The bartender says, “We don’t serve faster-than-light particles.”
A tachyon enters a bar.
We’re back to Helsinki 2017. The summer is in full bloom and the city is a sea of foliage: alive, fresh, and sunny. It looks so different from 2030, and don’t even get me started on post-war Helsinki.
I blink. My implant shakes hands with the local mobile network, hacks into it, and emulates a Finnish SIM. I check the current time and date; we’ve hit the mark.
I take Alberto’s hand. He stoops a little, head tilted, to better sift through the noises. We’ve been ambushed by the city’s din: cars and buses coughing, trams clanking, seagulls crying, human voices clamoring.
“Are they here yet?” my husband whispers. “Are you sure they’re here?”
I blink. My left cornea puts on Google Maps, my right one, satellite data. But I don’t need those. There she waits at the traffic lights: a girl with a suitcase and a backpack, ready to cross the street. The wind flaps around a lock that has escaped her braid. And there he stands in front of the store on the opposite sidewalk: a shaggy, stubbled boy preparing to light his cigarette.
“They’re already here,” I whisper, though there’s no real reason for keeping my voice low.
The girl steps under the arcade next to the grocery and stops at the sign of the hostel. The door hasn’t closed behind her yet, and I’m already tweaking the data in the upper floor’s computer. Crossing the street costs more effort: I have agoraphobia, after the future has rained fire and bullets on me for half a century. Alberto’s hand is shaking while I tow him along the zebra crossing.
He deserves an encouragement so I drag him in the store next to the hostel. I keep an eye on his implant shaking hands with the POS terminal, entering the bank’s system, creating a ghost of an account, pulling up blueprints of the standard card chips. Alberto’s hoodie has a woven-in 3D printer, which quietly prints the card, while I fill our basket with wursts, mayo, bread, Tropical pulpy juice, beer.
Oh, God, there’re so many brands of beer!
“Only four cans?” Alberto sounds grumpy.
“You won’t drink more than two,” I say.
“It was here in Helsinki you told me six is way too many.”
As if summoned by his bragging, the shaggy boy approaches us and grabs a six-pack.
I stand frozen, breathless. Alberto’s fingers clench my hand so hard they’ll leave a bruise.
The boy walks by.
I’m back in Helsinki 2017, a scream stuck in my throat.
It’s around 3 AM. A dim morning shuffles outside. An early tram slices the silence.
Alberto sleeps avidly, hands spread out, mouth open. There’s no need to wake him: the war is thirteen years from now. I mean the Islamic War, not the World War.
I’ve dreamt of Helsinki 2030. I’m used to those nightmares from which the quantum drive in my head autonomously decides to wake me up. It was summertime, too. The poplar fluffs flew up the smoke spirals and filled the sky. The Hunger had begun already; Islamic Europe was trying to cut the last incoming deliveries of the Insurgence. We’d been retreating for three years, just to find ourselves in Helsinki 2030, exhausted to the brink of death. And here I was, lying on the sidewalk by this very store, looking at the fluffs. Alberto knelt next to me, shot a couple of Muhammadrones from the billowing clouds of smoke and growled, “I do want to die by your side, Rumi, but not right now, okay?”
Later we trashed the store’s storage and found a forgotten carton of Tropical pulpy juice. The best drink of my life!
“If time travel were at your fingertips,” Alberto jokingly asked me, “when would you go?”
There and then, I looked at him and laughed. But the truth was, I’d do everything—I had already—to find us and save what we had.
Here and now, I spoon him tighter. I fall asleep, worrying about the next morning: we’ll have to travel quite far under clear open skies, if we’re to reach the first and only Worldcon I’ve been to twice.
A hag looks back from the mirror, her skin weathered to a rubber sole, her hair buzzed army short. She’s seventy-two, and it shows. I splash my face and drink from the tap. Helsinki 2017 takes pride in its clean water. Helsinki 2030 doesn’t have that luxury. And don’t even get me started on climate change. True, the nanocrawl keeps me in good shape, but I still age.
I cough. My palate tingles, and every breath scratches as if a poplar fluff has got stuck in my throat. I don’t even need to check my vitals: the burning at the corners of my eyes is a telltale sign of fever. I feel like that milkmaid in Berkeley 1786. Does the hag in the mirror mock me when I shake my head as I walk out?
Alberto almost makes me laugh. He’s in the hostel’s common room, sitting meekly at the long table. An absurd sight among the other guests: young, full of life, and soft. I bend down to kiss my husband behind the ear. Our affection sprouts smiles and giggles. I smile myself and smear a lot of butter on Alberto’s first slice of bread. Together we overhear the shaggy boy offer coffee to the braided girl.
“You’re here for the Worldcon, right? Where are you from? I’m Burt, from Portugal, but I live in the UK now. Have you ever been in Manchester?”
“I’m from Bulgaria. Nice to meet you, Burt, my name is Rumi. Yes, I came for the Worldcon. This autumn I’m going to London, to study. Physics.”
“Physics?” Burt laughs. “So you want to be Rumi Einstein, huh?”
Alberto pats my hand and swallows his laugh with a big bite of buttered bread.
Day One in Helsinki 2017 is just as I remember it. Later, they’ll announce that there were more than ten thousand guests at the Worldcon. There sure are way too many people, and I’m not calmed by the thought I’ve already lived through this so I do know what is not to happen: the closest terrorist attack will be next week, in Barcelona, at the height of the epidemics. I stomp at the head of my fear while browsing the crowds in Messukeskus, hand in hand with Alberto. True, we’re an old couple, but we don’t need the others to make way for us. Just the opposite. We want all the ten thousand guests to breathe the air we breathe. We want to touch every one of them. This is the only time in my life I am to see so many happy people in one place.
We find Rumi. She hurries past us but I grab her in a tight embrace and take in the aroma of her perfume: Laguna Maravilla by Salvador Dali.
“Oh, hi! You’re from the hostel, right?”
I haven’t spoken Bulgarian for so many years I get one word out of every three she says. But Rumi’s smile is glowing. I say, “English, please! I’ve been in Canada too long.”
“But you’re Bulgarian, right? I saw you at breakfast, with your husband. You’re so sweet a couple!”
“We met at a Worldcon, and now it’s our golden wedding,” says Alberto.
Rumi laughs. “Oh! Wow, fifty years together, huh? Burt, you just have to hear this.”
Winded, the boy runs toward us and hugs her from behind.
“They met at a Worldcon,” Rumi says.
I cough, trying to clear the scratching in my throat, as I shake Burt’s hand.
“Let’s go have a coffee,” Alberto offers.
“It’s horribly expensive here,” Rumi says.
“It’s on us. And anyway, we wouldn’t be able to enter the Opening, not with those crowds. I crave something sweet, too.”
It’s 14:49. The computer simulations show that the epidemics vector starts at the Opening ceremony. After this con crud, not only Europe, but the world won’t be the same.
In Reykjavik 2037, I don’t have a voice to scream anymore.
Neither do I have legs to walk, but a few months in a hospital take care of that. We live in an absurd world where a bowl of chicken soup is more expensive than a nanocrawl implant, and for the price of a kilogram of tangerines, I change my quantum drive to a more modern Chinese model.
The year 2037 is also when the tachyon joke slides out of the theoretic field.
“If time travel were at your fingertips,” Alberto asked in Helsinki, “when would you go?”
I did, in fact, make a bullet list. Starting with the depopulation of Europe, which led to losing the war. The Islamic War, not the World War.
We live in an absurd world where building a hi-tech lab is cheaper than eating meat once a week, and finding drinking water is harder than gathering a team of high-class scientists.
It takes me twenty years to send someone back in time. Everything else is just a question of logistics, I muse, hiding the pulpy juice from 2015 into the chaos at the store in 2030 as the autonomous sight of my drive amplifies the whir of the Muhammadrones and shows me at least twenty of them, red dots on my cornea.
Day Two in Helsinki 2017 is just as I remember it: the convention center is too small for all the ten thousand visitors, but order starts to show through the madness. The same drive for order will save my life during the war: this Finnish ability to instill a calm discipline into so many people at the same time.
On the second floor, I separate from Alberto in a niche opposite a door saying STAFF ONLY. He scans the mechanical lock, and the 3D printer in his hoodie buzzes softly, printing a key. The twelve-minute count for the operation starts . . . now.
At the seven minutes checkpoint, Alberto is already high under the roof. Tubes and metal profiles crisscross in a monster crossword there. A labyrinth of steel bridges straddles the abyss. We have located a key joint in the air condition system. On reaching it, Alberto pulls the fridge container from his pocket. He prints the connection valve right on the tube, hooks up the bottle, and opens the vent. Our simulations haven’t got enough data to localize the other container, and we’re running out of time.
The three minutes checkpoint flashes at the bottom of my eye. The cloaking is working smoothly. On a connecting bridge, a real staff member doesn’t look twice at his “colleague.”
Twelve seconds checkpoint: the STAFF ONLY door unlocks quietly. I hug Alberto and whisper in his ear, “I missed you!”
Zero seconds, end of our control time. The guests’ migration for the next events finds us still kissing.
The container is in place, but even so I keep hugging visitors, shaking hands, and bumping into crowds. We meet coughing people along the corridors. This evening at the hostel, in the common room, a blonde girl with eyes aglow by fever huddles in her jacket and drinks hot tea. She’ll be one of the first victims. We share a wall, and her coughing keeps waking me all night.
Alberto sleeps avidly, sprawled on his back. There is no full dark in summer Helsinki: only coagulating twilight behind the windows. At 3 AM, it’s already a dim morning. I dress and slip out of the room.
I know Rumi hasn’t been able to sleep because of the sick girl and has gone outside. I’ll find them together with Burt, near the front door. Her lips are swollen and flushed. He’s smiling, a half-finished cigarette smoldering between his fingers.
I cough to announce my presence.
“Do you want a smoke?” Burt says.
His voice was raspy that first time, too.
His kiss was smoking tasty.
Day Three, and everything is just as I remember it. I’m dizzy from lack of sleep and fever but I carry on. I mustn’t stop. Paramedics carry away a woman who has fainted. Alberto and I jump the line at George R.R. Martin’s signing station.
“I don’t have a book for signing, I just . . .” My husband pulls up his ACCESS badge with a shaking hand. The calm discipline opens a way for us right to the signing table. I spot Rumi nearby and ask her to take a picture.
“I’m glad to meet you,” Alberto murmurs and shakes hands with the writer.
Click!
In three days, George R.R. Martin will be dead. If everything is just as I remember it.
In Chiba 2066, I hold Alberto in my arms. Outside the lab, there are no protocols to shake hands with my implant. The war is over. Not the Islamic War, the World War.
If time travel were at your fingertips. . . .
It took me ten more years of experiments and preparation, but our time is running out.
“You have to find us and save what we had,” my husband whispers.
“So, I must save Europe first,” I say.
Alberto’s kiss is a ghost.
Day Four.
On its new tracks, the future doesn’t break off with a bang, nor even with a whimper.
The paramedics don’t need to rush the sick blonde girl to the hospital. She feels better, even if her coughing still woke me up in the predawn light.
At 3 AM, Burt’s sweat smells of Laguna Maravilla. I erase from the store cameras the part where Rumi and he make love.
“A smoke?” he offers in his raspy voice.
“There’s a wonderful physics department in Manchester,” I tell Rumi. It’s not just physics—their computer science is splendid, too. I had my first quantum drive installed there. Before the war. The Islamic one.
Rumi nods with a smile.
My sensors show her temperature is 37.1 C. It doesn’t get any higher.
Day Five. The first victim does not die in the hospital.
Rumi doesn’t faint at the Messukeskus entrance, and Burt doesn’t ride in the ambulance with her.
But I’m still dizzy. Alberto brings me a cold beer. “Do you feel better already?”
“I feel like the milkmaid in Berkley 1786,” I joke, and it’s not too far from the truth. The only difference is that the woman with the cowpox was not also a vector for a lighter strain of the disease. I am, and we’re racing time. Time and the real con crud.
That evening, we take Burt and Rumi to a restaurant.
On Monday, we go on a sightseeing bus tour.
I check the social media feeds.
Shimo Suntila: Roll call. Con crud, who got it? I’m down with almost 38.8 C. Planet, kill me already.
(65 answers)
Kirsi Saaros: I was going to volunteer for the next Finncon, but do I want a flu next July too? Hmmmm??
(4 likes)
Rumi Bakalova: Con crud here, too. I felt worse yesterday but I think it’s fading already. But, wow, has someone else fell in love during the Worldcon?
(3 likes)
I don’t need to look at the back seat to see her stowing away her phone and snuggling in Burt’s arms. The wind flaps around a lock of her hair.
“You think they’ll stay together?” Alberto whispers.
“A tachyon enters a bar,” I say.
