Story #70 - The Past Was No Great Eden
A longer story that took me an extra day to finish--mea culpa!
The Past Was No Great Eden
Danica was six months down bad. A breakup started it, an ugly one with a guy she thought she was in love with who one day made it clear he felt nothing for her in what seemed like an act of deliberate cruelty, but which he seemed intent on pretending was some big favor to her, an act of radical honesty for which she should have been congratulating him.
The breakup itself was the triggering event, but after just a few weeks it became clear that there was something else, something much larger, some superstructure that had surrounded and propped up her life without her realizing it, and that the breakup had torn the supports away from its base. The falling of that superstructure was slower than her grief, heavier, still crashing down and banging off things and raising dust a full half-year later, with no end in sight.
She’d had a job as a mid-level A.I. supervisor—what used to be called a paper-pusher—at an insurance company, a good job with good benefits albeit not something she was particularly interested in. After the breakup, working there became impossible, so torturous that she began to feel anxious-sick and throw up in the mornings, her body trying to manufacture any excuse to stay home and go back to bed. She started sabotaging projects, trying to get fired instead of quitting because she mistakenly thought that if she quit she couldn’t get unemployment. A round of layoffs came up and she intended to put her name in early so she could get the severance package, but they didn’t even give her the dignity of that fiction. Instead an email came in ten minutes after she heard about the layoffs telling her that she was being let go.
It was microcosmic of her interior situation that, despite her departure from work having happened exactly as she wanted—that is, orchestrating a departure from the job with a slam-dunk case for the unemployment office—she felt rejected and unsatisfied and inadequate at the result. Just another male or male-dominated corporation with no loyalty to her that would cease thinking about her the moment they were no longer in the same room.
She filed for unemployment and spent a month in bed, leaving only to use the bathroom and get more food. Trash piled up around her, half-eaten food and empty delivery boxes. Once a week the smell would get so bad that she would get a trash bag and pick up the worst of it, making the marathon trek out to the outside garbage can to dump before staggering back to bed as if she’d just run a marathon.
Unemployment wasn’t as much money as her job had been, but it wasn’t bad, and her expenses were a lot lower now that she wasn’t going anywhere or doing anything. Another month went by. Friends checked in on her and she lied to them, and because they were all adults and her friends were busy, the lies worked and they left her alone, and she pitied herself and built resentment against them for allowing her to get away with lying and pretending she wasn’t depressed.
A third month, and then a fourth. She was gaining weight and she felt terrible. She tried to get up and go for a walk every day, but she couldn’t do it every day, so she settled on every other day, but then she could never seem to remember when she had last gone for a walk, so she set alarms and asked her A.I. to remind her when it was time to walk, but then she never felt like going exactly when the reminder came in, so she would delay and then forget again. In the end, she got very little actual movement in, and the whole thing turned into an exercise in frustration and deepening despair.
She had to file reports with the unemployment department attesting that she was looking for work. There was a huge list of acceptable activities, from making a resume to attending virtual workshops to filling out applications, and in four months she had never done a single one of them. Instead she faked them, copy-pasting resumes online and changing the name, creating fake employers to apply for, things like that. At first this seemed obvious and unavoidable, since she had no intention of returning to work immediately, but it was against the rules to repeat activities too often, and soon she had used up the easy ones. She started doing hours of research to support her fakes, to give them proper verisimilitude. At some point she realized that just doing the actual activities would have taken less time and energy than creating plausible fakes, but she kept faking anyway, stuck in the habit of it and paralyzed by fear of actually engaging withe the bureaucracy.
Everything in her life was like this, fenced in by bureaucracy, trapped in a quagmire of the symbolic, stuck in psychological quicksand, unable to touch reality. Someone committed fraud on her bank card and they called to say they were cancelling it and she needed to call back to order a new one. She spent what felt like hours on the phone trying to navigate their auto-answering system, but was never able to get an actual person on the phone, and she got so frustrated and confused that she quit trying and only paid for things with Venmo, which was linked directly to her bank account.
She happened upon some videos on the Late Stage Capitalism subreddit that captured perfectly how she was feeling, the trapped-ness in a prison without bars, the disposability of atomized and fungible sexual relationships, the paralysis of knowing how small a part she was of how massive a machine. She started posting in that subreddit and related ones religiously, not just in the sense of ‘often’ but in the sense of ‘as a form of spiritual satisfaction’. The rage she hadn’t even known she was feeling bubbled up and found its release there, churning against all the rage from all the other atoms stuck in their apartments on the phone trying to argue with machines.
“This fucking shit society…” she started one post. “I’m so sick of being a cog in their fucking machine…” began another. “When you realize there is no escape from this tyranny…” she meme’d on a gif of a woman smashing a concrete wall with a sledgehammer. “Anyone else dreaming of living in hunter-gatherer times before the capitalist dystopia ruined everything?” She asked, thirsty for the flood of affirmation and assurance that hunter-gatherer tribes were more egalitarian than modern society because women’s contributions were so crucial to group survival.
One more month, and she only had one month of unemployment left. Her savings were already lower than they had been because unemployment didn’t quite cover everything even with her reduced lifestyle, and even through the haze of her depression, Danica realized she was going to have to get some sort of job or end up literally homeless, since she didn’t have parents to move back in with.
She turned on her A.I. and typed “I want a job where I literally don’t have to do anything and I just have to kill time, what job should I get?”
The A.I. answered smoothly: “You should work as a time equalizer for Time-Turners, LLC.”
"What the hell does that mean,” she thought to herself.
*****
“Time travel is one of the great advents of our age,” said the A.I. avatar smoothly, with a cadence that was a little too perfect to be human. Danica was strapped into the Turning Station that three men in crisp polos with the Time-Turner logo on the breast had brought into her apartment and set up in her living room that morning.
She’d tried to clean up before they arrived, but the moment they did, she looked around her apartment with fresh senses and could suddenly see how dirty and stinky it remained. The men didn’t seem to notice, however, or at least they didn’t say anything. Instead they focused on their work and executed the setup at speed with a casual intensity that seemed inhuman to her. She wanted to scream at them that they were not robots, but she just crouched in her bedroom with the door cracked, staring at them through it, until one stood up and came towards her with a clipboard, on which she signed for her receipt of the equipment.
“Time travel does not involve other universes,” the avatar continued. It was a monotone grey humanoid shape, standing in an empty white-walled room with no doors or windows. Danica looked down and saw her own hands and arms looked normal in the virtual space. This was top-of-the-line telepresence equipment if it could get this detailed of a scan so quickly.
“Time as we manipulate it, rather, is a dimension of our universe. You can think of it as an elastic band wrapped around the outside of our reality, holding it together. That’s too simple of a picture, because the shape of time is much more complex than a circle, but it’s an analogy that the human mind can grasp.”
The avatar waved its hand in a circle, and a black sphere appeared between them, wrapped in a red rubber band.
“Sending someone through time is like exerting an outward force on the elastic band, which is already under great tension. If you exert too much force in that one direction, what happens to the band?”
“It… breaks?” Danica answered cautiously because she wasn’t sure if the question had been rhetorical.
“That’s right,” the avatar said, smiling. It reached up and pulled on one end of the band, which snapped and fell to the white floor of the room. He drew a new circle, which appeared with a fresh elastic band wrapped around it. “We’re not sure exactly how much force it would take to break time, and we’re not sure exactly what would happen if it broke, but it’s hard to imagine anything good would come of it. So how do we exert the force but keep the band from breaking?”
Danica shook her head. She was starting to get exhausted with the questions. She just wanted to lay back down. This was the exact opposite of the job she’d wanted. She’d always hated tests and open-ended questions in school.
“You exert an opposing force at the same spot, with the same power. That cancels the stretching effect of the first force, and the band stays in place. The trick is, we found a way to still have the force move someone through time, even if it’s counteracted by an opposing force. It changes someone’s experience of time without actually changing time’s shape.”
The avatar paused and waited for her to respond, then seemed to sense her exhaustion.
“That’s where you come in, Danica,” it went on. “You are the opposing force. If someone wants to go a hundred years into the future, you go a hundred years into the past to balance their effect on the overall time stream. If someone wants to watch Jimmy Hendrix play at the Whiskey A-Go-Go club, you go eighty-seven years into the future and hang out on Sunset Boulevard until he finishes and they return to the present.”
Danica stared at the avatar, disbelieving. *This* was what the A.I. told her she should do for a living? It really took “without leaving her apartment” in a not-so-straightforward way. It must have thought she meant she didn’t want to commute, because otherwise this seemed like the opposite of what she asked for.
Still, the scenario had piqued her interest, she had to admit.
“Why haven’t I heard of this before,” she asked.
“This is a new and highly regulated technology,” replied the avatar smoothly. “Right now it’s in beta, only available to a selection of wealthy clients willing to sign complex legal waivers and risk their safety. Once we reach alpha testing maturity, it will enter the public consciousness. Would you like to choose your first assignment?”
Danica’s heart started pounding. Neurochemicals lit up her brain that hadn’t in six months, and for the first time in a long time she could hardly remember the name of the asshole who’d broken her heart. There was no way this could be real… was there?
“Yes,” she said. “I’m ready.”
The avatar snapped its fingers, and they were in a union hall, or what she imagined an old-school stevedore’s union hall might look like. There were rows of benches where a few people waited, studying an electronic board on the front wall. On the board flashed dates and locations: “1904, London, England”, and “2491, Vichy, France”, and “1388, site of modern day Manhattan”. Next to each job was listed a departure time, most of them within the next ten minutes, according to a clock on the wall beside the job board. Each one also listed a duration, from one hour up to a maximum of 24 hours. As she watched, jobs disappeared in real time, presumably as other time equalizers accepted them, and new jobs were added to the board.
“The maximum future journey for which we have confirmed safety at this time is seven hundred years,” the avatar continued, gesturing at the board as it spoke. “In all the scenarios we’ve ever encountered in exploring those futures, earth is inhabitable at least that long. We’re working to expand that confirmed-safe range, but for now that gives clients a possible travel window between approximately the years 1355 and 2755. Most clients—“
“Wait, so you know the future?” Danica stopped staring at the board for a moment and shot him a sideways glance. “You know what happens to… all this? And that it lasts at least another—“
“The future is undetermined,” the avatar explained. “There are a variety of possible scenarios, and we frequently discover new ones for our clients to explore. Remember, I said the analogy of the elastic band was too simple, because the shape of the future is complex. Our ability to navigate to specific clusters of possible futures is an active area of research. But in all of them, Earth continues to exist and is able to support human life for at least that long.”
“But you could send somebody into the past much farther than that, right?” Danica is so taken with the board that she misses the implication of her own scenario for a moment, then realizes what’s wrong with the picture just as the avatar speaks.
“For someone to go more than 700 years into the past,” it explained patiently, “a time equalizer would have to go that far into the future. But also, client demand for visits to the future is much higher than demand for the past. It’s likely you will spend most of your time in the past, and do keep in mind that because of the imbalance, work in the past pays more than work in the future.”
Danica knew she was still in her apartment, still strapped into the equipment that Time Turners had given her, just using the metaverse connection, and not physically sent through time yet. But part of her was already out there, already finding something better and raw and real in a better time than this one, at least in her imagination.
“Well,” said the avatar, “are you ready to choose your first job?”
*****
Boston, 1813 - 2 hours - Solo Mission - Starting on small farm ten miles outside city limits. Client expects to move West towards city during visit.
Danica couldn’t say why she chose it except it happened to catch her eye, and she didn’t want to go with a stranger. The avatar told her to summon it and ask for instructions in case she forgot what she was supposed to do, then disappeared.
She awoke briefly in her apartment in the fifteen minutes before departure, and first heard the sound of the 3-D printer that had come attached to the Time-Turning unit itself. She hurried to the printer, heart pounding, feeling better than she had in weeks from the dump of adrenaline. Almost finished printing was a period costume, an ankle-length, shapeless dress that she supposed was what women in early 19th century Boston wore, except that it was made of nanoactive materials, and instead of unwieldy buttons and clasps and ties, it slipped easily over her head and formed itself to her body with the perfect fit and drape.
Ten minutes later she was back in the Time-turner, strapped in, ready to ride. It struck her only then how weird it was that there was a time machine just sitting in her living room, yet the thing she was thinking of most strongly was how cluttered it made the room and how she was going to have to step around it all the time to get to the kitchen.
Then, without realizing anything had happened, she was standing at the edge of a field of corn. A quaint and well-maintained farmhouse waited at one end of the field. A dirt road ran past the field, just a few paces from where she’d landed, connecting the house to she assumed a larger road and eventually to Boston. A couple of men were working the field with hand tools, dressed much as she was though with trousers instead of skirts, and they did not seem to notice her.
Every bit of it seemed so vivid to Danica, she could hardly breathe. The air was the freshest she had ever smelled. The men were hale and fit. They laughed as they worked, and broke into a song that they all knew by heart. She could see women moving over by the house, pulling children on their apron strings as they did chores and gossiped. She imagined them all sitting down to dinner, made from what they had grown and nothing more, and could taste how grateful they must have been for every bite.
Her uplink buzzed inside of her pocket, and she pulled it out. It looked like a compass, and would pass as one to any onlookers, but when it detected contact with her specific hand, it lit up with circuitry that made it a communication device to her A.I. helper, as well as a live translator and a map.
Now the uplink lit up with an instruction to move West. She had to remain within a quarter mile of her client’s location in the future to keep the journey balanced. If she got outside of that range the A.I. would pull both her and the client back early. If that happened, she’d been told, she’d better have a good story about why, or she’d be out of a job.
She turned West, along the road, and walked away from the farmhouse. As she did, she looked back, longingly, at the simple life of the people there she would never see again. For a moment she had glimpsed their whole world, and she felt leashed by her uplink, a slave to this complex system that had not produced her and of which she was not a part but which somehow she had no ability to opt out of.
Those farmers were free, she wrote later on the Late State Capitalism Subreddit, hidden behind a VPN and using an alt account so she wouldn’t lose her job. They knew a dignity and a freedom and a community that we’ll never have here, not ever. Their lives were better in every way. They had what they needed, they didn’t answer to anybody. That kind of simple life is what we’re built for, they have to hammer us down to make us cog-shaped before we fit into the machine.
*****
She started working every hour that Time-Turners would allow, always going to the past. She specialized in Agrarian societies in the Anglo world of the 18th and 19th centuries, with a special fondness for the British Isles. Clients frequently wanted to go to London in the 22nd and 23rd centuries, so this was a lucrative trade, but she did it because she loved it.
I never thought this job would change me like it has, she confessed to a growing audience of followers on her anonymous Reddit account. I wake up from a trip and I don’t want to leave my apartment. I don’t want to be part of the world out there. Right outside my door there are these planter boxes, with flowers in them I don’t know the name of, but they keep these flower bushes pruned into perfect squares, and they cut them back every year so they never grow, and they’re all alone in the boxes because whenever a weed or anything else tries to settle next to the flowers, they come along and tear it out. And I’ve realized I am that flower bush, we all are, and every time I leave my building and see the flowers I feel like I’m going to throw up.
As she got more confident, she took other jobs on a lark. She went to the Dutch Republic during the Tulip Mania of the 1630s and watched tulip bulbs being marched to market under armed guard. She went to the pre-settlement American West and saw a pair of young natives pull salmon out of a river with their bare hands. She went to Australia during the 1830s and watched ships of convicts arriving in their filthy multitude. She went to hundreds of times over the course of six months, and the thing that struck her most of all was that almost everyone was a farmer. Unless she was in the center of one of the largest, most famous cities in the world, she usually arrived on or around a farm.
She went to 14th century China, at the end of the Yuan dynasty. The 3-D printer made her an active mask to give her a Chinese face along with her clothing, and it contained a hidden pouch in the mouth where she could put her uplink and have it translate in real time. She arrived at a rice farm, and spoke to the farmer working his fields, and found deceiving him about who she is to be so horrible that she ran away, and nearly left the quarter-mile radius of her client, stopping only steps away from disaster when her uplink sounded the alarm.
That sound was the sound of consequences seven hundred years away, and it was like a chain jangling around my neck, she wrote to her thousands of cheering fellow anti-capitalists. That farmer is a slave to the weather, to the pests, to the soil, to the river, but those are natural things. He can mistake those things for God. What holds my chain doesn’t even pretend to be God. It’s just a corporation, just other people who don’t mind making somebody suffer to make money. What I hate most is that I need this now. The thought of going to some other job where I don’t get to go to the past is the most horrifying thought I can imagine, even more horrifying that being part of their machine.
Danica learned history as she went, always taking the five or ten or fifteen minutes between mission acceptance and departure to ask her A.I. about the time and place she’s going, and sometimes having it tell her more through the uplink while she was there and waiting for the time to go by. More often though, while she was actually there, she tried to forget about the uplink, to just exist in the place and pretend she belonged. That’s what felt real to her now—the time and place she’d been born into was the alternate timeline.
She didn’t leave her apartment for four months. She just went to work, traveled back and forth in time, ordered food in—which she could easily afford now as she made top dollar for being so experienced and dedicated to her area of the past. She hired a robot to collect her trash and take it to the bin for her, she ordered household supplies for delivery, and she 3-D printed new clothes when she needed them, but mostly just wore ratty sweats when she wasn’t in period clothes anyway.
*****
By looking out her window at just the right angle, she could see the planter boxes out in front of her building, and she watched the flowers shrivel and the plants go dormant as fall turned into winter. She happened to be looking when the gardeners stopped by to trim them back into perfect squares, trim off new growth from the trunk, weed the beds, and cover them with a layer of new mulch to keep the roots warm during the coming frosts.
The Time-Turner always went to the same day of the year that it was in the present, so in the past as well it was turning over seasons. On the farms the harvests drew to a close, with a flurry of canning and smoking and storing for the long winter that was descending throughout the Northern Hemisphere. There was a sameness to all these tiny, isolated worlds, a connection she started to feel in her bones. They were living under the same skies, buffeted by the same forces that blew through all the ages except the one she’d grown up in, where the metal and glass and tar and concrete defeated those forces so thoroughly that people couldn’t even remember what they felt like anymore.
But as winter came and the fields were no longer burgeoning, Danica started to notice other similarities that troubled her. She saw anxious looks on the faces of those she encountered, as they spoke of the long cold, as they almost always did, and wondered whether what they’d stored would last and what they’d do if it didn’t. She saw women with fear permanently affixed behind their eyes like her uplink slid into a mask, women who hadn’t spoken a free word since they spoke their first, who looked over their shoulder for their husbands’ rage and trembled when it came near, but who had so little chance of getting away that it didn’t even occur to them it might be possible.
She woke under an apple tree, and turned around to find a row of graves, with headstones in a language she couldn’t read. The uplink translator told her that they were the names of children, all eight of them from the same family with the same mother, and they’d all died before their fifth birthday, and that she was buried beside them, and her headstone said that she’d died in her ninth childbirth.
Once she started noticing these parts of the past, she couldn’t stop, and the sameness of the Agrarian life she’d so loved at first became a curse, a dread-inspiring inevitability, a trap for most of the souls that had ever existed, leaving them at the mercy of the rain and the sunshine and the animals they kept to keep the other animals from eating their crops and destroying their future.
A few weeks of this was all it took to get her less excited about working. She stopped reading about the places she was going. She tried to leave the farms behind and only take work in the cities, but that was even worse. There the human suffering was only more concentrated. Preteens donated arms cut off in factory accidents to the cause of industrialization. Horse dung choked the streets and the stench of burning coal of coal filled everyone’s lungs with poisonous coughs. People threw buckets of piss out of open second story windows, and carriages ran down unwary peasants rather than slow down or swerve around them.
*****
Danica stopped posting in the subreddits, and shut down her anonymous account, much to the chagrin of her followers. She had tried to keep writing the same screeds, but they didn’t feel honest anymore. She had tried writing more nuanced takes on the relationship between past and present, and she’d been called a sell-out and a corporate apologist.
She often found herself in the union hall holo for long periods now, studying the board of available jobs. Whereas before she’d picked the first one that looked interesting without thinking much about it, now she agonized about each choice, trying to think through how bad life was likely to be in the destination society, often paralyzed and furiously querying her A.I. about the specific historical conditions until the job disappeared off the board and it was too late.
Occasionally she would think about the boy who had started all this, the one who’d broken her heart with her coldness and casual cruelty and sent her down the path to Time-Turners. She looked back on how easily she’d been hurt with scorn now, rolling her eyes at what she’d considered real suffering just a season before. She half-wanted to look him up and apologize for anything she’d said that was insulting. All he’d done was be honest with her about who he was and what he felt. He had been right that it was a favor to her, for it granted her the ability to move on and find something else, somewhere else. She realized now what an immense privilege that was, indeed.
She kept working as the winter turned into spring, not for the love of it now but for the money, because she was good at what she did, and clients who liked her reliability were willing to pay top dollar to avoid getting paired with someone new who might screw up their trip. Most of humanity survives even a really bad winter, and as the pasts she visited began to feel the touch of spring, Danica felt the touch of hope in her breast that every farmer must feel when the last frost falls away, the fingers limber after a frozen spell, and the planting can begin again.
*****
On the first warm day of spring, Danica left her apartment for the first time in eight months. Her plan was to walk around the block, and then walk two blocks the next day, and add a block every day until she was taking a good long walk every day in her own time. All the activity of moving through the pasts had helped her body get back into shape, but at the expense of her mind and spirit, and she felt it was time to correct the imbalance.
With much trepidation, she left her apartment by the front door, traversed the hallway outside, and exited by the front door. As she did, she saw the planter boxes with the square flower shrubs in them, which were also shaking off the mantle of winter and already had visible shoots of new flowers forming close to the stalks, waiting for the real heat to burst forth and begin their dance.
As she passed, the gardeners were working, pulling weeds that had barely started to grow, adding fertilizer and trimming anything they’d missed from the fall. Making, in other words, these shrubs unnaturally perfect, almost alien specimens, the perfect metaphor for modern life in all its boundaried, neutered sterility.
Only now, Danica could see the wisdom in that. She could see, not the beauty, for the preferred wild things and deep pasts even still, but she could see the reason for it. She could see the comfort of suffering prevented instead of just the pain of adventure strangled. A society that even took perfect, obsessive care of its plants was a society that had a lot of things more figured out than she’d given it credit for.
She resolved to be more grateful for it as she set off around the perfect square block of concrete that served as barrier between her and the harsh, bitter earth, and she did not curse the maniacal commercial principle that had placed it there. She’d learned her lesson about that.
END
Thanks as always for reading! If you enjoyed this story, please help me out by sharing, liking, or commenting. Have a great week, and I’ll be back next Sunday with something fun.
This was wonderful. Keep up the great writing!
One of my favorite stories so far- and I agree, a book or a screenplay is waiting to be written.