Future Shock (5 page)

00:32

I pick the unicorn up carefully, holding my breath. It’s made of silver paper, with not even a speck of dust on it. I slide my fingers across the folds of paper, like I did with the origami unicorn from earlier today.

I know one thing for certain: Adam made this.

“Elena?” he calls from the stairway. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah!” I shove the unicorn in my backpack before he can see it. I don’t know what it means yet, and I need more time to figure it out.

Adam and Zoe wait in the stairway. She stands close to him, like she might grab his arm at any second. I doubt she’d let him out of her sight, not with her hands shaking like that. And if they were together the entire time I was on this floor, there’s no way he could have placed the unicorn there.

Not
this
Adam, anyway…

“Find anything?” he asks.

“No.” If the future version of Adam put that unicorn there, he did so knowing I would search the third floor alone. He wanted me to find it—and
only
me.

We return to the lobby, where Chris and Trent are already waiting. “Like I said, nothing here,” Chris says. “Total waste of time.”

Adam sighs, adjusting his glasses. “We need a plan.”

Chris crosses his arms. “The plan is we go out there, find shit to bring back to Aether, then we come back. Just the bare minimum so we can get paid, and nothing more.”

“We don’t know what’s out there. It could be dangerous.”

“Dangerous?” Zoe asks, her eyes wide.

“What if it’s not just this building that’s been abandoned?” Adam asks. “There could be radiation or—”

Chris shakes his head. “Hell no. I’m not gonna spend the next twenty-four hours holed up in this building. And I need that money.”

“He’s right. We can’t stay in here,” I say. Someone must have been inside the building recently to leave the origami unicorn upstairs. “Maybe there’s another way out.”

Chris pulls on the front door handle, but it’s locked. “The doors are glass. If we find something to break them, we can pull off the boards.”

“Hang on.” Trent pulls some little metal sticks out of his backpack. “Lockpicks!”

That’s a weird thing for Aether to put in our backpacks. I narrow my eyes. “How did you know those were in there?”

“I got bored and went through my bag while we were searching the place. There’s all sorts of stuff inside—food, water, and these lockpicks. You probably got them too.”

I kneel down and unzip my backpack. Inside, I find granola bars, an apple, a sandwich, and a full water bottle. There’s also a wallet full of more cash than I’ve ever had at one time before, a blank notebook, a map of Los Angeles, and a compass, which I don’t know how to use.

While Trent starts working on the door, I check the remaining pockets on my backpack. No lockpicks, but one has a first aid kit, which I really hope we won’t need. I also find a handful of condoms. Guess they wanted to prepare us for
everything
.

Another pocket has a gun.

I freeze, staring at the black metal. I’ve never held a gun before. I can’t tell if it’s loaded, but I don’t see any bullets in my bag, so I assume it is. Is the safety on? I have no idea. Sure, my tattoos make me look tough and I’ve been in plenty of fights, but I’ve always tried to stay out of trouble as much as I could. I thought Aether knew that. Why would they pack a gun for me? Did they expect us to run into trouble?

I raise my eyes to study the others, who are all going through their own backpacks. Do they have weapons too?

Is the gun in my backpack to protect the group—or to protect me
from
the group?

I zip the backpack closed before anyone sees the gun. If the others have weapons, they aren’t announcing that to the group. And if they don’t, it’s probably better that no one knows about mine. I just hope it doesn’t go off in my backpack by accident or something.

Trent unlocks the front door with his lockpicks and pushes it open. “Wait!” Adam yells, but it’s too late.

A cool breeze rushes through the open door, along with a dash of hazy sunshine. I don’t realize how musty and old the air in the building is until I get that first taste of fresh air. I breathe it in, and when none of us falls over dead, I figure we’re safe.

We gather around the door, peering outside, afraid to take that first step. The sky is cloudy, with tiny drops of moisture in the air that hint of rain to come. The fence around the research facility has barbed wire and is covered in “No Trespassing” signs that weren’t there before. Beyond the fence I see buildings and signs instead of rocks and dirt. Aether’s facility is no longer in the middle of nowhere.

On the other side of the fence, a car drives past—at least I think it’s a car. It’s black but shaped like a sideways egg, sleek and shiny, with dark-tinted windows. It’s hard to tell what part is the front or the back, but it has four wheels, so I assume it’s a car. It zips past us and is gone.

“What was that?” Trent asks.

“Wow, cars have changed a lot in ten years,” Adam says.

That’s when it finally hits me. This is real. All the clues add up to one inevitable truth. “We’re in the future,” I whisper.

“Hell yeah!” Chris shouts, pumping his fist. “The future, baby!”

“I can’t believe it,” Zoe whispers, wrapping her arms around herself.

The future. It’s so big, so unknown, so amazing…yet oddly familiar too. I want to see more. And now that we know for certain where we are, we can do what we came for—find technology for Aether. “We should look around. Find some stores or something.”

“Finally, someone’s talking some sense around here,” Chris says. He strides toward the fence, and Trent and Zoe follow him. I start to go too, until I see Adam hanging back, his hands shoved in his pockets.

“Come on,” I say. “There’s nothing we can do here.”

“I know. I just can’t shake the feeling that we missed something.” He looks up at the building and I follow his gaze. Every window is dark and empty.

For a brief second I consider telling him about the origami unicorn, but I remember how he brushed off my concerns earlier. The conversation between Dr. Kapur and Dr. Walters plays back in my head. They were worried about something happening “again”—did they know the facility would be abandoned when we arrived? Considering the fully stocked backpacks, I believe it.

We catch up with the others at the fence, where Chris cuts a hole large enough for him to get through with a pair of pliers he must have found in his bag. Trent is already on the other side—he climbed over the barbed wire in the time it took us to walk over.

“What?” Trent asks, when he catches me eyeing him. “It’s easy!”

Lockpicks and climbing over barbed wire…I’m getting an idea what his talent might be.

When Chris is finished, we each duck our heads and step through the jagged metal. What was once empty land is now a wide road lined with other offices and industrial buildings. Adam pulls out his map and compass and studies them, but I doubt a map from ten years ago will be much help if this area has changed so much. The others look back and forth along the road, but there’s nothing to tell us which way to go.

I remember the drive here, every twist and turn stored in my brain. I know the freeway is nearby—or at least, it was in our time. There should be a mini-mart or a gas station near the exit. I start walking. “This way.”

“How do you know this is the right direction?” Chris asks, catching up with me.

“You got a better idea?”

He snorts but doesn’t say anything else. The five of us head down the empty road, while the rising sun struggles to peek out from the dark clouds.

Another egg-shaped car shoots past us but slows at the corner to turn right. On the back window there’s a shiny red, white, and blue bumper sticker that says,
REELECT NGUYEN
, followed by a year. A year that makes me stop dead in my tracks.

Because it’s
thirty
years in the future. Not ten.

01:06

I stare after the car, the numbers lingering in my brain long after they’ve disappeared from sight. “Was that…?” I can’t say it. I’m finding it hard to breathe. “The car. The sticker. The
year
.”

“It can’t be,” Adam says, his voice low. “It must be a joke or something. Like those Yoda for President stickers. There’s no way…”

“Thirty. Years.” Chris shakes his head. “Thirty fucking years. Not ten. Thirty. Holy shit.”

All five of us are rooted to this spot in the middle of the road, gazing after a car that is long gone, hoping for answers. Zoe leans against the fence, her arms wrapped around herself, whispering, “Oh God,” again and again.

Trent stands beside her with his mouth hanging open. “This is seriously messed up,” he finally says.

“Okay, let’s not panic,” Adam says, running a hand through his dark hair. “We just need to think this through. Assuming the sticker is real, that means we’re at least thirty years in the future. Or more, if it’s an old sticker, although it looked shiny and wasn’t peeling off or anything. Dr. Walters said they
thought
we would be going ten years forward, but maybe they weren’t sure how far the accelerator would send us in the future.”

“Or the machine malfunctioned,” Chris says.

I think of the conversation I overheard between the scientists. “Or they lied to us.”

“Why would they do that?” Zoe asks.

Adam and I lock eyes, but he gives a tiny shake of his head. He doesn’t want me to tell them what I heard. Fine. It would probably freak them out even more.

“How the hell should we know?” Chris asks, saving me from having to answer. “They didn’t tell us shit. Who knows what else they’re hiding?”

Trent nods. “No kidding. They just went, ‘Hey, guys, you’re going to the future. See ya later,’ and sent us on our way. Not cool.”

“No matter what the date is, it doesn’t change the fact that we’re in the future, which is amazing,” Adams says. “Yes, thirty years is further than we expected, but that just means we’ll have even better things to bring back to Aether.”

“But, dude. Thirty years!” Trent says, his eyes wide. “Whoa, future me must be so old. Like almost fifty. Damn.”

He’s right; all of us would be about forty-eight or so. I try to imagine what my life might be like at that age, but quickly push those thoughts from my head. The temptation to find out about my future is strong, but I have to resist it. We have a job to do, and we need to stick to it so we can get back to our time and get paid. That’s what I need to focus on.

“Thirty years or ten years, it doesn’t matter in the end,” I say. “But we need to get going. The clock is ticking and we’ve already wasted an hour.”

I start walking, and it’s not long before the others catch up. After a few blocks of office buildings, we turn onto a busier street with a large strip mall and a giant parking lot. The place doesn’t look much different from any other shopping center from our time—just a chain of bland, beige-colored storefronts and restaurants—except for the strange egg-shaped vehicles parked in front.

“Look at the cars,” Trent says. “No one’s driving them!”

A car slows as it turns into the lot, and I glimpse someone lying on their back, with their eyes closed. In the next car, two people are making out, not paying attention to the road at all. Everywhere we look, those strange egg-shaped cars whip around without anyone at the wheel, like they’re possessed.

“The cars drive themselves,” Adam says. “They must all be connected somehow, some sort of GPS and traffic system, along with spatial sensors…”

“This is the kind of stuff Aether wants to know about, right?” Trent asks.

“Let’s get a closer look.” Chris’s head turns to follow each car that passes by. “I’m a mechanic, so I assume this is the kind of shit Aether picked me for.”

We head into the lot and peer inside one of the parked cars. There is no driver’s seat, no mirror or pedals. The dashboard, steering wheel—everything you’d use to drive the car—are all gone. It’s like the inside of a limo, from what I’ve seen in movies anyway. Plush couches line the inside walls of the egg, with a low table in the middle.

Chris studies the car and kneels down to check under it. “It looks like the entire thing is used for passenger and storage space. There’s no hood. No room for an internal combustion engine.”

“But then what powers it?” Adam asks, kneeling beside him. “Is it electric?”

“I don’t think so. Maybe some sort of kinetic or solar power…”

I have no idea what they’re talking about, but at least they aren’t fighting at the moment. They continue debating how the cars work, but I tune them out and study the stores. There’s a big drugstore, along with some clothing shops, a couple restaurants and fast food places, and some others I don’t recognize.

I catch Zoe drawing furiously in a sketchbook, which she must have found in her backpack. Every few seconds she takes quick glances at the stores before turning back to her page. I peer over her shoulder to get a better look. In a minute, she’s sketched the shopping center and all the cars in front of us, down to the tiniest detail. Not bad. This must be her talent.

A car stops in front of us and part of it slides open. Two women step out, the door shuts, and the car drives off by itself. The first woman wears a long-sleeved dress with tiny blue lights flickering all along the edges. She has a black facial tattoo, a pretty design of swirls and flowers, curling around her left eye and along her temple. The other woman is wearing something similar, but the tattoo on her face looks like leopard print.

Are facial tattoos common in thirty years? That’s a strange trend.

But as I watch, the leopard print design changes, flowing into a new pattern, and I gasp out loud. The women hear me and give our group a strange look before entering a place called Frosty Foam. Probably because we’re all staring at them with our mouths hanging open.

“Did that just…” Zoe asks. “Her face…”

“I don’t know, but we need to find out,” Adam says.

I nod. “We should split up and check out some of these stores.”

“Come on, Trent,” says Chris. They take off toward a huge drugstore called Aid-Mart, leaving me with Adam and Zoe.

We check out the Frosty Foam place first. It’s like a frozen yogurt shop, except that it sells sticks with foam on them in different flavors ranging from green tea to bacon to cupcake. Signs all over the place proclaim that it’s a fun, low-fat treat, but it looks like a weird, frothy mess to me.

The women with the face tattoos sit in the corner with bright-purple foam sticks, but there’s no one else inside. Instead of a counter with a cash register and someone to take your order, there’s just a wall of screens with a menu on each one. There’s also a TV showing the news, with a headline about supply problems with the Mars base and an ad on the side for cloning your pets. The date and time are displayed on the bottom, confirming our suspicions. We’re exactly thirty years in the future, even down to the day.

For a minute, our eyes remain glued to the TV screen, taking it all in, absorbing that this is really happening. I set my mother’s watch to match the current time: 8:13 a.m.

“Thirty years,” Adam says, shaking his head. “And there’s a colony on Mars now? Awesome.”

“I want to try one of these foam things,” Zoe says. She taps the screen for a coffee-flavored stick, but it flashes an error message:
ID NOT FOUND.
She tries again with no success. “Am I doing it wrong?”

“Maybe that one is broken,” Adam says. He tries the next machine, pressing a few buttons, and the screen reads, “Thank you.” Part of the wall opens up, and a light-brown foam stick slides out.

“Thanks,” Zoe says, grabbing it. The wall closes back up again a moment later. She takes a mouthful of foam and laughs, wiping at her lips. “It’s good! But weird at the same time. Like eating flavored bubbles.”

Adam examines the spot where the opening was. “This place must be all automated.”

“What about the food?” I ask. “Someone has to be preparing it, right?”

He finds a breakfast menu on the screen and orders some hash browns. They pop out of the wall within seconds. “Doesn’t look like it.”

I grab one and take a bite. Tastes normal. “How did you pay for these?”

“I’m not really sure.” Adam stares at the screen. “It didn’t ask for payment or anything. Just said ‘complete your order’ and then gave us the food.”

“Hmm. Strange.”

We leave Frosty Foam and walk into a store next door called Smartgear. This place does have people working here, each with one of those facial tattoos. The salespeople stand around display cases while videos play on the walls behind them, showing a woman applying something that looks like a clear Band-Aid to her temple.

“Welcome to Smartgear!” a man says. His facial tattoo is of a dark-blue geometric pattern. The collar of his shirt reads
Smartgear
in twinkling white lights. “Can I help you?”

“Um, yeah.” I stare past him at the video, where the Band-Aid thing on the woman’s face morphs into one of those tattoos. The screen reads
Fully Customizable
and shows the tattoo-thing changing shape and color. Ahh, that makes a lot more sense than everyone going around getting ink all over their faces.

Zoe is silent except for the scratch of her pencil against her sketchbook as she captures the store on paper. Beside me, Adam watches the video with his mouth hanging open. “We want to see one of those,” he says to the sales guy.

“Certainly. This is the newest model, the SG17 flexi.” He gestures to the table next to him, where thin, see-through patches are displayed on little stands. “We’ve improved on the augmented reality and the integration with household objects from the previous version.”

“Oh. Great.” I have no idea what he’s talking about. He picks one up from the display and hands it to me. The patch is flexible and curved to fit on the temple around the eye. It’s completely clear and feels like smooth plastic—it reminds me of when I got glue all over my hands as a kid and would peel it off. I pass the patch to Adam.

“How do they work?” he asks while he examines it.

“They’re simple. Flexis have microscopic sensors that read brain waves, allowing you to access the Internet using only mental commands. No more clunky glasses or heavy tablets to carry around. And the flexis are so thin and light, you won’t even know you’re wearing one. They make a great fashion statement too.” As he says this last line, the tattoo on his face—the flexi—changes colors from blue to purple. “See?”

“Wait, so the Internet is in your
brain
now?” I ask before I can stop myself.

He blinks at me, but quickly recovers with a smile. “Yes, and it’s all connected to everything else. For example, you can control your smartclothes with a flexi. Although…you don’t seem to be wearing any.”

Damn Aether and their matching outfits. We’re way too obvious and dated, and my stupid mouth blurting out questions isn’t helping.
Think, think, think.
“Um, our parents are really old-fashioned,” I say. Which makes no sense, since the three of us are clearly not related.

But Adam picks up the slack immediately. “Yeah, we go to this superconservative school with no technology.” He rolls his eyes. “Parents.”

“I see,” the salesman says, but his smile drops. “Will they, uh, let you buy anything?”

“Oh yeah, not a problem,” Adam says. “So can we see a demonstration of how they work?”

“Certainly.” The salesman still looks suspicious, but he takes the flexi and begins fitting it to Adam’s face. “When you put it on, it can sync with your profile using your brain waves or your DNA.”

Connecting to Adam’s profile could lead to him learning about his future self. He must realize it too, because he quickly raises his hands to stop the guy. “Oh, um, I don’t—”

“Don’t worry. If you don’t have a profile, you can easily create one. And our display models here are set up with a fake profile for you to try.”

Brain waves and DNA? I shudder and turn away to examine the other displays of similar plasticky patches. The whole idea of having the Internet in your brain is just so…creepy. I don’t want a computer messing around with my head. But one glance at Adam, with a spiraling pattern around his eye and a big grin on his face, and I can tell he doesn’t feel the same.

On the wall, a video shows what it looks like when you’re wearing a flexi. We see from the eyes of the person wearing it, and as he walks down the street, the video bounces with each step. Information swims across the screen—news headlines scroll in one corner, along with an ad for portable 3-D printers, and a message from someone named John flashes at the bottom:
Dinner at Pedro’s?
Another box displays below and a message slowly appears in it, as though being typed by the user:
Sure, be there in 5
. I watch, hypnotized and horrified at the same time, as the message is sent and a map pops up in the corner of the screen, guiding the person to the location.

Adam moves beside me, still wearing the tattoo. “This thing is incredible. I can’t even feel it on my face, but it’s like a smartphone in my head
.
” He laughs. “I just started watching a video of a cat riding a pig! Oh man, I wish we could take these back to our time.”

“Be quiet!” I whisper, glancing around. Luckily the employees and other customers are too busy to hear us.

“Sorry.” He leans close, lowering his voice. “We should buy some of these so we can study them somewhere safe.”

“Won’t they connect to our future selves’ profiles?”

“Nah, we can just make new profiles. Let’s get five of them.”

“Five? Do we
all
need one?” I have zero interest in putting one of those things on.

He grins at something only he can see, while Zoe sketches one of the flexis on display. I can see I’ve completely lost the two of them. We’ll be here all day if I don’t do something.

The original sales guy is busy with another customer, so I walk up to an employee with pink streaks in her hair who can’t be much older than I am. “Finding everything okay?” she asks.