The Time Travel Chronicles (29 page)

Cordball? Darren knew how long he should have been asleep and had prepared extensively for the potential changes that would take place in the world as he slept his way through time. This cordball must be one of those changes.

Gathering his energy, he pushed, focusing on moving his mouth. His brain told him that he should have been yelling, but what he actually felt was the slightest twitch of his lips. The woman saw it and brushed a finger across the side of his mouth, easily erasing all the effort Darren just made.

“Mr. Gordan, please, relax,” she said, her eyes kind. “You shouldn’t try to rush this. It might harm you.”

Her expression was guileless and so very sincere, with none of the natural guardedness people normally kept firmly in place when dealing with strangers. It reminded Darren of the way the best nurses tended to their charges. It also made him want to do what she said. His usual response to anyone telling him what to do would be to fire them on the spot. Either that or ignore their advice completely and do what he wanted anyway.

Most of the people that worked for him in positions of close proximity learned the ropes and answered his questions only with what he expected to hear. That this caring and—he should just go on and admit it—beautiful woman felt comfortable telling him what to do
and
seemed to take his compliance as a given comforted him for some reason. It made him want to do exactly what she said.

She blurred again as she stepped away and he heard the familiar sound of chair wheels squeaking across tiles. She rolled it next to the bed and leaned forward again so that her face was clear once more.

They were silent a while, she stroking his shoulder while he examined her face and the white blur that was the rest of the room. She was hard to read. Darren hadn’t become rich by accident of birth or some stroke of luck. He’d become rich because he understood people. He could figure out what drove them with almost a single glance into their eyes. Their biases, what they envied, what they felt entitled to, all of it revealed itself to him within a moment or two after meeting them.

He didn’t know how he did it, but he could, and knowing that made him able to sell water to a drowning man. Or in his particular case, sell investments to anyone. No matter the risk, past poor performance or anything else that should warn an investor away, he could sell anything to anyone and did. Or rather, he had. By the time he had quietly signed the papers with Life/Time—a full jump of the maximum three hundred years the company offered—the astronomical sum they wanted for the privilege hadn’t seemed like much at all.

His instinct to read people kicked in almost as automatically as his restarted heart found its rhythm. Yet he couldn’t figure out this woman. It wasn’t that her face was bland or deadpan, because it was anything but.

Instead, it was as if she was utterly at peace and had no envy, no biases, and desired nothing more than to wait quietly with him while his mind and body resumed communicating with each other. Darren could detect not even the slightest hint of impatience in her face, and everyone was impatient where other people were concerned, no matter how much they cloaked it in the guise of caregiving.

He couldn’t even tell her ethnicity. She appeared at once Asian, African, Caucasian, and more. She appeared to be a perfect blending of all humanity into one extraordinarily beautiful face.

A sharp twinge of sudden discomfort blazed a trail down his arms and he felt the muscles of his face twitch in a confusion of misfires. It was as if every nerve had come back to life at once in some random and exquisitely painful order. The woman caught the movement and glanced at his fingers, which he could hear tapping a frenzied, out-of-time beat on the bed.

Her smile broadened and he felt her hand clasp his, stilling the beats so that his fingers only twitched inside the warm cage of her hand. Her fingers were soft and her touch as gentle as if he were a newborn babe. She said, “There we go. Right on time. Welcome to the future, Mr. Gordan.”

Chapter Two – Hospital World

Apparently, the future consisted of a hospital room, a physical therapy room down the hall, and little else. Well, that and bland, soft food delivered to his room three times a day.

He’d imagined a whole lot of possible futures during the year he waited for his turn to climb into a containment chamber and start his long sleep into the future. His current reality had not featured in any of those imaginings. Darren had dreamt up amazing technical futures, futures filled with barbarians, and even futures in which his chamber had to automatically wake him because there were no humans left to do so. He’d never imagined a future that was boring, a future in which he ate beige food the consistency of mashed potatoes.

Darren leaned against the side of his bed and struggled to snap the closure on the fly of his loose cotton trousers. This much he could do for himself, if he focused almost to the point of perspiration. The strange bracelet on his arm twisted uncomfortably as he pressed his wrists against his hipbones to keep his hands from shaking. At last, the snap came together, and he sighed in relief.

He examined the bracelet again. It was metal and plastic of some sort, somewhat fitted, and entirely annoying. It tracked everything about him from his vitals to his calorie expenditure to his metabolic rate. Even now, somewhere inside a computer, the stress of getting himself dressed was being registered and accounted for. He didn't like it, but that was just the way things were here. Everyone had one.

Genarae—the woman who had been there when he woke and for most of the two days since—assured him that he was doing exceptionally well and would be himself in no time. Darren had a hard time believing that, given how difficult a single snap was after stumbling with equal clumsiness from the bathroom. And actually going to the bathroom? Well, that just didn’t bear thinking about.

He would get over this feeling in a few minutes. As soon as he was done and settled into his chair, Genarae would come back and continue his orientation. Then he would get lost in what she said and forget his awkward body until something reminded him of it again.

“So, Darren, how do you feel about what we discussed yesterday?” Genarae asked after smoothing a blanket over his legs and settling his feet on a cushioned footstool of the palest green.

Her accent was still odd to his ears, but otherwise she was a perfect companion for someone like him, someone waking up after centuries of nothingness. So far everything she’d said had met or exceeded his dreams of a future he had so craved.

Before Life/Time it had been hard to have everything he desired, yet understand that the future would someday go on without him. His life would end and he would miss all the good stuff Darren was sure would come later. It was a feeling that had grown in him until it became an almost intolerable itch he had no possible way to scratch.

Life/Time had come and answered this deepest desire. He spent a small fortune making sure they were legitimate when they first entered the scene—their services limited to a very select group of the wealthiest of the world, word of mouth the only method of introduction. Then he had spent a slightly larger fortune paying someone to test the process, to be put into containment under his watchful gaze, and then wake a year later. It had been flawless. How could he resist?

His dream to be a part of the future, to skip what Darren had known would be the tumult between the present and future, had come just in time. At the age of 59, the cusp of what he considered old age, he’d found an out. Once again, it seemed that he had beaten the market and, as a bonus, cheated even time itself.

And now he was here and Genarae was telling him everything he’d ever hoped to hear.

Except for the money, that is. She’d given him the shock of his life the day before and now she wanted to know if he was going to go off-kilter from the knowledge.

“You mean the idea that I’m no longer rich?” he asked, putting a smile on his face to let her know he really was okay with it.

Genarae nodded and waited, not at all fooled by the easy smile. One eyebrow twitched upward in challenge at his flippant response.

He glanced out of the wide window in his hospital room before answering. It was a beautiful day, the sun bright and the air so clear it looked unreal. Air like that hadn’t existed in his time. He wondered if this distant generation of people understood how fortunate they were to have it.

A wide and heavily manicured garden lay below, carefully raked white gravel in twisting trails through little islands of perfectly groomed trees. Each tree was heavy with blossoms and bright swathes of colorful flowers made the grass surrounding those islands seem almost too green. The few people that strolled amongst the beauty were the only elements that allowed Darren to believe the garden was real, rather than some sort of projection.

Turning away from the window and meeting Genarae’s ever-patient gaze, he answered, “I feel like I’m missing something without it, if you want to know the truth. But if what you say about money is true…” Needing reassurance, he let the sentence trail off in invitation.

Again, she nodded confirmation, but said nothing.

“Then I guess I feel okay about it. If no one has money then what does money mean? I’m less happy about the time issue,” he said.

“I understand that feeling, but I hope
you
understand that there was no choice. There are very few pods remaining in the Life/Time facility and those containment pods are failing as well. You did get almost 280 years.”

“So there are more? Who are they? Are they being woken too?” he asked, running all the possibilities through his head. There hadn’t been
that
many hugely wealthy people in the world he left behind. A feeling—something that might be longing—stirred inside him. He wondered who still slept the years away. Did he know any of them? He wanted to talk to whoever they were, share his surprise at what they’d gotten for their fortune. Not because he was unhappy with the future, because aside from the physical weakness, it seemed wonderful.

It was more that he knew he was alone and it would be nice to have someone else in the same boat as he to talk to, to understand what being out of the timeline truly felt like. He gave a little shake of his head and repeated his question, this time leaning forward, his eagerness clearly visible, “Who are they?”

Genarae blushed a little and looked away, having said more than she was likely supposed to. The Life/Time program guaranteed one thing even above the chance to wake up in a new time, and that was privacy. He lifted a hand from the arm of his chair and waved away his question, his disappointment evident. “Never mind.”

Looking relieved, Genarae smoothed a lock of hair behind her ear and changed the subject. “And the rest?”

The rest?

The world was now one single collection of people, a chaotic hell in the past forcing all who remained onto part of two continents and a tiny section of a third. There they had fought innumerable local wars and eventually forged a new path, one in which war became unthinkable.

Its people formed a web of interconnectedness that ensured everyone was born in good health, with high intelligence, and a secure future. That made inequality a ridiculous notion. According to Genarae, the strange truth was that work was a joy for every person and groups of people lived together in a new version of constantly adjusting marriage.

Quite frankly, Darren thought it sounded suspiciously communist. Of that, he was not a fan.

“I expected changes. You can’t prepare for them all,” he said. “I’m still not sure I understand this retirement thing, though. I’m already eligible? I’m only 59.”

“Ah, well, you’re not there quite yet, but you’re almost at the transition window already. Normally, people adjourn to the Transition Center a few months before they turn sixty in order to prepare for a whole new stage of life. You’re only weeks out from that, so I’ll be handling both your introduction to the world as per Life/Time agreements, as well as the transition protocols in accordance with current society.” She paused there, waiting for him to interrupt or ask a question.

When he said nothing, she forged ahead. “You’ve nothing to worry about, Darren. The Life/Time facility was settled into government care long ago. We keep all the original agreements, without exception. That means you have, as of this moment, the same work credit as everyone else does at your age. You’ll be able to enjoy the fruits of labor you completed centuries ago. The only difference is that you won’t pay for it in the same way you might have before.”

That idea certainly appealed to Darren. While the Life/Time agreements were comprehensive and his financial affairs cared for under directions worked out carefully beforehand, there had always been the worry that all his investments and assets might fail. The idea of traveling through time only to wake up without means or skills suitable for a new world had been frightening. Now that worry was gone, too.

“I’d like that. But what do people do here?” he asked.

One of the reasons he had gone ahead and signed with Life/Time was the feeling that he was getting slower, that he might need to look at retiring or taking a more removed role in his investing house. It wasn’t that others were smarter or better than him, but they
were
younger and quicker. And every day he felt older and more out of place in the hallways of his own firm. The feeling of falling behind had been enough to urge him to take the leap. Still, the idea of retirement—as in right now—made him a little uncomfortable.