have seen them anyway, they were so tiny.¡±


    ¡°We did not. But other races did.¡±


    ¡°Really? So many people would have been vindicated, knowing that. Too late now, though. Have you spoken to those other races about us?¡±


    ¡°There are so many inhabited worlds, Perry.¡±


    That was a no.


    *


    After many weeks, he had set up a shelter, with a fireplace. The fireplace was made of stones he had found and stacked himself; the shelter, however, was made of synthetic panels made by the zhranmin fabricator. Perry had also cleared some of the field and had transplanted several fruit tree saplings which the gatherers had found and brought to him.


    ¡°I wonder if it¡¯s too late to plant potatoes,¡± he said to himself. ¡°If I can explain what they are to Z, and if the gatherers can find any. And I¡¯ll absolutely have to plant things in the spring.¡±This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.


    There was a significant stream at the bottom of a decline off the north side of the meadow, as he thought he had heard in his first walk-around, and over the course of several days he had arranged many rocks in it to form a weir. He had never seen a real one in his first life, but knew the concept from his archaeological reading. The trap captured many fish too small for him to bother with, but also plenty of larger ones.


    ¡°Our devices could simply bring you fish,¡± Z said.


    ¡°I know. I need to figure this out for myself, though. I want to think about sustainability.¡±


    ¡°You used a shovel from us to deepen the weir,¡± the reflection pointed out.


    ¡°You¡¯re just a comedian now. It¡¯s hilarious, guys.¡±


    *


    He wondered if he would be making the effort to survive were it not for the alien avatar constantly watching him from the doorway, and speaking with him. Had he been truly alone, two hundred centuries after the demise of all other humans, he might have simply lay down and starved. What would there have been to live for?


    But then again, without the zhranmin he would not have known that he was the last person alive. So he might have tried to keep himself alive in hopes of finding someone else. So, either way, he likely would have still been trying to catch fish.


    *


    ¡°I can¡¯t believe all the humans died out,¡± Perry told the reflection on another day. ¡°All but me. We engaged in some very self-destructive behavior, I know, but to wipe ourselves out to a person. That¡¯s just . . . mind-boggling. Without an asteroid strike, I mean. An asteroid strike would explain it, but you know I¡¯ve seen deer around here, and I don¡¯t think mammals would have sprung back to be that size so soon if a Chicxulub-style blast had been bad enough to kill off every last mammal the size of a human. I don¡¯t really know, though. But I had the impression that after the last one, it was just . . . rodents ruling the Earth for half a million years, something like that.


    ¡°And even with a nuclear war, I think some people would have survived. Even if only a tiny number. Plenty of people had caves, mountain shelters, whatever. They would have been able to last a few years, even if the sun was blocked. Wouldn¡¯t they? And it wouldn¡¯t take very many of them.


    ¡°So, I¡¯m not surprised my people drove themselves straight into some apocalypse, but I¡¯m surprised it killed every last one of them. I would have guessed it would be like the rabbits in Australia, and myxomatosis. Before I was born, a virus was intentionally introduced to try to eradicate rabbits in Australia. And it did kill like ninety-eight percent of them. But those other two percent . . .


    ¡°And if robots took over and killed us all off, something like that, you would think they would still be here. Doing their robot thing, whatever their point was. You guys really have no idea what happened?¡±


    ¡°We cannot determine the fate of humans from the residue we have found,¡± Z answered. ¡°We agree it was unlikely an asteroid strike.¡±


    ¡° ¡®Residue,¡¯ ¡± Perry repeated. He shook his head. ¡°That¡¯s quite a word for human society. All of our buildings, our bullet trains, pyramids, the Eiffel Tower ¨C just residue. Residue.


    ¡°Well. I still hope it wasn¡¯t something people did intentionally. Imagine if it was. What people would think if they knew they were reducing themselves to residue.¡±


    *


    Soon thereafter, Z told Perry:


    ¡°We could reintroduce you.¡±


    ¡°To whom?¡±


    ¡°We mean we could create more humans. Reintroduce your people. From the genetic information in each of your cells.¡±


    *


    Perry had shared enough information with Z for the alien reflection to get this idea across, but nowhere near enough to get into all the details. And he had only a hazy understanding of those details, himself.


    This was a conundrum that arose often, for them: The alien intelligence had a vast understanding of space, planets, physics, biology, mathematics, on and on; but neither of them had access to all of the knowledge and especially the vocabulary that humanity had developed for all of this, so the alien could not know how to describe these concepts to Perry.


    ¡°Is that Venus?¡± Perry had asked the reflection, one warm night.


    ¡°What is ¡®Venus¡¯?¡±


    ¡°The second planet. Brightest one in our sky.¡±


    ¡°It is the second planet, yes. ¡®Venus,¡¯ then. Orbiting the sun once every two hundred and twenty-five of your days.¡±


    ¡°That sounds right. That¡¯s the one.¡±


    This happened over and over again. Perry certainly didn¡¯t know the vocabulary for genetics nearly well enough for them to speak definitively of how the process would work.


    ¡°So you have my cells,¡± he said now. ¡°Dead skin cells falling off regularly, maybe. Easy enough. And in each of those, if you can get it, is DNA.¡±


    ¡°DNA,¡± Z repeated.


    ¡°Deoxyribonucleic acid. And that means ¨C¡± Perry had to stop short. ¡°I don¡¯t know. Its form is a double helix. All twisted up.¡±


    ¡°Helix.¡±


    ¡°Yes. Two parallel strands of ¨C genetic material, twisting around. Like a spiral staircase. Like this.¡± He indicated with his hands.


    ¡°I know it¡¯s made of, I mean our names for its four components, were adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thiamine. Something like that. And they were ¨C molecules, I guess. Proteins? I don¡¯t really know what they were made of. And they come in a certain sequence that are a code, directions, for the body to create ¨C well, more proteins, I think, which then spawn everything. Everything in our bodies. ¡®Gene¡¯ is the word we used to refer to each of these certain sequences, I think. And there were chromosomes . . . and honestly I don¡¯t think I can give you a compare and contrast essay about genes versus chromosomes. I hope you know what I¡¯m talking about. I assume you do, if you¡¯re offering to construct new humans based on this.¡±


    ¡°The four components you mention, and the spiral shape, indicate to us what you are talking about, and you are correct,¡± Z said. ¡°Deoxyribonucleic acid,¡± it repeated.


    ¡°Yes. De- because . . . I don¡¯t know. Oxy-, it must have oxygen in it, I suppose. Ribo-, again I¡¯m not sure; I think that word may be related to what we called vitamin B, but I¡¯m not sure about that, and I also don¡¯t know what it really had to do with DNA. And acid ¨C well, certain molecules, I guess, were designated as acids or bases, I remember that. But I don¡¯t remember the difference between them. Boy, this is all something I should have studied harder. But anyway ¨C you have the ability to do this? To create new humans?¡±


    ¡°Yes.¡±


    ¡°Here? On this ship? Or would that be another round trip?¡±


    ¡°We could do it on this ship.¡±


    ¡°You replicate my DNA and get it to multiply?¡±


    ¡°We could do that. And we would introduce variation.¡±


    ¡°Genetic variation. So they could be fruitful and multiply. That¡¯s ¨C game-changing, isn¡¯t it.¡±


    The reflection did not answer.


    ¡°Where would these new people ¨C grow?¡±


    ¡°In tanks of liquid.¡±


    ¡°Okay. Well, you¡¯re not wasting your time coming up with a euphemism for that, are you? Babies floating in vats of liquid.¡±


    ¡°Until they are viable out of them.¡±


    ¡°And then I would raise them.¡±


    ¡°Yes.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ve done that once, with one. I had a lot of help, though. It¡¯s difficult with us. Not sure about you.¡±


    ¡°You would have the gathering devices.¡±


    ¡°Right, well, but you would have to be ¡®gathering¡¯ food that¡¯s appropriate for infant humans, and a means of feeding them. That¡¯s not fish or potatoes. Among many other things I would need help with.¡±


    ¡°We are capable of that.¡±


    ¡°Well.¡±


    Perry pictured himself teaching a kindergarten class in the clearing. One adult ¨C him ¨C and the entire rest of the human race gathered around him.


    This proposal from Z had changed his life, yet again.


    ¡°I would be a pioneer one more time, wouldn¡¯t I,¡± he said. ¡°There would be a long list of things to go over. But ¨C are you sure this is ethical? Maybe humans didn¡¯t deserve to live. We don¡¯t know how they died out. They almost certainly destroyed themselves. Maybe they weren¡¯t fit to survive. We had our shot. That¡¯s paraphrasing a story from my first life.¡±


    ¡°It is never wrong to support life,¡± Z replied. ¡°Especially conversational life. And if they did destroy themselves, they did not quite fail completely; they managed to leave you alive. So it would be right for you to resume. And you would just have to try to do better. We agree, Perry: had humanity completely terminated itself, we would not attempt to revive it even if we could. But it did not quite do so.¡±


    ¡°So,¡± Perry said. ¡°You don¡¯t think the race quite deserved to be condemned. But we cut it close, didn¡¯t we.¡±

 Seventeen - The Tooth and the Tanker, part three of six; one last good nights sleep

    Perry slept on it. The immediate crush of thoughts and emotions that came to him had to do with the insanity of raising four infants alone; but after just a few minutes thinking this through, he arrived at a different state of dread that felt almost like a literal roadblock. It was one particular alarm, and he talked to Z about it the next day.


    ¡°Z,¡± he said. He was sitting just inside the doorway of the ship, on a rough stool he had made himself and carried up the ramp with him some weeks before.


    ¡°Listen, I don¡¯t know how much you can tell about us humans from my DNA, and I don¡¯t remember what all I¡¯ve told you. But you know there are two sexes? I¡¯ve mentioned that?¡±


    ¡°You have.¡±


    ¡°And the women give birth. So eventually, any girls that are ¨C born, if that¡¯s the word, these first ones you will create, will grow up to be women, and probably most of them will become pregnant.


    ¡°I mean,¡± Perry added, ¡°who the hell knows. But you¡¯ve got to assume. I won¡¯t be touching them, they¡¯ll be my daughters basically. But lots of young guys will be around. Eventually, anyway.¡±


    ¡°We agree.¡±


    ¡°And that was pretty dangerous for us. Childbirth, I mean. Many women died while giving birth. Well, maybe not ¡®many,¡¯ but it wasn¡¯t uncommon. And we won¡¯t have any obstetricians. Or midwives. People who assist with birth. It¡¯s nice that you help me out with the fabricating of shovels, and gathering a lot of the food, but delivering babies ¨C that will be something else.


    ¡°It¡¯s just ridiculous, Z, how poorly humans seem to have evolved to give birth. Women would sometimes have pregnancies start outside their uterus, which kills them. And when the pregnancy does happen in there, it¡¯s fairly common that the baby would not come out head first, which can be a problem. And no matter how the baby is born, the woman can bleed too much. In my time we had doctors operating on women fairly regularly to terminate pregnancies outside the uterus, or to deliver the baby by just cutting through the mother¡¯s abdomen. Will your robots be able to do that? I certainly can¡¯t. This is so much more than, you know, finding wild pears on a tree and bringing them here.


    ¡°Maybe all the kids born from now on should really be raised in vats, the way you¡¯re talking about, but that won¡¯t happen. Women will get pregnant. Trying to convince people to restrict their reproduction to babies in vats ¨C all respect, but that would be just a recipe for disaster. I could imagine trying to enforce that. That would be some bizarre science fiction story. There¡¯s no way.¡±


    ¡°We were not aware of these common complications with birth, as you describe them,¡± the reflection answered. ¡°But yes, our robots could perform surgery.¡±


    ¡°Seriously? And you can ¨C anesthetize people? Eliminate the pain?¡±


    ¡°We are capable of that. We are also essentially similar to mammals, Perry. Human bodies are quite different, but not so different that this would be completely new for us.¡±This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    Perry leaned back and put his hands on his head.


    ¡°I hope we¡¯re doing the right thing, Z. Well, at least these kids ¨C women ¨C should be healthy. Well-fed, I mean. And they won¡¯t be having ten children each, which should help. And we¡¯ll make them wait until they¡¯re at least ¨C well, who knows, but not fourteen or fifteen for sure. I know that was about a cutoff age for safe births. I¡¯ll have to keep an eye on that, though. Hoo boy. Think of it. It¡¯s going to be a nightmare enforcing that. Cross that bridge when we come to it, I guess.¡±


    *


    Nine months later, four babies ¨C two male, two female ¨C were ready to be lifted out of the transparent cylinders of fluid where they had been grown.


    Perry by now had a three-bedroom house, insulated and painted, ready for them. The gathering devices had done nearly all the work on it. With children on the way, he had dropped his desire to do everything himself. He had, however, planted a large garden with his own labor.


    He had four cribs. He had bird mobiles over each of them. He had twelve thousand disposable diapers, in graduated sizes, stacked up inside the zhranmin ship. He had clothes. He had forty blankets. He had rattles, and stuffed animals.


    (The first stuffed animals the zhranmin fabricator had made had been picture-perfect recreations of animals observed around the ship, only soft and smaller.


    (¡°Z, these are almost creepy,¡± Perry had told the reflection. ¡°Or scary. This badger thing looks exactly like a badger ¨C it¡¯s going to frighten them. This isn¡¯t what I meant by ¡®stuffed animal.¡¯ My god. You¡¯ve got to give it friendly eyes, make it plump, give it a smile. Come on.¡±)


    He had tasted the artificial milk that zhranmin had fabricated, and had tested the bottles.


    ¡°Four at a time,¡± he said. ¡°Or four in a row, I mean. Day after day after day. This is going to be insane. Good thing I¡¯m unemployed.¡±


    He had a stroller, a long one which could accommodate four babies, mounted on an antigravity platform.


    And he had remembered the songs he had used to sing to Araceli. Goodnight, Irene; An Irish Lullaby; Over the Rainbow. The Spanish ones, also; the one about the market of San Jose, and the elephants swinging, and Arroz con Leche. Would he try to teach them as much Spanish as he knew, as well as English? What would be the point? But yet it seemed tragic not to pass on everything he could.


    ¡°I owe it to you all. Les debo el esfuerzo, mis compa?eros.¡±


    The plan was to raise these four until they were nine, or ten, or eleven, and then get a few more.


    ¡°Oh hell yes I¡¯m going to take advantage of your free labor when you¡¯re older,¡± he had told them at one point as they floated in their tanks. ¡°You''re going to be put to work taking care of your little fourth cousins or whatever. I¡¯m not bringing back this race alone, kids. Enjoy that peace and quiet in there while you can.


    ¡°Z,¡± he had asked one day inside the ship, while he surveyed the stacks of diapers and other supplies he had directed them to fabricate. ¡°What happens if something happens to me before these kids can fend for themselves? If I die? I don¡¯t think all the gathering devices you could crank out will be able to raise functioning humans.¡±


    ¡°You will not die,¡± Z had answered. ¡°Not before they can care for themselves, at the earliest. We will ensure that. And we will speak about your lifespan later.¡±


    *


    Perry got one last good night¡¯s sleep, one last unrushed and uninterrupted breakfast. He instructed the gathering devices to water the garden. He then climbed up the ramp to the cylinder ¨C pushing the antigrav stroller before him ¨C to retrieve the next generation.

 Seventeen - The Tooth and the Tanker, part four of six: Hoofer

    It was eight years later that Perry came to judge that the carefree part of re-starting the human race had lasted . . . about seven years. The new friction, the end of the golden beginning, happened because of a pet deer.


    The first seven years had not been easy; he would never have said that. They had been hard, sometimes tortuously hard, what with the four babies seeming to always get hungry all at once, but yet going through teething pains in a precise, drawn-out sequence, one by one by one by one; and, later, with them as terrified toddlers crying in thunderstorms; and, later still, with them as curious four- and five- and six-year-olds grilling him with questions, impatient for answers, staring at him like four owls as he tried to teach them and care for them and corral them, alone, doing the work that at least four adults, or maybe eight, or even two dozen or more (counting doting grandparents and uncles, aunts) would have handled in his first life.


    But he had expected all that to be difficult. He had assumed ¨C correctly ¨C that he would not sleep well for probably two years. And of course he had the flying robot helpers of the zhranmin ship assisting him with everything from fetching clean diapers to fabricating a solar-powered heated bathtub.


    ¡°I¡¯m worried this isn¡¯t sustainable, Z,¡± he had told the reflection soon after this, as he monitored the four babies splashing in the warm water. He had them outside on a sunny day in front of the looming ship, with Z standing in the doorway as usual. ¡°I¡¯m going to have to heat my own water, one day. Or the five of us will. I don¡¯t know if it¡¯s a good idea to just have you build solar panels for us, for everything. I¡¯ll have to teach these kids to chop and dry wood. Or dig coal. Or peat? Lord, we¡¯ll end up baking this planet all over again.¡±


    ¡°We will try to make sure that by the time you¡¯d be burning enough wood to be a problem, you¡¯ll know how to make your own solar panels,¡± the reflection answered.


    ¡° ¡®You¡¯ as in me, personally?¡±


    ¡°This would be some time in the future, Perry.¡±


    ¡°I know, I know. Just giving you a hard time.¡±


    Perry had also known he would need to work hard early on to make sure the four would get along with each other. This was crucial to him. He was not going to have antagonistic siblings. This would not be ¨C as Perry put it ¨C a society in which Caracalla murdered Geta, or Henry I imprisoned Robert Curthose, or Edward IV killed George of Clarence. As soon as the four could understand unfairness, he would make sure he was fair to them all. As soon as they might realize that food, clothing, shelter could be finite, he would teach them that there was plenty for all. (This was not hard, with the supply robots whizzing around.)


    Of course they still had their spats about who had found the shiniest rock, or the best flower, or who could jump the highest.


    ¡°But damn it, they¡¯re going to know I love them all. They¡¯re going to know they¡¯re equals. We¡¯re not going to single out Heathcliff and beat him. None of that.¡±


    ¡°You know I can hear you,¡± Z said from the door of the ship. Perry had been raving a bit in the yard behind his house.


    ¡°Yeah, well, they can¡¯t.¡±


    ¡°And there¡¯s no Heathcliff.¡±


    ¡°Damn right there¡¯s not. And there¡¯s not going to be.¡±


    ¡°Have you been getting enough sleep, Perry?¡±


    ¡°No.¡±


    But all of that work, Perry had anticipated. What he hadn¡¯t was their pet deer dying.


    *


    The kids had noticed a very young deer wandering the edge of the clearing, always alone.


    (The kids:


    The girls were Charlotte and Elizabeth; the boys, William and Jonathan. [Perry had chosen names which they could later shorten, if they wanted to; he thought that would be a bit of self-determination which would be good for them.] They had things in common in pairs:


    Charlotte and Jonathan were quieter; Elizabeth and William spoke up more, both more loudly and more often. Charlotte and William loved ranging about the field, and into the woods; Jonathan and Elizabeth were content to spend more time in the house. The boys sang songs and were more interested in music ¨C Perry had had Z and the robots knock together a ukulele and a xylophone, for them ¨C while the girls spent more time drawing and painting.


    And they were developing as individuals, too:


    Charlotte would make up stories, many of them about a hawk like the ones they would see around their meadow.


    Elizabeth spent the most time, by far, interacting with Z. She asked questions about the ship, the zhranmin home planet, distances among stars, the basics of flight, on and on. The other three spoke much more just to Perry. Perry had wondered about this, before the children were ¡°born¡± and when they were babies: would they consider Z to be a co-parent with him? It turned out that they clearly did not.


    William was a toolmaker, and a nascent inventor. He was driven to devise his own shovels, fruit-picking poles, baskets, on and on, even though the robots could fabricate better ones and do it much more quickly.


    Jonathan was the most quiet of the four, but he would watch everyone closely and was the one who would anticipate needs, outings, chores. Elizabeth would take just one glance toward the front door and Jonathan would be headed outside instantly, retrieving her shoes from outside the zhranmin ship for her because it was obvious to him that she was looking for them, and he remembered where she had left them before she did.)


    Perry and the children raised and then dried corn. The robots had initially found ears of it, who knows how far away, and Perry had then been able to grow it easily in a field on the other side of the clearing¡¯s treeline. William discovered that the lone deer they¡¯d seen wandering around would approach him for tossed handfuls of the dried corn, and soon thereafter would come up to just eat out of his hand. Before long the deer would stay close to them, seldom straying from the house. William spent the most time with the deer, but all of them considered it their pet. Perry had been glad to see this. He considered having pets a part of childhood, and he had wondered if it would be possible to acquire one. He had seen no feral dogs or cats around which they could try to domesticate. There were rabbits, but he didn¡¯t want to steal one from its mother.


    Local animals which would never be pets included cougars. Perry had never seen one very close to the clearing, but had come across one a few times while on walks some distance away. They had always turned away upon seeing him. Or it may have been the same cougar, for all he knew; he had never seen more than one.


    *


    The children came up with a name for the deer which they all agreed on, which Perry considered a miracle of consensus: Hoofer.


    Late in September, the deer was away from the house and clearing for five days. After three days, they had all considered the absence unusual.


    Charlotte and William found its remains in a glade past the area of the bend of the stream which they visited most often. After they brought back the news, all five of them went out to see the body.


    The young deer was on its side, its blank eyes open. Perry saw that the neck had been bitten and broken. Flesh had been torn away from the lower ribs. Dried blood stained the fur, and the ground.


    ¡°I think the cougar must have done this,¡± he said. The children stared, silent, at the corpse.


    ¡°Let¡¯s take him back and bury him,¡± he told them. ¡°We¡¯ll have to dig a deep hole. If it¡¯s not deep, the cougar may come back and try to dig it up.¡± The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.


    It was Charlotte who asked the question, the next day, after they had buried the deer:


    ¡°Do you think Hoofer is still here?¡±


    ¡°No, Charlotte. He¡¯s dead.¡±


    ¡°I know. The deer is dead. But is Hoofer still here?¡±


    Perry wasn¡¯t sure if she was hoping that it was mistaken identity; that maybe it had been a different deer they had found.


    ¡°That deer was definitely Hoofer,¡± he told her. ¡°He¡¯s gone.¡±


    ¡°I know that the body was Hoofer¡¯s. But is Hoofer ¨C still going?¡±


    Perry looked at her in silence for a moment.


    ¡°Do you mean,¡± he asked, ¡°is Hoofer separate from that body we found?¡±


    ¡°Yes. Is Hoofer a ¨C shadow now? Is Hoofer¡¯s mind still here?¡±


    She didn¡¯t have the vocabulary, Perry realized, to ask about a spirit, or a soul. He had very intentionally made sure none of them did. But this concept had occurred to her on its own.


    He was gobsmacked.


    ¡°It¡¯s hardwired into us,¡± he said aloud.


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°I just mean,¡± he said, catching himself, ¡°that we often want a piece of things, things that we love, to be with us even after ¨C after they die. But ¨C I don¡¯t think they stay with us, Charlotte.¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t think.¡± He had cracked open that door.


    *


    Perry had been raising the four of them without any religion.


    ¡°I don¡¯t want you fighting about gods or prophets,¡± he had told them one day, years before, while they were tiny and in their cribs. ¡°I don¡¯t want you killing each other over Albigensian heresies. Or Cathar heresies. Or Lollard heresies. There will be no heresy. There will be no apostasy. Got it? I don¡¯t want any crusades. The Williamites are never going to launch a crusade against the Elizabethans. There will be no martyrs. There will be no inquisitions. We¡¯re not excommunicating anyone. We¡¯re not communicating anyone to begin with, either, for that matter. We¡¯re not converting anyone. We¡¯re not going to have pogroms. We¡¯re not going to have ghettos. We¡¯re not having cavaliers, and we¡¯re not having Roundheads. We¡¯re not having a massacre at Magdeburg; we¡¯re not having a massacre at Mainz; we¡¯re not having any massacres. We¡¯re not arguing about which son-in-law was the true whatever. We¡¯re not having jihads. None of you has his own separate promised land. This is all promised land, all of it, for all of us.


    ¡°I don¡¯t want you wasting your time arguing if you''ll be saved by your faith or your works. None of you are getting saved, and that¡¯s because you¡¯re all fine already. You¡¯re fine. We¡¯re leaving all that behind.


    ¡°For all I know,¡± he finished, ¡°all of that nonsense was why they blew themselves up to begin with. If that¡¯s what they did. Anyway, we¡¯re not doing it all over again.¡±


    *


    When they were old enough to talk, Perry explained natural phenomena as soon as he could, and as thoroughly as he could ¨C given their ages ¨C every time a question arose. Thunder, lightning; rain, snow, hail. The atmosphere is thicker than you might guess, Jonathan. The Earth is round and it¡¯s on a tilt, Charlotte. There¡¯s something called evaporation, Elizabeth. The stars that shift around each night are actually planets, William. Perry knew he probably overdid it; he noticed eye rolls from them, by the time they were six, when he rushed to explain fireflies or bee stings.


    Elizabeth actually asked him, once: ¡°Why are you so worried about explaining everything so fast?¡±


    ¡°Because we know things, Elizabeth. We¡¯re a clearing of people who can explain things.¡±


    And he wasn¡¯t going to have them attributing any of it to a supernatural power, he said ¨C to himself only.


    The kids had been afraid of the dark. He had guessed that they would be, no matter how rational he was about it; and it was very obvious how his ancestors so easily attributed all sorts of devilry to spirits of the night. He just did the best he could. He kept them awake in the summer, sometimes, to show them owls¡¯ eyes and raccoons. He explained to them what the screeching fox yelps were, and hoped to see a fox make such a sound during the day although he never did. The four of them did not love the dark, when they were little, but at least they didn¡¯t fabricate evil night beings.


    He felt it had gone well. The kids weren¡¯t invoking God, or god, or gods to explain dry weather, or wet weather, or storms, or bad luck, or good luck. The idea never would have occurred to them, because they had never heard anyone bring it up.


    As for any sense of an afterlife, the question had not come up in their eight years, probably because no one ¨C nor any animal important to them ¨C had died. They ate a lot of fish, but none of the four ever asked Perry about any eternal permanence the fish might have.


    (Perry and the children never ate any animals apart from fish. He wasn¡¯t against doing so, but it just struck him as a hassle and they had never gotten around to it. He was content with the fish, grains, legumes, fruits, tubers, vegetables they had; and the kids of course didn¡¯t realize they were missing anything else. He would not have minded having milk, cheese, and eggs, but there were no animals around they could milk, nor any chickens or other fowl they could domesticate.)


    They came across the occasional dead squirrel, or crow, but asked nothing beyond what the cause of death might have been.


    But that had changed with the pet deer. When Hoofer was killed, it punched a hole in their group, and then Charlotte had come up with her question.


    *


    ¡°You don¡¯t think there¡¯s anything left of Hoofer still here?¡± she asked him, now.


    ¡°I just don¡¯t. Charlotte,¡± he started. He frowned.


    He felt he had to come out with it.


    ¡°Charlotte, back when I was first here, there were people who did think that something was left of a living thing after it died. Maybe a shadow. Maybe an echo. Maybe. People just didn¡¯t know. But you¡¯re not the first one to wonder about it. You deserve to know that.¡±


    *


    Someday she¡¯ll be a grown woman, and I¡¯ll be gone, he thought. This was the crushing responsibility he felt, sometimes. It was the exact same thing he had worried about so long ago with Araceli:


    I am raising a grandmother. I¡¯m raising a supervisor. Someday she¡¯ll be fifty. She¡¯ll be older than I am now. She¡¯ll be a leader. People will look up to her. She¡¯ll have her own office. And it¡¯s up to me. It¡¯s freaking up to me ¨C and Jen ¨C to not botch this.


    He would shake his head.


    It takes a village to raise a child, but just one person can single-handedly screw up the kid completely.


    *


    ¡°And if a person dies?¡± Charlotte asked.


    ¡°Yes,¡± he said. ¡°People would wonder the same thing about ¨C people. If any part of them went on.¡±


    She stood silent for a moment, and then asked:


    ¡°And everyone you knew ¨C died.¡±


    ¡°Yes, they did. A few of them, while I was there. And then all of them, afterward.¡±


    ¡°Do you think that any part of them went on?¡±


    ¡°I ¨C I¡¯ve never seen that they did, Charlotte. Some people thought so, but I never saw anything, back in my first time here, to think that.¡±


    But this was hard for Perry, because . . . he wasn¡¯t sure. He just wasn¡¯t sure. He had heard people he trusted and respected talk about afterlives.


    Bob Schwartz had been an old man, around eighty, who lived a few doors down from Perry¡¯s parents¡¯ house. Bob had stopped by frequently to talk with Perry¡¯s father. And Perry had listened in, once, when Bob told his father about dying in a hospital room, floating above the table, and watching the doctors work on him.


    ¡°It was very peaceful,¡± Bob had said.


    Perry had just heard too many similar stories to write them off. He¡¯d also heard repeatedly of staff in nursing homes mentioning electrical anomalies in rooms after their occupants died; lights flickering, or turning on or off by themselves.


    He¡¯d heard too much. He couldn¡¯t promise Charlotte that Hoofer was completely and finally gone. And he was stunned that she had come up with the idea on her own.


    ¡°She didn¡¯t associate it with a supreme being, though,¡± he told himself, that night. He found that a relief.


    He often wondered about the possibility that there would be an afterlife, with departed souls gathered there, and chatting, all while there was no sign of any supreme being. And if the departed would pick up their old arguments anyway.


    ¡°Watch dead people in a godless afterlife just argue that God is still somewhere else,¡± he said to himself.


    *


    Charlotte didn¡¯t talk to any of the other three about her question ¨C that Perry was aware of. But he wondered, now, if religion was hardwired into them. He felt dread that from now on he would have to keep an eye out for crusades and inquisitions.

 Seventeen - The Tooth and the Tanker, part five of six: the field trip

    The children had just celebrated their eleventh birthdays when an idea occurred to Perry.


    (Their birthday was April 10th. He and Z had agreed that they should be ¡°started¡± in late June, the year before, so that they would be born at the start of fairly warm weather.


    ¡°Gestation, if that''s what we''ll call it,¡± he had asked the reflection, ¡°will still take nine months?¡±


    ¡°Yes.¡±


    As for knowing what day it was in the first place, he had worked that out, again with Z¡¯s help, in his first month after exiting the case:


    ¡°Listen, you know this planet and its orbit pretty well, right?¡±


    ¡°We do, yes.¡±


    ¡°Can you tell me when its axis, its northern axis, tilts most directly toward the sun? Right now we must be in late spring or early summer, so it can¡¯t be too far off. I suppose I could figure it out myself by knocking a stake into the ground. Or I could make a sundial, and then see ¨C what, when the sun is most directly overhead? But I¡¯d have to be able to compare measurements at exactly noon for that, wouldn¡¯t I? Or would I? Or I guess it would just be ¨C when the stake casts the shortest shadow?¡±


    ¡°The point of orbit you are speaking of will happen nine days from now,¡± Z answered.


    ¡°Really? Like, nine nights to go, and then we are ¨C tilting as directly toward the sun as we ever do?¡±


    ¡°Yes.¡±


    ¡°So that makes today ¨C ¡± he counted to himself ¨C ¡°June 12th. Okay, then.¡±


    He added:


    ¡°Although I could just call the solstice June 1st. Or July 1st. I¡¯m not sure why it ever made sense to have it be the 21st, anyway. If I bump it up to July 1st, then, let¡¯s see, autumn would start October 1st; winter, January 1st ¨C that would be strange, I guess. Could be June 1st, September 1st, December 1st, and then March 1st for spring . . . which could be pretty cold and miserable, still. Hmm. Maybe I¡¯ll just leave it the way it was.


    ¡°It¡¯s not like anyone¡¯s going to complain,¡± he added.)


    For the children¡¯s birthdays, he had made them a cake. This had always been a challenge ¨C he had been doing this since they were three ¨C since they had no sugar. There was always honey to be found, though; he retrieved it by using the zhranmin flying robots. The first time, he had seen bees coming out of a dead standing tree trunk, and directed the robots to it. After that, he had been able to just tell them to find and bring back honey, and they had done so.


    He also had the robots grind flour for him, and he obtained yeast by putting grape skins into it.


    (¡°Guys,¡± he had told them when they were three, ¡°Z and the robots help us a lot, but someday we¡¯re going to have to figure all this out ourselves. We¡¯ll have to mill wheat. And we¡¯ll have to figure out how to get honey without getting stung. Or stung too much. Climb up to the hive around dawn is how to do it, I think. We have our work cut out for us.¡±


    ¡°Z has great big eyes,¡± William said.


    ¡°Okay, right. I¡¯ll bring this up again when you¡¯re older.¡±)


    But in addition to the honey bread cake, he realized he might be able to give the four of them an amazing present. It would take some time to organize.


    *


    ¡°Z,¡± he said, just outside the ship. ¡°I¡¯m coming up.¡±


    ¡°Of course.¡±


    Once inside, he said:


    ¡°Listen, I¡¯ve just remembered something you said a long time ago. You said that humans had made settlements on the Moon, and on Mars.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s correct.¡±


    ¡°So, there¡¯s nothing left here on Earth, of course. Nothing I can show the kids here beyond a layer of flattened plastic trash in the soil, or whatever. And you¡¯ve said that even the Pyramids have weathered away. But any structures on the Moon are probably still there, right? And same goes for Mars.¡±


    ¡°They are, yes.¡±


    ¡°Unless they¡¯ve been hit by meteors. And I assume there have been some of those ¨C no atmosphere  ¨C but still, any structures are probably largely intact.¡±


    ¡°Again, yes they are.¡±


    ¡°Can this ship still fly? Can it lift off from Earth?¡±


    ¡°This ship cannot,¡± Z answered. ¡°But we could build one that could. One that could fly as far as the Moon.¡± The reflection paused. ¡°Not Mars, however. Not safely. And the flight to Mars, even if we could, would take a month. One way. I believe that would be a strain on the children.¡±


    ¡°Of course. But the Moon? Could we take them up there? It would be safe, right?¡±


    ¡°We would make it safe, yes.¡± The reflection paused to think, again.


    ¡°I would recommend,¡± it resumed, ¡°building a large window into the ship, and landing next to the human structures on the Moon, rather than exiting the ship to walk around them. That would require isolation clothing.¡±


    ¡°Space suits.¡±


    ¡°Yes. Those would be ¨C much more time-consuming to make. And their safety would be more difficult to guarantee if they were walking around up there.¡±


    ¡°Okay, well, that would be good enough. And you¡¯ll be able to send out some of the robots to get inside, I suppose? Although for that matter, you could probably just send them from here, and we could watch in the ship, remotely . . . ¡± Perry shook his head. ¡°But no, going up there would be amazing for them.¡±


    ¡°I will design and build the ship,¡± Z said.


    ¡°Very good. How long will it take?¡±


    A pause.


    ¡°It will take six weeks.¡±


    ¡°Okay then. We¡¯ll be ready.¡±


    *


    The lunar transport that Z constructed looked, to Perry, like a space yacht. It hovered over the two of them in the vast open space of the main ship.


    ¡°Beautiful,¡± Perry said, looking up. ¡°I¡¯m surprised you didn¡¯t build one of these before. Just for you to cruise around in.¡±


    ¡°We did not design it with an eye toward aesthetics, Perry.¡±


    ¡°I know. It is handsome, though.¡±


    It was silver and white, long and narrow, and pointed at both ends. The middle of its main hull rose higher than its ends, making it look to Perry something like a dolphin jumping out of water in an arc. On its underside, however, a long viewing gallery dropped down, its bottom nearly as low as the bow and stern. The passenger seats ¨C the only seats, of course, since there was no crew ¨C were on the floor of this gallery.


    ¡°You will be able to sit in that area, and look out,¡± Z said.


    ¡°Do you know what it looks like, roughly? The moon base, I mean?¡±


    ¡°It is just a small dome, on the surface. The size of your house. Most of it is tunnels. We will send a camera robot into the tunnels, while you¡¯re there, and show you the feed.¡±


    ¡°Very good. And ¨C will there be any bodies? Do you know what happened to the people there?¡±This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    ¡°There are none. They must have returned before the disaster here, or during it.¡±


    ¡°So, getting off the Earth didn¡¯t end up helping the race, it turns out. How about on Mars? Was anyone stranded there?¡±


    ¡°Yes. There are corpses there.¡±


    ¡°Well. If I could get there, I could . . . show the kids a two-hundred-thousand-year-old dead human. I wonder what would be left of them. Just freeze-dried, must be. Yikes. It¡¯s just as well.¡±


    *


    The day approached. Perry prepped the kids. Z told them that the trip would take six hours each way, and they could spend three hours around the moon base.


    ¡°So you¡¯ll get to see something that humans made,¡± Perry said. ¡°Other humans. I¡¯m surprised I didn¡¯t think of this earlier. When I was here the first time, getting to the Moon was very hard. They had to build a ship almost as long as Z¡¯s ship, and it took three days to get there. Coming back and landing safely was very difficult, too. Only twelve people walked on the Moon, back before I went into that case. More went afterward. Anyway, I¡¯m glad this occurred to me.¡±


    ¡°And it¡¯s safe?¡± Jonathan asked. ¡°I remember you saying that some astronauts were killed, back in your first life.¡±


    ¡°They were. But the zhranmin are much better at this than we ever were. Z wouldn¡¯t send us there if there was any risk.¡±


    Perry remembered how he was trying to raise them, and added:


    ¡°I mean, it¡¯s up to you. If you ¨C any of you ¨C don¡¯t want to go, you don¡¯t have to. I thought you would like this, but you can stay here.¡±


    All four of them said they wanted to go.


    *


    When the yacht was complete, Z lowered it down to the bottom of the large ship and had the five of them board. They stepped up into a tall hatch that opened on the back side of the dipping bow of the ship. The reflection and Perry showed the children the gallery, the seats, the seatbelts. Only then did Perry really realize that the very concept of being in a vehicle ¨C much less a spaceship ¨C was hitherto unknown to them. They had never stepped into a car, a boat, even a horse-drawn wagon. They were amazed by the white hallways, the padded seats, the floor-to-ceiling glass, even while the yacht was motionless on the ground.


    ¡°After some distance of flight, you will be weightless,¡± Z told them. ¡°Perry has told you what gravity is. This ship will be going fast enough that you won¡¯t feel it any longer, until we approach the Moon. You will float in the gallery, if you get out of your seats. And even on the surface of the Moon, the gravity will be less.¡±


    *


    When the day came, Z saw them off as they entered the yacht again from the floor of the ship.


    ¡°Are you coming?¡± Perry asked it. ¡°Can you be projected inside the yacht when it¡¯s outside this ship?¡±


    ¡°I cannot. I will be speaking, however.¡±


    Once in their seats in the gallery, the yacht lifted straight up, into the void of the larger ship. Before it, a large exit then opened up, dilating open just as the smaller doorway below had done for Perry, eleven years before. The yacht pulled out. All of the movement was silent, and smooth.


    They rose high into the sky, and started to cross the continent. Perry saw the green of what had been the eastern United States give way to the plains and then the Rocky Mountains, with the yacht rising all the while, and by the time they were over the Pacific they were dozens of miles, Perry guessed, over the surface. They felt no acceleration, but the ship must have been speeding up exponentially. Soon they could see the edge of the Earth, and after some time the entire globe was in their windows.


    It was magical. Perry had asked the zhranmin fabricator to make them a globe, years before, but looking at that was nothing like being a hundred miles over the oceans and continents and seeing the actual Pacific, Himalayas, Mediterranean, all of it.


    ¡°All that room and no other people,¡± Elizabeth said.


    ¡°It¡¯s astounding, isn¡¯t it,¡± Perry answered her. All five of them kept staring down at the Earth even as they came closer to the Moon, and it became visible on the other side of the gallery.


    ¡°So, back in my first life people managed to do this only a few dozen times,¡± Perry told them. ¡°They landed on the Moon six times. And there was also a space station, or a couple of them, that orbited the earth up here. They were small. No one could live off the Earth permanently. After I left, people must have gotten a little better at it, at least.¡±


    Eventually they did get close enough to the Moon that its features became more visible, and they changed positions to see it. Except for William. Perry saw that he had sat down and clipped himself back into his seat. He hoped he wasn¡¯t getting nauseated. The boy occupied himself with a sort of abacus cube he had made himself.


    They approached and the Moon soon took up all of the view out the gallery; and then craters and their shadows grew nearer; and then the many different shades of whites and grays resolved themselves before them; and then they could pick out a dome that was their target.


    A human-made dome. The first thing the children had ever seen, after eleven years, which was made by a person other than themselves or Perry.


    It was modest. It was smaller than their house. It was colored just another gray in a landscape full of them. As they neared, Perry could see that it had indeed been punched through several times by meteors of varying sizes. One had been large enough to leave a foot-wide hole. Others had not broken through, but had left indentations. The dome looked very worn, but the children still stared at it entranced; even William, now.


    The yacht settled down next to the dome, although Perry noticed that it still hovered rather than land on the surface.


    ¡°So, there it is, sure enough,¡± Perry said. ¡°That was built after my first life. By our old brothers and sisters. Z says it¡¯s an entrance to tunnels ¨C that¡¯s right, Z?¡±


    ¡°Yes. And there¡¯s a greenhouse roof behind that rise, there, and then a solar array behind that. The majority of the construction here is underground, as we have said. Still, it is not a large complex. We will send in a camera. We were ready to force open the hatch, there, but that meteor hole is large enough.¡±


    The five of them saw the hovering camera fly into view and then lower itself into the hole in the roof. To Perry, it looked uncannily like a regular old-school film camera.


    A section of the viewing wall became opaque and displayed what the camera was seeing. They saw it float down an easy staircase, and then it was in a large room, empty but with doors lining the walls.


    ¡°What do you think is behind the doors?¡± Elizabeth said.


    ¡°Things like space suits, I would guess,¡± Perry answered. ¡°And oxygen tanks, probably. Things anyone would need out on the surface.¡±


    The camera progressed through underground rooms. They saw office chairs, and desks. There were several bathrooms. There was a dining room, and a kitchen.


    ¡°Mixing bowls. Just like ours,¡± Charlotte said.


    Off the kitchen there was a storeroom. It had wire shelves lined with canisters.


    ¡°Can you get closer to those?¡± Perry asked. ¡°I want to see if there are any labels.¡±


    There were not. The canisters were intact ¨C underground as they were, and subject to no oxidation, or solar radiation, or floods, fire, or anything else ¨C but any labels had degraded into illegibility over the millennia.


    There were bedrooms. There was a lounge, with couches and a large screen on the wall. There was an apparent control room with many video monitors stacked up; and thin rectangular boxes below ¨C


    ¡°Are those ¨C computers?¡± William said. ¡°They look a bit like your writing machine.¡±


    ¡°They are.¡±


    Then a hallway led to a doorway to a much larger room.


    ¡°This is the greenhouse,¡± Z said. ¡°We will pull around over it, while the camera is in there.¡±


    The ship lifted and then moved away from the dome, gliding about fifty yards. It stopped over a flat expanse of what looked like just more lunar surface.


    ¡°Covered with dust, after all these years,¡± Perry said. ¡°Meteor strikes blew it around. And I see some holes here, too.¡±


    Below them, the camera was moving down an aisle. It was flanked by tables of raised soil beds. They again looked as gray as the outside.


    ¡°Looks like moon dust covered up the dirt. I wonder if they were able to ¨C create it up here, from the ground, or if they had to fly it up from Earth. It¡¯s not going to grow anything now, at any rate.¡±


    ¡°Do you think they raised enough to feed themselves?¡± Elizabeth asked.


    ¡°I strongly doubt it. They would have needed more area. Fun to try, though. It was a start.¡±


    On the other side of the greenhouse chamber the camera flew into a much larger room, which had bare rock walls. It contained several boring machines, giant things taller than Perry with rotating toothed grinding wheels.


    ¡°And they were still building out,¡± Perry said. ¡°This was in progress. Imagine what they might have built here. When I was young, I read books that guessed that we would someday build cities, with people born and growing up here.¡±


    ¡°That is all, for this one,¡± Z said. ¡°There is another one, also. Shall we visit it?¡±


    The second moon base had much in common with the first, with some differences. It was also primarily underground, but it had several entrances. They were wedge-shaped, rather than domes, but again were severely worn from meteor impacts. There was one large dome in the complex, however, which reminded them all of the very viewing gallery they stood in.


    ¡°That must have been just a big room with a view, like this one here. I wonder if they gardened in it.¡± It, too, was covered with gray dust.


    ¡°We are not finding a suitable entrance for the camera,¡± Z¡¯s voice told them. ¡°I am afraid we will not be able to enter this one.¡±


    ¡°What are those ditches there?¡± Perry asked. He pointed across an expanse of surface. ¡°On that incline. Can you move over to see those? And maybe rise higher?¡±


    The yacht rose, and moved toward the feature. Once they were high enough, Perry recognized it. It was two large shapes, next to each other, cut into the rock.


    ¡°Those are the characters for the word ¡®China,¡¯ ¡± he said. ¡°I remember them. So this was a Chinese base. I¡¯ll bet the other was American, or European. Or both.¡±


    ¡°They couldn¡¯t all build one together?¡± Charlotte asked.


    ¡°Apparently not,¡± Perry said. ¡°Who knows, maybe both were Chinese. I don¡¯t think there¡¯s any way to tell, from what we saw. But this one definitely was.¡±


    *


    The children were quiet on the way back down to Earth, absorbed again in looking down at the oceans and land masses as they approached.


    In the weeks and months to come, they seldom talked about their birthday field trip. The Moon seemed very far removed from their clearing and woods, and their effort to feed themselves and become as self-sustainable as possible.


    But Perry was glad he had come up with the idea, and taken them there. He felt ¨C validated, somehow. He had worried over the years that all his stories of his past, the planet¡¯s past, might have seemed entirely invented, to them. Would they distrust him? He had never had the impression that they did, but still, he would not have blamed them if they had ever grown to doubt what might have seemed like endless tall tales from their elder. But now they had seen the vanished civilization he prattled on about endlessly; or as much of it as they possibly could have.

 Seventeen - The Tooth and the Tanker, part six of six: William

    Perry initially felt like he should keep the four children in teaching sessions for at least half the day, five days a week, but he had realized quickly that he would run out of material.


    ¡°I know I¡¯m lousy at math, so I can¡¯t tell them anything beyond basic algebra,¡± he told Z, ¡°but even so, I still don¡¯t know how school chewed up six hours a day for me for so many years. What the hell am I going to do for that amount of time? There¡¯s no way.¡±


    He had some books, but he would need many more. He had arranged to print books with the zhranmin when the children were two:


    ¡°Listen, Z, I want you to fabricate something pretty complex. I hope I can explain it. I want a little table with buttons on it to be able for me to write, and I want to see the words I¡¯m writing on a screen. And I want to be able to save what I write, so that I can add to it over multiple days. And weeks, months, years. And then I want you to print out these stories I write on paper; mashed up and dried wood pulp, in thin sheets, like leaves. Or however you can make it, whatever. About yay big. Eventually five copies of each so that each of us can have one. Is this making sense? I guess I will draw a picture of all the buttons and how they¡¯re arranged, in the dirt outside.¡±


    ¡°We understand,¡± Z said. ¡°I will give you a small table which you can make figures on, to show us the design.¡±


    ¡°That will be perfect.¡±


    *


    Perry did the best he could to convey the history of the human race to the children, although he often wondered how much it mattered. He also left huge gaps.


    ¡°The Roman Empire had a string of rulers known as the five good emperors,¡± he mused aloud to Z one day. ¡°Although I only remember two of them. Hadrian and Trajan. And one of them adopted the other ¨C they were consecutive ¨C but I don¡¯t remember which was which. These history books are not going to win any awards, I¡¯m afraid. Ah well. But mostly I want to get across the ideas of causes and effects, and pendulum swings through history. Democracy to tyranny, and back.


    ¡°Sometimes it seems like history was just a string of rulers attempting to maximize their power as much as they could without sparking violent discontent that would get them overthrown.


    ¡°These lessons . . . it will be so long before they matter to anyone. It will take us decades to get up to even a hundred people, and even then it¡¯s not like it¡¯s going to be fifty Spartans and fifty Athenians. I¡¯m just worried about ¨C the descendants of these kids creating some horrific dictatorship someday. But any chance of that is so far in the future . . . I need to tell them something about how bad it got in our past, though.¡±


    *


    There were so many times when he wanted to talk to Jennifer about the job he was doing. He wanted to run things by someone who was not a child, and not an alien. And who had grown up in the same world he had.


    These four children¡¯s world was so different than his ¨C his as it had been at their age ¨C that he wondered if it was healthy. Sometimes at night as he lay in bed, after a day of taking advice from the alien avatar, and accepting goods it had fabricated, and answering a million questions from the kids, and basically working as hard as he could to ensure a functional future human civilization, his mind raced with doubt.


    ¡°It¡¯s easy to stay busy and handle all that during the day,¡± he said to himself. ¡°But at night, it¡¯s another matter. As Hemingway sort of said.¡±


    Was it normal for these kids if he let the zhranmin build them an entire freaking spaceship and truck them up to the Moon? Was it preparing them to run a sustainable society? Shouldn¡¯t there have been some intermediate steps such as at least building, say, a wheelbarrow?


    The gathering devices had brought them apple trees, cherry trees, blackberry vines, on and on. Would they have been better off striking out on their own to find them?


    But what choice did they have? It was either eat nothing but fish and dandelion greens, and try to survive on that, or else accept help to get themselves started.


    The zhranmin fabricator forged knives, saws and axes, made soap, created synthetic fabric, stamped threading needles, made thread.


    But what were their other options, other than to accept these things? They would be stinking and dirty while wearing¨C if they were lucky ¨C sun-cured deer skins, if they didn¡¯t.


    ¡°We have an alien neighbor,¡± Perry said to himself. ¡°It¡¯s obviously normal and natural, in our universe; we just hadn¡¯t known that, in my first life. So, they live near us, and share what they know. It¡¯s like living next to a smart uncle. A smart uncle who can interplanetary spacecraft in his garage. What¡¯s wrong with that?¡±


    Not to mention the fact, he knew, that the children wouldn¡¯t even exist in the first place without the aliens.


    He and Jennifer had spent so much time bouncing questions about Araceli off each other. Was a certain book too old for her? And so what if it was? Was she old enough to sleep over somewhere? Had she been outside to play enough, a particular day? If she were uncomfortable about it would she have admitted it, or just said nothing and been miserable?


    There were no sleepovers for these four children, of course ¨C but William did indeed absent himself from the house, now in the summer he was eleven.


    *


    He had left the house with an ax and a bow saw, and departed the clearing for an entire day, several times before the night when he didn¡¯t come back. Perry had noticed, and had asked him about it:


    ¡°I saw you walking out of the clearing yesterday with the saw and the axe. Are you doing anything interesting?¡±


    William had been quick with an answer. It was obvious he had prepared it in advance, and had rehearsed it, and was not being completely open with it:


    ¡°I¡¯ve seen some wood I want to work on. I¡¯ll show you what it is, if it works out.¡±


    His eyebrows had risen as he said this. It was clear to Perry that this was not the whole story.


    Perry loved this boy so much.


    When he looked at him, he didn¡¯t necessarily feel he was looking at himself. He knew that William shared his DNA ¨C there was nowhere else it possibly could have come from ¨C but the boy, the young man, was not an obvious carbon copy of his own jaw line, or eyes, or build.


    But William felt like his son. Or maybe his brother. Perry was moved by the way the boy would sit himself down to study new things, whether it was a new book the zhranmin had printed, or a bulge-eyed toad, or a lone feather. He would be quiet, just absorbing what he saw; Perry liked to think that he himself looked that serious when he was learning. Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.


    And Perry admired him for his tool-making, his ingenuity; they all did. It had been William who had figured out how to process raw cotton into yarn, and then into cloth, on their own.


    This had been yet another thing that had been hard for Perry to explain to Z so that the gatherers would know what to look for. He had mentioned it toward the end of one July:


    ¡°So there¡¯s a plant that develops pods of fiber that is white. The fiber looks like dandelion heads when they¡¯ve gone to seed, but much thicker. It would grow in pods about this big, I think. It has a lot of seeds mixed in with it. I assume it would still be around. I know it grew wild in many places. That¡¯s what I¡¯m looking for. It would be at this latitude or to the south; it grew in warm climates. I don¡¯t really know when it will be ready, blooming, whatever it¡¯s called. But probably around now, I¡¯d guess.


    ¡°Brother,¡± he added. ¡°I don¡¯t really know what we¡¯ll do if you find any; I think it was hard to grow. But we could plant it and see. I don¡¯t know ¨C on the one hand, people used slaves to grow it, for a hundred years or more, because it was so hard to do; but on the other hand, it was successful enough as a crop that they needed tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of slaves to process it.


    ¡°And then,¡± he finished, ¡°it would just be a simple matter of converting that fiber into cloth. Which I have no idea how they did.¡±


    The gathering devices did indeed return after a few days with their tubs full of cotton pods. He set the kids to pulling it all from the pods, and separating out the seeds.


    ¡°Feel how soft it is? People would make clothing out of this. They would spin it into yarn, and then use that to knit or weave cloth. I don¡¯t really know how it was done, though. Obviously they weren¡¯t tying together all of it strand by strand. And then once they had yarn, it must have taken a long time to make cloth. They did that by weaving it; lacing it together. They would sometimes make a frame to do that, and slide in the lengths of yarn one by one. So it must have been hard, but at the same time people all over the world figured it out, and they did so a very long time ago. I mean thousands of years before I was born.¡±


    ¡°If you pull it out a little flat,¡± William said, ¡°it sort of holds together still. I wonder if you could just ¨C pull it out pretty thin and then roll it back up. To get a long sort of string out of it.¡±


    He had figured that out himself just by manipulating this plant he had never before seen.


    *


    The night he didn¡¯t come home, Perry tried not to look too worried in front of the other three.


    ¡°He¡¯s not in his room?¡± he asked them.


    ¡°No,¡± Elizabeth said. ¡°I saw him leave this morning, again. With the saw and axe. I didn¡¯t see him since.¡±


    They ate dinner together, with one chair at the table empty. Perry tried to keep a normal conversation going. At the end, though, he asked them:


    ¡°Did he seem upset, or anything, to any of you? I didn¡¯t notice that he did.¡±


    None of them had, either.


    ¡°I¡¯ll go look for him in the morning. We¡¯ve always seen him heading the same way, to the east, right?¡±


    ¡°Can we go too?¡± Charlotte asked.


    ¡°Charlotte, for this, I really want to just go by myself.¡±


    Perry knew he could have just asked Z to send the robots to look for William, but he didn¡¯t. This just seemed like something he wanted to handle himself; or themselves. Without the zhranmin. When Perry set out that morning, he noticed that the avatar was not standing in the doorway of the ship as it often did. It, too, seemed to understand this.


    Perry walked out of the clearing and kept heading east. He walked through trees; he jumped a stream that fed into the larger one to the north where they had their weir; went through glades.


    He thought of William walking this exact path, and what the boy would have been thinking. The boy was his own person, taking in the world through his own eyes.


    William knows this land just as well as I do. Or better.


    Eventually, in another clearing, Perry smelled smoke. Not much; it was just barely there. But smoke was so rare, it was easy to notice.


    At a distance, before the next treeline, he saw a few flames. As he neared, he saw William crouched by a fire. It was under control.


    Closer yet, Perry saw something round hanging from a tree.


    It was a turkey. William had hunted one, and was preparing to roast it.


    Perry stopped. Should he make a sound? Clear his throat? He was still too far for William to hear that. There was no door to shut, no corner to drop a tool down in with a thud.


    William looked over at him, right then. He stared a moment, and then turned back to the fire.


    *


    ¡°You got a turkey,¡± Perry said, once close enough.


    ¡°I did.¡±


    ¡°Good job hunting. How did you do it?¡±


    ¡°With a spear.¡±


    ¡°You just threw it?¡±


    The boy nodded.


    ¡°Just threw it, yes. But with this.¡± He stood and moved over to the tree. He picked up a short stick leaning against it. Perry saw that one end of it was a smooth handle, while the other had been carved into a socket.


    ¡°I figured out that if I put the end of a spear in here,¡± William said, pointing to the socket, ¡°and then hold it like this, and throw, it goes a lot faster and farther. It¡¯s hard to aim. But it worked for this one.¡± He nodded toward the turkey hanging from the tree. It was tied by its feet, its wings hanging down to the ground.


    ¡°You¡¯ve invented the atlatl,¡± Perry said. ¡°Out of the blue. Very well done. It never occurred to me to tell you about them. I¡¯d forgotten about them. But Native Americans used these. And right around here, I¡¯m sure. They¡¯d be proud of you.¡±


    ¡°Atlatl?¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s the word, yes. That¡¯s ¨C remarkable you came up with that. Really impressive.¡±


    The boy didn¡¯t answer.


    ¡°You know,¡± Perry said, ¡°you¡¯re going to need to be careful with ¨C ¡±


    ¡°Something coming after the remains of this at night, I know. My lean-to is over there a ways. I¡¯m not sleeping close to the fire and this blood here.¡±


    Perry saw William¡¯s little shack, then, about forty yards away. It was a wedge-shaped structure built around a log beam that had been suspended between two trees which were about ten feet apart.


    ¡°Reminds me of the base entrances we saw on the Moon,¡± Perry said.


    ¡°I guess so.¡± William looked back at the fire.


    ¡°William, it¡¯s fine that you¡¯re out here. Stay as long as you want. I¡¯d say be careful, but I know you will be. But you should let us know when you¡¯re away for the night. The others worry. I worry.¡±


    The boy stared at the fire silently and then answered:


    ¡°I know. I just wanted to do this myself. I didn¡¯t want anyone along. Now that I¡¯ve done this much, I don¡¯t mind if anyone wants to come. And I¡¯ll come back home tomorrow night.


    ¡°I just ¨C ¡± he continued. ¡°I get tired of that thing doing everything. Z. Always watching us. We¡¯ve done things on our own. I mean, people. I know the aliens are ahead of us, but ¨C we went to the Moon. We went to Mars. We did whatever it was that kept you alive all that time. Z doesn¡¯t have to do everything for us.¡±


    ¡°I know, William. I don¡¯t want it to, either. And we¡¯re getting better and better.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s so slow,¡± the boy said. ¡°It¡¯s going to take us so long to get back where we were.¡±


    Perry put his foot on one of the rocks that William had put around the fire, and rocked it back and forth.


    ¡°William. You¡¯re doing great. You¡¯re doing so well. I¡¯m so proud of you. Your life is not easy. Yours and the others¡¯. You¡¯re the first person, the first children, to ever grow up like this. I mean getting everything you know from just one person, and from an image of an alien. It¡¯s hard. You guys are all doing so well. And you, especially, you have so much to teach. I¡¯m so impressed by you. You know, kids are going to learn a lot from you.¡±


    ¡°Kids,¡± William repeated.


    ¡°Yes. It¡¯s time for more. More people. I think we should get another four. Soon.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s time for that?¡±


    ¡°It is. You¡¯re all eleven. You¡¯re old enough to help. We¡¯re going to double the size of our ¨C family. Clan. And I¡¯m so glad you¡¯re going to be along to help with these kids. They¡¯re going to be lucky to have you. I couldn¡¯t do this without you. We¡¯re going to come back, William. We¡¯re going to come back even better than we were in my first life. And you¡¯ll get to see it. You¡¯re going to help make that world.¡±

 The Video Message - part three

    ¡°You¡¯re doing very well,¡± Penelope told Perry. She turned her screen toward him, just to indicate that her notes about him were positive. ¡°We think we will keep you here just a few more days. Perhaps two nights.¡±


    ¡°And then that apartment is set up?¡±


    ¡°It is. Again, it¡¯s small.¡±


    ¡°I remember. You¡¯ve prepared me. You¡¯re making me think it will be smaller than this room.¡±


    ¡°No, it will at least be larger than this.¡±


    ¡°Thank you. To you, and everyone else who has prepared something for me. I don¡¯t know what I would have done otherwise.¡±


    ¡°Well, we don¡¯t let anyone who is here walk out and just sleep outdoors,¡± she said.


    ¡°That¡¯s changed, then. Good to hear.¡±


    ¡°And in fact we¡¯ve learned something about that, about your assets. Well, two things. First, we have two more videos. They had been corrupted, and it has taken some time to restore them. But one is ready. And from the second one, we do know that Araceli left you a bank account. Which has earned interest for one hundred and twenty years.¡±


    ¡°Well. How about that. Is it ¨C very large?¡±


    ¡°No. But it¡¯s something. It¡¯s about what I earn in a year. So you¡¯ll have something for yourself. We would provide the basics for free, but you¡¯ll be able to ¨C ¡± she shrugged ¨C ¡°buy whatever clothes you want. That sort of thing.¡±


    ¡°Okay.¡±


    ¡°And now to the video. Are you ready?¡±


    She pulled her screen wider and turned it toward him again.


    The scene was white, but then resolved into two women, facing the camera. It was Jen and ¨C another Jen. A younger one, still not quite as tall. It was actually Ara, of course.


    ¡°Hello Perry, we¡¯re back,¡± Jen said. ¡°We wanted to ¨C record another of these.¡±


    ¡°Hi Daddy. I¡¯m sixteen now.¡±


    Ara smiled, and it struck Perry like a sunrise, like summer. She was radiant, just crushingly beautiful. This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.


    My god, that¡¯s what Jen must have been like at her age.


    ¡°I remember,¡± Ara continued, ¡°that you seemed to talk about being sixteen as a threshold. You know, what with driving, high school, dating boys. All that. So I thought we should make another video. To let you know how I¡¯m doing.¡±


    She looked at her mother.


    ¡°She¡¯s doing very well,¡± Jen said. ¡°We are doing well. We have missed you so much. But . . . we move forward. We have to.


    ¡°We¡¯re in the same house. Ara got into Maggie Walker.¡±


    ¡°I got in!¡± Ara repeated. Again, the beaming smile.


    ¡°She¡¯s doing very well there, very busy. It¡¯s nice that it''s close, she¡¯s there so often. And she should be driving soon, she has her permit.¡±


    ¡°And I¡¯m on the field hockey team, varsity now. I picked it up three years ago. It¡¯s really fun, and two of my friends are on the team.¡±


    She kept smiling. Both of them looked so good: Ara in jeans and a white shirt, with Jen very sleek in black pants with a black jacket.


    ¡°Your job,¡± Jen said, quietly.


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°Tell him about your job.¡±


    ¡°Oh yeah! I¡¯m working at the blue market! Where you used to take me! Shields! I saw they needed someone, so I¡¯m there a couple times each week, in the evenings.¡±


    ¡°Ellison is still with us,¡± Jen said. ¡°He hops all over. I¡¯m afraid poor Whistler passed away, though. Just last year. He had a good long life.¡±


    ¡°I guess I should do something with his cage,¡± Ara said.


    ¡°We still have it,¡± Jen said. ¡°She took it out of her room, but it¡¯s in the basement still. We should give it to someone who needs it.¡±


    They continued to talk to the camera, and each other, telling him of his parents, and Jen¡¯s; a new nephew; bad weather. Jen spoke easily, but he couldn¡¯t help feeling that, again with this video, as he had felt with the first, the idea to make it had been more Ara¡¯s than hers. There was something in her eyes as she looked at the camera; or, more accurately, something missing from her eyes.


    He had to wonder if she was seeing someone else. She was not old, and he couldn¡¯t imagine she would spend the rest of her life alone.


    ¡°And I hope,¡± he said to himself, ¡°I wasn¡¯t one of those husbands who puts the wife off long-term relationships forever.¡±


    But he couldn¡¯t be sure how she felt, what exactly she was thinking. Sitting for a camera was never Jen¡¯s thing, and he knew it must have been tiresome for her; especially now as a busy single parent who couldn¡¯t be sure he would ever see this. She had to assume that the odds were strong that he never would.


    And times of transition were always hard on a relationship, he knew; when one or the other had been away for some time. And this was the hardest time of transition known to any relationship in history. Jen was a pioneer as much as he was.


    *


    Ara spoke:


    ¡°Goodbye, Daddy. I miss you so much. I hope we can see you soon. I know we may not, but ¨C I have to hope. I think about you every day. I wish we could just stop time until you¡¯re better.¡±


    ¡°Goodbye for now, Perry,¡± Jen said. ¡°We¡¯re still waiting and hoping. I love you.¡± And with those final words, her last look into the camera before the screen turned white again, he saw her old eyes, and the connection he knew.

 Eighteen - The Darkling Heavens

    Maybe it¡¯s just as well I was cold, because it was a distraction from the nightmare vision I had stepped into.


    I was on a beach by some sort of dead sea. I was standing in what seemed a dark red twilight, because the sun itself was bloated, bloody, dark, dying. It stretched across the sky, far larger than I had known it but also colder.


    The sky apart from the sun was black, not blue, and filled with pale stars. The air seemed thin, as if I were at altitude. It held none of whatever warmth the dull sun was managing to throw off.


    The sea was gray, taking its color from the dead sky above; and it had no waves, no breakers. There were swells, was all. I had emerged onto a sand beach, if it could be called that, but the sand was cold and nearly as gray as the water. It was interspersed with shelves of rock. Patches of that rock which were far enough back from the water to be dry were the only path I had in order to try not to, honestly, freeze to death. I was naked in the cold, and I could scamper around on those ranges of dry rock to try to keep up my body warmth. Further down the beach I saw that there was actually ice on the sand at the edge of the water.


    I jumped up and down while the silent sea rose and fell, barely, beneath the tenuous sun. Was it a red giant of some other world? Somehow I felt this was still Earth, and those dull embers were what was left of the sun.


    The world was oppressive, but not lifeless. Where the rocks were wet, they were covered with an olive-colored slime. And out in the water, as the tired swells slowly lifted and fell, I saw something move, a dark form. It was small and round; I wondered if it were a small seal. With a slight rise in the water it was thrown up onto ¨C or managed to climb up onto ¨C a ridge of rock. And now I saw that it had tentacles. It struck me as a cross between a seal and an octopus; a rounded animal with a smooth, mottled gray hide, perhaps with short fur, but also thin dangling limbs. Once atop the rock and out of the water, it seemed to rest and gather its strength. I couldn¡¯t help but think it was expiring, too, just like the sun; just like this Earth.


    And now to my left there was a device, a machine. It had not been there when I ran up; it simply materialized. It reminded me of a four-person pedal cab I had seen, once, in a park. This was due just to its size, and its construction out of metal framing. It also had several white arc-shaped bars that reminded me of tusks, or maybe some long bones of a mastodon ribcage. The cold may have been getting to me, by that point.


    From inside that white ribcage emerged a man, now, getting up from a seat that had been obscured. He stepped high to clear the frame, and then froze as he noticed me.


    He looked Victorian. He wore an Ulster overcoat, dark plaid pants, and a flannel scarf. I would not have been surprised had he worn a top hat, but instead he had on a warm-looking fur cap.


    ¡°Well, good day,¡± he said. ¡°Although I am afraid it is not.¡± He had an English accent.


    ¡°Good day,¡± I answered back. ¡°I didn¡¯t expect to see anyone here.¡±


    ¡°I just arrived.¡±


    ¡°I saw.¡±


    ¡°And how do you find yourself here?¡±


    I turned to gesture toward the case, but it was hidden behind a rise in the rock.


    ¡°A case, back there. You can¡¯t see it. I climbed out of it just a short time ago.¡± I was going to add that I didn¡¯t know anything else about how it arrived here, or when I got into it, but I held off.


    ¡°Well then. Becoming a regular Brighton here. I don¡¯t have it to myself any longer.¡±


    ¡°You have ¨C been here before?¡±


    ¡°Many times,¡± he said. ¡°For better or worse. I keep coming back.¡±


    He literally jolted, then:


    ¡°But here¡¯s my coat. Pardon my manners. You did not come here ¨C with any amount of preparation, did you.¡± He swept off his coat and stepped forward to hold it open for me.


    ¡°I¡¯m afraid I did not,¡± I said.


    ¡°A white case, you say?¡±


    ¡°Yes.¡±Stolen novel; please report.


    ¡°Nearby? I¡¯m surprised I haven¡¯t seen it before.¡±


    ¡°How many times have you visited?¡±


    ¡°A dozen. Or more.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s true,¡± I said. I couldn¡¯t help speaking out loud to myself. ¡°Wells was writing ¨C a report. Journalism.¡±


    ¡°Beg you pardon?¡±


    ¡°Where are you coming from? Or when are you coming from?¡±


    ¡°London, is the where. And from various times, as you seem to have guessed.¡± He smiled. ¡°It was difficult to convince my friends back home of the nature of my traveling.¡±


    ¡°And this is the place you keep coming to?¡±


    He looked away from me, out at the oily sea.


    ¡°One of the places. It¡¯s odd, I suppose. But there is something that draws me here. Something about ¨C the end of things. This time when there are no further sunrises. No further sunsets, even.¡± He looked back to me. ¡°It¡¯s ¨C knowing how the story ends, I suppose. That¡¯s the addiction of it. How many of us ever really know our own stories? The arcs of our lives? But I know the arc of this one. This world¡¯s life. Many observers admire an austere beauty, you know. The Pennines in the winter, that sort of thing. Well then. You can¡¯t get much more austere than this.¡±


    And he turned again to gaze out over the ocean. I thought he was weighing saying something more, but he was silent. After a minute or two I realized he was truly getting lost in a reverie about this nightmare of a dying shore.


    ¡°Shouldn¡¯t you get back?¡± I asked him. ¡°Don¡¯t you have someone waiting for you ¨C maybe a writer? Maybe ¨C Hillyer, I believe it was?¡±


    He turned to me.


    ¡°You are acquainted with Hillyer?¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ve read of him.¡±


    He nodded, once.


    ¡°He might be waiting. Still. Although I would not really need to leave him waiting long at all, would I.¡± He looked back at his machine.


    ¡°But listen,¡± he said. ¡°I can at least take you back. I shall do that. You don¡¯t care to stay here, I imagine?¡±


    ¡°I do not, no.¡±


    ¡°Even I don¡¯t want to stay here too long. The end is truly near. I will transport you out, then. My machine seats only one person, but I have been thinking of correcting that. And this is a good time to do so. A good time.¡± He high-stepped back into the frame of the machine, and spoke before he sat back down on the saddle inside the ribcage:


    ¡°This won¡¯t take long, of course. Not for you.¡± He smiled.


    He sat; I saw him move two control levers; and then the machine was gone. There was no sound as it vanished; it simply disappeared.


    Out in the sea, the seal-octopus still lay on the rock, looking lifeless.


    And then the machine was back. It appeared silently; but it was slightly larger, now, two or three feet longer.


    ¡°That was a good trip for you to avoid,¡± the traveler said, standing up. ¡°Took me nearly three months. Much longer than it should have.¡±


    ¡°You went back to your time?¡±


    ¡°Oh, no. The work then would have taken years. I couldn¡¯t just add a seat without improving the mechanism. They are better equipped to do that in the twenty-third century.¡±


    ¡°Are they.¡±


    ¡°Yes, very much so. You are from an earlier time?¡±


    ¡°Yes. Close to yours, actually.¡±


    ¡°Very good. We¡¯re practically neighbors, then. I brought you these.¡±


    He lifted up a pair of white boots.


    ¡°Very modern-looking, aren¡¯t they. I should have picked some up for myself. Much warmer than my cobblestone-worn shoes. Come on in, step over that bar there.¡±


    I did so, and he motioned behind his seat to one which shared the back of his but faced the other way.


    ¡°Sit down there and we¡¯ll be on our way. Back to a time of a younger sun.¡±


    ¡°This vehicle of yours reminds me of a ribcage,¡± I said. ¡°I don¡¯t suppose you were at Hawkins¡¯s dinner?¡±


    ¡°Ah, at Crystal Palace?¡± he asked. He laughed. ¡°No, I¡¯m afraid that was before my time. Although that¡¯s no obstacle now, is it. Perhaps I should drop by. But when do you want to go to?¡±


    ¡°To 2025.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s your own time?¡±


    ¡°It is.¡±


    ¡°And nowhen else? Not even on the way? There is so much to see, my friend.¡±


    ¡°Perry.¡±


    ¡°Perry. It¡¯s a long, beautiful span before we arrive ¨C here. But straight home?¡±


    ¡°Yes, please. I thank you for the ride.¡±


    ¡°Not at all.¡±


    He must have moved the levers, then, because the sable sky, the dull red sun, the gray beach, all whirled.

 Nineteen - The Ancient Man

    I was twelve years old when my mother showed me the frozen man.


    I had heard of him before, of course. The ancient man had been kept by the people up in River Bend for longer than even our oldest elders could remember. He was well-known to everyone for many miles around. He was a part of our country, just like the Shoals River and Heron Inlet.


    But I was more interested in seeing just about anything else ¨C ospreys, catamounts, the caravels off the coast, the festival day lacrosse games. I also had acquired three coins from the old times; two of them, my father had given to me, but one I had found myself while clearing a drain ditch. All three were silver, and I was always on the lookout for another.


    Somehow even dead people had always interested me more than this living, or at any rate not-quite-dead, man just up the river. There had been a storm two years before which had uprooted an old maple tree, by a stream that had flooded; locked in those roots, now vertical over the hole they had left in the ground, were three skeletons ¨C broken, with the rib cages of each one suspended in the dirt. One skull, and arm and leg bones, were visible in the ground below. My grandfather said they were likely warriors from the old Red Nation from the Reivers War of his grandfather¡¯s time.


    ¡°That tree grew over their cemetery,¡± I said.


    ¡°Well,¡± my grandfather had answered. I got the impression he was thinking of how to express this appropriately for a child; he must have decided I was old enough for a harsh truth:


    ¡°Son, there probably wasn¡¯t a cemetery for these men. General Woundwort¡¯s boys likely just threw those bodies in a ditch and left them. They were probably completely forgotten by the time that tree got knee high.¡±


    So these were the kinds of things I had all around me, and a frozen old man didn¡¯t raise my interest. But my mother went to River Bend every now and then to visit my aunt, a two-hour trip on the canal boat.


    My mother always looked forward to canal trips, and her enthusiasm was infectious. She liked seeing Aunt May, for one thing, and she dressed well for the boat. On that trip she wore a red dress which she had purchased on a previous visit to the same River Bend.


    ¡°You had to make a trip for a proper dress to be able to make a trip,¡± my father had said. ¡°It¡¯s circular.¡± He was teasing her; he clearly liked the dress, and he would often step to her to touch her back when she was wearing it. I would look away at that point, of course, maybe up toward the sky for an osprey.


    ¡°Well, next time I¡¯ll just have it shipped down on the hog barge, and I¡¯ll tell everyone that was your idea,¡± she answered him.


    Her enthusiasm for these trips was infectious, as I said ¨C but it never lasted, for me. She was glad to get away from our farm for a day or two, and board the boat, and watch the canal water glide by with the rougher river beyond. I, on the other hand, found myself after a short while just staring at the mules on the bank in their harness, pulling us along under the driver¡¯s whip, seemingly having fallen into a mindless rhythm similar to how I was feeling as I sat on the bench next to my mother. I would get up and stand by the bulwark, hoping to see something off in the woods, but I thought the real action was out on the river. It was visible from time to time through the trees, in spots where the canal had been dug close to it. It had a few rapids, and a number of islands where you had to wonder if anyone was hiding on them; maybe kids my age sneaking off.


    There were two locks the ship had to rise in, on the way, and they were briefly interesting with their great doors being closed behind us and then opened before us, but even they just seemed like a lot of work to raise the boat sixteen feet total.


    After a few hours the mules finally stepped up and down over the short stone bridge, on the side of the canal, that marked the approach to the town of River Bend. I left the side of the ship and returned to the bench.


    ¡°Acey, you¡¯ve never seen the ancient man, have you?¡± my mother asked. I shook my head.


    ¡°Why don¡¯t we stop to see him on the way to Aunt May¡¯s. She won¡¯t want to come along.¡±Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    ¡°Why today?¡±


    ¡°Why not. The weather¡¯s nice. You should see him. You never have. Maybe you¡¯ll be the one who can figure out how to bring him back.¡±


    I rolled my eyes.


    ¡°If he wants to come back,¡± I said, ¡°I think he¡¯s going to have to ¨C find a switch in there himself.¡±


    ¡°No, I think someday it will be one of us. If he could have come back by himself, I think he would have by now. He seems ready enough to get out, from what I can see. The look on his face. Let¡¯s go and I¡¯ll show you.¡±


    So instead of walking straight up the center road of River Bend, on this day we turned left after a block. The building that housed the ancient man and his casket had been built up a short distance from the river to protect it from flooding.


    The building struck me as less than a church, but more than a house. It was stone, not wood like most; and it had an arch over the front doorway. (It had no actual door; the people in River Bend hadn¡¯t bothered installing one because they¡¯d realized very long ago that the case would endure no matter the cold or heat outside.)


    So in that regard, it looked a bit like a church; but it was smaller than any other church around, and it had no furnishings, no benches or anything.


    When I was older it occurred to me that the relatively formal design of the building was a form of hedging by the townsfolk. Was it a small museum dedicated to a quirky freak? Or a house of reverence for someone or something who might be superior? Or if not superior to us himself, maybe sent down to us by superior others? If the ancient man ever woke up, would he be able to cause any trouble if he wasn¡¯t satisfied by the dignity of his housing? I felt like the stone construction, the size, the archway and so on was a just-in-case.


    And this was one reason I had never been too keen to go see him; I suspected it might be a quiet, reverential space where I¡¯d be expected to sit silently for an hour, and so on.


    But that wasn¡¯t the case. The building was empty. No one outside had paid it any attention as we walked up. The place and its occupant had been there so long that people seemed to ignore it as much as they had ignored the little bridge the canal boat mules had walked on, on our way here.


    The case was mounted up on a small platform. It was white, and clean. Its outer lid was kept raised all the time, apparently, so the man inside could be seen.


    He was submerged in a thick but clear substance. Some sort of grease, it looked like, but it was clean. You could see straight through it. He looked like one of us, nothing strange or special. I thought he looked a little disgusted, and impatient. I don¡¯t know what I had expected.


    He was naked, but people had cast a blanket on the case lid, to cover him up from about his navel on down. The blanket was tied down with cords that wrapped down underneath the case, but it was clear that they had been pulled loose many times by the curious. My mother reached down and hiked it up a little up his body.


    On the side of the white case there was a small darker area, which showed just a green dot and the number -178.


    ¡°Do people know what that number is?¡± I asked.


    ¡°No. It has never changed.¡±


    ¡°And how many years has he been here?¡±


    ¡°No one really knows.¡±


    ¡°But since the time of the Red Nation?¡±


    ¡°Even before then. He¡¯s older than that, everyone says.¡±


    ¡°No one ever has to ¨C do anything to this?¡±


    ¡°No. They keep up the building, is all. Make sure it doesn¡¯t fall down on him. It would be such a shame if anything happens to this case before ¨C well, before whatever it is going to do, it does. The people here keep an eye on it.¡±


    ¡°Do you think he¡¯s alive? Do you think he¡¯ll come out?¡±


    I knew she did, but here in front of this oddity, this silent inexplicable oddity, I felt like I had to check.


    ¡°I¡¯m sure he¡¯s alive. He looks it, doesn¡¯t he? As for what will happen to him, I can¡¯t say, Acey.¡±


    And that was that. There was nothing else to see, or do. I felt a little bad leaving him there, when we walked out; but as far as that went, it was reassuring to know he had survived in there for so long already. Our departure wouldn¡¯t matter.


    *


    Sixty years ago, that was, and what a different world it is now. The canal is still there, but steamers make the trip now, and the mules are gone. And only freight goes by water these days; people travel in steamcars of course. I tell my grandchildren about traveling by the canal passenger boats, and they look at me as if I¡¯d told them I got around by paddling logs.


    My mother lived to be ninety; Aunt May, ninety-two. I did stop by and see the ancient man a number of more times, after that. The building was altered a bit, over the years, and about fifteen years ago he was moved altogether, but he and his case never changed; the same green dot, the same number displayed, and the same impatient look on his face. I visited him with my own children and grandchildren, like everyone else around our parts does.


    The last I saw him was about five years ago. I don¡¯t believe I will be able to make the trip up to River Bend again, but I know he¡¯s still there, looking as old and as young as ever.

 The Video Message - final

    Perry watched the fourth and final video which had been left for him ¨C this one by Araceli alone ¨C immediately prior to departing the hospital for his new apartment and new, or resumed, life.


    ¡°You have everything?¡± Penelope asked him. ¡°I know it isn¡¯t much. But you could watch the video first and then gather what you¡¯re taking, and sign out.¡±


    ¡®No need, everything¡¯s in here,¡± he said, lifting up a cloth bag. ¡°Not much, as you said. Just the printouts of what you¡¯ve given me. And the few clothes I acquired here.¡±


    ¡°There¡¯s much more in the apartment,¡± she said. ¡°Let me turn this on, then.¡±


    Once again she turned the screen toward him.


    Araceli was alone, and she looked to be well into her eighties. She was smiling, and alert, but slighter ¨C not surprisingly ¨C than at sixteen.


    ¡°I can¡¯t believe I outlived her,¡± Perry told Penelope.


    ¡°Daddy,¡± his daughter said. She sat straight, with her hands folded in her lap. ¡°It¡¯s me. Araceli. Many years have passed. I know that¡¯s hard to tell, since I look amazing.¡± Her smile broadened, with a flash of the radiance he¡¯d seen at sixteen.


    ¡°I made it into the Twenty-Second Century. And almost through its first decade. I¡¯m sorry that I ¨C we ¨C went so long without recording. We began to worry that it might almost be ¨C cruel to speak of everything you missed. I¡¯m so sorry you weren¡¯t with us. I truly hope you see these.


    ¡°Mother passed away at eighty-eight. That was 2071. She had a wonderful life. She kept working with the school system for her entire career. She raised me, then helped with my children. I had three. Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    ¡°I became a social worker. I spent my career in schools, and then a hospital.¡±


    She smiled again.


    ¡°It¡¯s so ¨C odd to look back on my life. I know what it was, now. I know the story. It went well. I was happy. I met good people, and I fit in well with everyone. And much of that was because of you. Even though you were with me for only ten years, they were the most important ten. You set me up to have a good life. And you were good for Mother, too. Even after you left ¨C there was a stability with us that you had helped establish.


    ¡°I hope I passed some of that on to my children. They have done well, themselves, and I have five grandchildren. You should have descendants around, whenever you come back.


    ¡°Mother never married again, Daddy. You were her only husband, and I am her ¨C your ¨C only child.


    ¡°I came to see you in the hospital several times. They showed me the case. It was . . . not easy to look at you. Mainly because you never changed. Mother said that Dr. Saars-Tomlin believed that the machine might heal you on its own, given enough time, or that medical science might catch up and be able to . . . revive your brain, essentially. But neither of those has happened, yet.


    ¡°I¡¯m recording this because I am not sure how much longer I have. Of course I have not been sure of that for a long time. Who is? But lately I¡¯ve been feeling more tired. I¡¯ve had a long, wonderful life, just like Mother.


    ¡°I am the last person who . . . remembers you. I find myself being so blunt. I can¡¯t imagine what you¡¯ll have to go through when you return, given all you have been through already.


    ¡°You made the news, you know. I wonder if you¡¯ll be able to look up the headlines, when you return. You were working, in a tunnel beneath a pyramid in Mexico. It collapsed. They pulled you out, but not quickly enough. They took you to a hospital in Merida, and then medevaced to Richmond. That¡¯s where mother spoke to Dr. Saars-Tomlin.¡±


    She paused.


    ¡°You led quite a life. I hope you live another.¡±

 Twenty - The Refugee

    ¡°Daddy, there¡¯s a man with no clothes on,¡± Ella said. ¡°Out by the river, the Steamship. And I only saw him because Blue saw him, and barked, and then I came right here.¡± She sped through this last line, her eyes wide. She was typically so self-possessed ¨C I often thought she was the oldest soul in the village, and I really don¡¯t think that was just paternal pride talking ¨C but now, this once, she seemed worried what I would think.


    ¡°No clothes on?¡±


    ¡°None,¡± she said.


    ¡°What was he doing?¡±


    ¡°Just sitting there. He may be hurt, I think. I didn¡¯t stay long.¡±


    ¡°Okay, sweetheart. I¡¯ll go look. You stay here. You were back with the sheep?¡±


    She nodded. ¡°On that back hill.¡±


    ¡°All right, stay here. When Mommy gets back, tell her where I¡¯ve gone.


    ¡°And tell her not to worry,¡± I added.


    Blue was looking at me, ears up a bit, sensing he might be able to get in another walk.


    I went first to the barn to get a staff, although I doubted this man, if he were truly naked, and perhaps injured, would be much trouble. Blue cantered behind me. I nearly cantered myself ¨C I was very curious to see this visitor. Our village did get travelers walking through, now and then, sometimes in varying states of distress. This might be one of them. Or, perhaps just a stranger who had been swimming in the river and had not expected a girl and a dog to chance upon him. Or ¨C well, we would see.


    And then on second thought I went back into the barn to get an empty feed bag. I picked up two of them.


    ¡°Beggars, choosers,¡± I said to Blue.


    The Steamship was our name for an outcrop of rocks to the east of our farm, close to the river. It had an older name ¨C En Yan Leota ¨C which dated back to an age before there was steam power, but now in our time, with its two large central stones that looked like paddlewheels, and the tall one behind them which stood in for a smokestack, The Steamship it was.


    I passed the vegetable garden, our horses, the apple trees, and then entered the back grazing field. The sheep were off in a corner of it. Blue and I went straight through, ignoring them.


    On the other side of the fence, by the rocks of the Steamship, the man was there. He made no attempt to hide, just sitting on one of them even as Blue and I drew close. He was aware of us, and watched us approach. He seemed tired. He was indeed completely naked.


    He was about forty, I would say. I had never seen him before, that I could remember. He had black hair. His skin was very white; he looked like he hadn¡¯t been out in the sun for a long time. And he looked very, very tired. He seemed fatigued to the point of being dazed.


    ¡°Can I help you?¡± I asked him. ¡°Do you have clothes?¡±


    He shook his head, but it didn¡¯t look like he was answering the question; it looked more like he wasn¡¯t understanding.


    ¡°Where have you come from?¡±


    He spoke a few words then, and pointed with this thumb down toward the river. I didn¡¯t catch anything he said.


    ¡°Do you understand what I¡¯m saying?¡±


    I had been speaking Common, and I decided to switch to Cape:


    ¡°How about now? Do you understand me now?¡±


    He shook his head.


    ¡°Can you get up and walk?¡± I gestured to indicate standing up. I had switched back to Common, which is the language I really wanted to know if he spoke.


    He braced himself with his hands and stood. He looked to be in pain, and I saw that his right ankle was hugely swollen. He balanced on his left foot and tried to hop forward.


    ¡°Well just stay there then, my goodness,¡± I told him. I waved him back. ¡°You can wear one of these, and I¡¯ll wrap that ankle with the other.¡±


    I showed him the feed bag and laid the staff down on the ground. I wore a knife in my belt and pulled it out to haggle the bag in half. The man just watched.


    ¡°Did you come here from Redenton? Redenton? No? How about Meyerton? From that far? Meyerton?¡± He clearly wasn¡¯t understanding me, but I thought maybe the names of these neighboring towns upriver would get a response from him. They didn¡¯t.


    ¡°Did you float here?¡± I motioned to the river. ¡°Float in on something?¡±


    No answer.


    It took me a while to cut one bag into long strips, and the other into a wrap, but eventually we had his ankle bandaged up tight, and him covered up somewhat. I had him put an arm over my shoulder, and we inched our way toward the house. That also went pretty slow. I wasn¡¯t able to talk to him.


    We put him up in the barn, and I gave him some of my clothes. Lulu ¨C my wife ¨C had no problem with it.


    ¡°He can barely move, and we¡¯ll know him better in a day or two.¡±


    ¡°I agree.¡±


    We talk to Ella once more about him:


    ¡°You know to be careful with that man, right? People who have lost everything may have had it taken from them for a reason. He could have been put out of law for something he did. And he may have deserved it, for all we know.¡±


    She had just nodded, her eyes once again wide.


    The first couple days, this guest of ours just lay down in the barn, mostly. On the third day he started to move about more. He began testing his ankle every day, as if he wanted to leave. He also fashioned a travel sack for himself, with a shoulder strap, from another feed bag.


    Whether his ankle was a sprain or a fracture, it healed enough after a couple weeks for him to walk fairly normally.This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.


    Lulu spoke Franco, in addition to my Common and Cape, but the man apparently didn¡¯t know that, either. He spoke to us a few times, a few words we couldn¡¯t understand. Lulu agreed with me that his language wasn¡¯t so very different from ours; it wasn¡¯t something from across the ocean, but we couldn¡¯t make it out.


    He learned a few Common words. He helped out around the farm as soon as his ankle allowed, digging potatoes once and then helping me clear brush in a field beyond. He was clearly careful never to be alone with Ella. Also, very reassuringly, Blue liked him.


    He either could not or would not tell us where he had come from or what he was doing, though. He identified himself as Sterling, although he pronounced it more like Steerling. He didn¡¯t mention a second name.


    *


    He was an interesting twist to what was otherwise a placid, blessedly eventless summer. The six previous ones had all had long bouts of dangerously hot weather, but this one backed off on that a little, for once. (And in the last one of those, just the year before, Lulu¡¯s sister¡¯s house had burned down, so they had spent the season with us while we put up a new one. So that had been an especially busy few months. It had been enjoyable, and memorable, having these guests so close to us, but also hard.) The sheep were content, the apples were growing, the wheat was coming in. We went to the fair for Solstice Day and spent the night outside in tents, as we always did. Ella had fun at the fair, but I soon couldn¡¯t recall any particulars about it that set it apart from the others I had gone to for the past fifteen years.


    Ella turned ten. Jake and Walt were thirteen, and they had gone to spend the summer at Lulu¡¯s father¡¯s farm, helping out there. This was their second summer doing that, and they loved it. Other than that, we just worked our farm. It was a smooth summer. Our guest stayed just over three weeks, total.


    Sterling seemed to be a level man, and I trusted him, as I mentioned, but it was a little odd that he made extremely little effort to learn Common beyond a few survival words. Once he was walking around easily he clearly wanted to move on, and because of his reticence I thought it was just as well.


    He did ask me if I wanted him to stay to help around the farm in order to pay off the food and clothing I¡¯d given him. He just spoke, in his own language, what had to be words to that effect, quietly, but from his gestures I understood his meaning. He first motioned that he would be walking; then he pointed to his shoes (which had been mine, of course), and then out to the fields, and made some hoeing motions. His question was obvious.


    ¡°No, don¡¯t worry, you can go ahead,¡± I said, shaking my head and waving my hands.


    But I added:


    ¡°I do want to show you something first, though.¡±


    *


    We had set up a cot for him in the south end of the barn, the end by its large door. We kept our buggy and our farm wagon in there; the wagon in front, with the buggy backed up to the far wall.


    I swung open the door, and together we pulled the wagon out. Then we moved the buggy away from the wall. I then went back to the floor beneath where it had been, and lifted up planks while he watched. I could see that he was confused about why I was doing this, but he didn¡¯t say anything.


    Beneath those planks was where I kept the white case, under a cloth.


    ¡°I wanted to show you this, before you go,¡± I said. ¡°Do you recognize this?¡±


    I pulled back the cloth. The case was still clean, and looking new, even fifteen years since it had opened up and let me out, plus the two hundred, three hundred more, whatever it was, since it had been made, back in my first life.


    He looked down at it, then up at me. He clearly didn¡¯t know what it was.


    ¡°You didn¡¯t happen to come here in one of these?¡±


    He just looked down and up again, politely confused.


    ¡°So you really don¡¯t speak any Common, any English? You don¡¯t understand me at all?¡±


    ¡°Don¡¯t understand,¡± he said.


    ¡°Well then.¡± I shook the cover and laid it back down on the case. He, helpful as ever, grabbed the far corners to assist. We put the planks back in place, and pushed back the buggy and wagon. He may have frowned just a bit, wondering what all that had been about.


    *


    I had been the naked guy coughed up on the edge of a town, fifteen years earlier. It had happened upriver from Meyerton. I had been taken in by a family, but I wasn¡¯t in quite such a rush to leave as Sterling had been, with us. I learned the language and also met Lulu. We had come here to our farm, land her family owned, within a year. The twins came soon thereafter.


    I did not, at that time, remember, and never have since, what exactly happened to me back when I was placed in the case. I can remember Jennifer and Ara, and our house in Richmond, and my job; but nothing after that until the case lid rose above me, here in this time, on the bank of that river, and I sat up, choking on the vaseline or whatever it was.


    Jennifer would have liked Lulu.


    Half the time I say that, it sounds to me like a weak excuse, a cop out, a denial. Maybe even a betrayal of Jennifer. I have often repeated it out loud; just to hear myself say it, I suppose, to leave no uncertainty that I am really buying into the idea.


    But . . . she would have. Lulu is tough, and down-to-earth, just like Jen was. Lulu can shear sheep, graft apple branches, tackle her sons. She has a sarcastic sense of humor. And she puts up with me.


    Ella, of course, reminds me so much of Ara, her long, long ago half-sister. I wish so much that they could have met. And the past few years, when Ella has been eight, and nine, and now ten, have put me to thinking so, so often about the ways in which she is like and unlike Ara; because I lost Ara ¨C or she was lost to me ¨C when she was nine, just about this age. I would guess that in years to come, as I see Ella grow, I¡¯ll see hints, reflections of the person Ara must have been.


    I figure it had been at least two hundred years, and perhaps much longer, since I had been locked into that white case at the end of my first life. I also think that at least one hundred years have passed since something apocalyptic happened in this world; something I obviously missed. I think it was likely a nuclear war. I¡¯ve seen rubble fields which local folklore says you shouldn¡¯t walk too far into; I assume this is a warning about radiation that has been simplified over time and lost its origin story. Who knows if the areas are still radioactive ¨C we¡¯re not back to the technological level to be able to produce a measurement device to find out.


    The world depopulated and fell into a dark age, but had now emerged. Well, many or most people from 2025 would regard these years right here as still a dark age, I¡¯m sure. But we are doing well enough. We have plenty of food. Our technology is about late Nineteenth Century, and that seems good enough to me. We do have painkillers; going to the dentist is not a torture session.


    We do, certainly, lose more women to childbirth than in my first life. And I see older people being struck down by strokes and heart attacks who I¡¯m sure would have done better back then. But . . . late Nineteenth Century, as I said. It could be worse. I suppose part of why I feel content here is the civilization, more so than the technology; we don¡¯t have slavery, nor a Seven Years War, nor a Thirty Years War, nor an Eighty Years War, nor a Hundred Years War.


    Anyway, once Lulu and I had established our farm, I retrieved the case from where I had hidden it, and put it in our barn. I didn¡¯t know what further use I would ever have for it. Just keeping it for ¨C the day when someone like Sterling appeared.


    I was so nearly certain that this visitor of ours had been another survivor from my time. Common is basically English, which is why I kept trying it with him.


    *


    I keep finding myself wondering what it was about me ¨C or what it is about me, I guess, present tense ¨C that I¡¯m the one who was put into a coma and then revived like this. Then I catch myself, because I know that¡¯s ridiculous, a spotlight effect: we assume we¡¯re special, but we¡¯re really not. This was random; I¡¯m just the guy who -- needed to be put to sleep for some reason at the same place and time that whoever-it-was had that case ready to go. And then apparently it was never done again, or at least not that anyone has heard of.


    (I wonder if they just decided it was unethical, after they put me down in that thing; that must be torture for that poor guy, what if he¡¯s having endless nightmares, we can¡¯t do that again, etc. Or maybe they decided it wouldn¡¯t really work, but thankfully they didn¡¯t pull the plug on that case when they decided that. I mean a figurative plug of course.)


    So I know there¡¯s almost certainly nothing special about me. I was just right place, right time if you want to call it that. Still, it¡¯s human nature to at least form a coherent story, a narrative. What kind of a life is this; how can this make sense; why did this work. And well, I did read a lot of science fiction, especially when I was younger, which sort of prepared me for this. As soon as I saw that case, I had a sense of what must have happened, which maybe some other people in such a position might not have had.


    This man I had found was apparently just a drifter. I never did learn why he turned up with no clothes.


    Now that he has departed, I feel freer, somehow. All these years, my story has seemed so odd, so unbelievable, so unlikely, that I had always hoped to find someone who might confirm it. Another person just like myself would have been the perfect person to do that, of course. But now that he has come and gone, I feel like I made an honest attempt to figure out my story, and now that it hasn¡¯t worked, I can drop it. I am fifty-five, after all, in waking years, and I¡¯m getting too old to wonder about the end of my first life. I spent so long trying to solve a mystery about my life which could not be solved ¨C or maybe it was no mystery at all. Something had happened to me such that people around me thought I¡¯d be better off frozen and preserved for the future. I had had a beloved wife, back then, and had raised a happy daughter. What more was there to know, really? I needed to pay attention to Ella, now, and to the twins, and to Lulu, and to the farm. This is now my time; my second time, but now the only one that matters.

 Twenty-One -- The Beginning

    The doctor looked familiar.


    She was one thing I could latch onto. Most everything else in the room just looked odd. The walls were glass, illuminated green and blue, and one of them ¨C the one to my left ¨C was an actual giant fish tank, floor to ceiling. Dozens of tropical fish drifted up and down, occasionally stopping and seeming to look at me. Red ones, yellow, electric blue ¨C I don¡¯t know my fish very well, so I didn¡¯t know what they were exactly.


    And there was a fragrance in the room, basically pine. And light breezes would come through, gentle but still more than would have been generated naturally by any air conditioning system. Any such system from my first life, at any rate.


    I think it was all there to be relaxing, but I found it too much. Well, the fish were cool. The breezes and scent, I could do without.


    But the doctor looked familiar.


    It hit me, and it had taken too long for me to realize:


    She looked like Jennifer.


    I felt I was still half asleep, thinking this. Was my mind playing these tricks on me because I was drowsy? Or was the impossibility of it wearing me down and making me drowsy?


    But she looked like Jen; just older. Substantially older, around seventy. Or over seventy. She was clearly a doctor, or some medical professional, because she wore a white coat over a gray suit; but she looked past the usual retirement age.


    She was beaming at me.


    It wasn¡¯t actually Jennifer, of course. I knew that. Her eyes were green, for one thing, and Jen¡¯s were brown. But the shape of the eyes, her eyebrows, and just her face overall, especially the top of it, somehow, reminded me of Jen. And her hair; her hair was dark gray, not black like Jen¡¯s, but it was pulled back the way Jen pulled hers back, and it was the same length.


    I asked her:


    ¡°Have you been trying to wake me up for some time?¡±


    ¡°No,¡± she said. ¡°We¡¯ve been checking on you, of course. But this is your second day awake. Why do you ask?¡±


    ¡°You look familiar. A little. Like maybe I¡¯ve seen you already here but I¡¯ve forgotten.¡±


    ¡°Your eyes have been closed, so you wouldn¡¯t have seen me. But that¡¯s good. We want this room to be warm and comfortable, for you.¡±


    ¡°I ¨C see,¡± I said. ¡°That¡¯s what I guessed. It¡¯s almost like ¨C camping, in here.¡±


    ¡°Camping on a coral reef,¡± she said. She was smiling.


    ¡°Yes. I can¡¯t miss the fish.¡±


    ¡°Is it too much? We could channel them away.¡±


    ¡°No, they¡¯re fine. I always feel like I¡¯m being watched, but maybe that¡¯s good. Keep me in line.¡±


    ¡°Can you tell me your name?¡±


    ¡°Perry. Perry Doran. But I¡¯m not remembering much else. I feel I¡¯ve been asleep for ¨C quite a while, possibly.¡±


    ¡°You have been. A very long time. Are you ready to know?¡±


    ¡°Sure.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s now 2122, Perry.¡±


    ¡°And I ¨C I don¡¯t remember exactly when I . . . lost my memory. But that¡¯s around a hundred years?¡±A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.


    ¡°It is. You were put into stasis ¨C suspended animation ¨C in 2025.¡±


    ¡°Twenty Twenty-Five,¡± I repeated. ¡°So that¡¯s ¨C ¡±


    But suddenly the simple arithmetic was beyond me. I looked beyond the doctor to two orange fish which seemed to be looking at me, and I felt fatigued. Near-paralyzing fatigue; torpor. I realized I was not well; not yet well.


    Then I must have fallen back asleep.


    *


    The next day, I woke up normally. The doctor was back, already sitting there. Behind her, the fish drifted around, ignoring me. I realized that I felt better.


    ¡°Good morning, Perry. You¡¯re back again. I¡¯m sorry if I said too much too soon yesterday! What you have been through is like anesthesia, and you¡¯re still coming out of it.¡±


    Today she looked familiar, again; but this time she reminded me not of Jen, but of Araceli. It was her smile, and the way she spoke; but primarily her voice. It was strange, because I remember Ara as a young girl, of course, and this woman here was over seventy, but still ¨C the voice seemed so familiar.


    ¡°Is it still ¨C 2122? I mean, am I remembering that correctly from yesterday?¡±


    ¡°You are.¡±


    ¡°I became so tired all of a sudden.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s to be expected.¡±


    ¡°Where am I? Have you told me already?¡±


    ¡°We have not. You are in Atlanta. In a specialty neurological clinic.¡±


    ¡°What have I ¨C been doing for a hundred years? Have I been in a coma?¡±


    ¡°Basically, yes. You were placed in a stasis device back in 2025 after your brain activity stopped. There was a very optimistic doctor who thought you might be revived, one day. And here you are.¡±


    ¡°I, uh,¡± I said. ¡°I don¡¯t feel one hundred. Or one hundred and thirty, whatever age I am. I guess I haven¡¯t looked in a mirror. My hands look normal, though. My skin.¡±


    ¡°You do indeed look good. You didn¡¯t age. Are you remembering anything from your time away?¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t, no. I do feel like I¡¯ve been gone. I can tell time has passed, like after a long sleep. A very long one. But I¡¯m not remembering anything. I¡¯m not even remembering what happened to me. But ¨C I remember my past. My wife, and my daughter. And our home, and my work.¡±


    ¡°Good. Jennifer, and Araceli.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s right. You know this?¡±


    ¡°We do. Perry, I¡¯m afraid you did not miss them by much. Araceli lived a long time, and she passed away just over ten years ago.¡±


    I said nothing to that.


    ¡°And Perry ¨C she was my mother. Jennifer was my grandmother. I¡¯m your granddaughter. I¡¯m Jenna ¨C it¡¯s for Jen, and Araceli. I¡¯ve been waiting for you.¡±


    I looked down. I cried. And cried. Ugly cried, as people would have said ¨C one hundred years earlier. And my granddaughter Jenna was there to put her arms around me.


    *


    ¡°And ¨C you knew your grandmother? Jen?¡±


    ¡°I did. Very well, she took care of me many days when I was little. She would take me to the bus stop. Some days my parents were away, and she baked with me.¡±


    She smiled and added:


    ¡°And she helped me name my rabbit. The one I got when I was eight.¡±


    ¡°What was the name?¡±


    ¡°Cinnamon.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s a good name for a rabbit,¡± I said. ¡°And a good name coming from . . . your grandmother.¡±


    I paused, then asked:


    ¡°Did she seem ¨C happy?¡±


    ¡°She did. Very. She was a perfect grandmother to have. I was lucky.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m so sorry I missed her. I missed half of her life. That should have been our life.¡±


    It occurred to me:


    ¡°And I should have been there for you, too. Taking you to that bus stop.¡±


    ¡°Well, you¡¯re here now. We can go back there soon and you can walk me. We¡¯ll find the corner.¡±


    With that, I started to cry again.


    ¡°And you¡¯ll be coming home with me,¡± she said.


    I raised the bed sheet up to my face to dry off.


    ¡°Home with you?¡±


    ¡°Yes, I have a room. You can stay with me until you¡¯re on your feet again. Oh, and I have this for you.¡± She reached into a pocket.


    She took out a ring; my wedding ring. I recognized its water pattern. It seemed appropriate, what with the wall behind her.


    ¡°We saved this for you. Grandmother gave it to Mother, and she gave it to me.¡±


    She put it in my hand.


    ¡°You¡¯re back, Grandfather. Welcome home.¡±