Planes, Trains, and Time Machines

Simeon settled into his seat with The Gazette and a cup of English Breakfast. The hyperlight tunnel’s prismatic waves washed over the compartment. They reminded him of the nightly auroras from his university days cruising the Arctic on his motorcycle.

Across the morning’s A1 ink, editorials skirmished over tightening water rations. Labour ransacked resource austerity measures again, populists clamoring to parch throats of those whose bellies were doomed to starve anyway.

Bellies that have already starved, Simeon reminded himself. He’d purchased the paper that morning, but the news was decades out of date. One often faced such paradoxes when commuting to the future.

The intercom chimed. “Next stop, 2190.”

The glistening colors outside the window dissolved. Charing Cross appeared worse for wear. Graffiti slathered the station walls, and the arches gradually dissolved beneath torrents of acid rain. Another cathedral from the past despoiled. 

A phalanx of constables guarded the train doors, accompanied by mongoloid police dogs spliced with bear DNA. Screaming throngs swarmed the ticket takers, all sheathed in the primary colors of their chemical-resistant rain slickers.

“A trouble decade,” Simeon grumbled. He wondered why the chronorail bothered stopping.

After some struggle between the masses and the law, the doors finally closed. Tension fell off his shoulders. The Huns failed to breach the gates. Or most of them had, anyway. 

Squishing galoshes intruded on his morning quietude. A young woman with a dirt-spackled face marched across the aisle, channeling a feeble attempt at nonchalance. She groused a litany of curses while failing to stuff her raincoat in the overhead compartment.

“You can toss that in the rubbish, Love,” Simeon said. “The acid rains will subside before our next stop.”

She cocked an eyebrow. “How can you predict the weather that far out?”

“I don’t predict.” Simeon slid her a business card. “I plan.”

The girl hid a certain vivaciousness beneath her grime. Biologically, she looked young enough to be Simeon’s daughter. Chronologically, his granddaughter. While he’d often indulged in young mistresses, he interpreted his current dearth of carnal desire as a sign of his blossoming maturity.

“Simeon Smythe,” she read off the card, struggling with the letters. “Strategic Planning.”

“It means I ensure the future has sufficient resources.” 

A sharp, snide laugh rebuked his occupational description. Folly of the short-sighted masses. Sometimes, things must grow worse before they grow better.

She kicked up her legs and fidgeted in her seat. It seemed the ability to sit still was getting bred out of humanity.

“Thought it would be crowded in here,” she said. “Given all the folks outside.”

“Tickets on a business-class chronorail cost a sizeable fortune.”

“Oh?” A sly grin emerged as she flashed her ticket. “Suppose I should be chuffed that I found this on the floor.”

“Indeed. I take it your real name isn’t…” Simeon squinted at the type. “Marvin Galbraith.”

“Ticket man couldn’t tell after that beer bottle smashed him upside the head. Name’s Kite.”

The concessions cart rolled through the compartment. Simeon ordered a warm up on his English Breakfast. The young lady snatched a bottle of Perrier while the concessioner wasn’t looking.

“Hey, you guys got any cushions?” she asked. “These seats dig into my arse.”

With a beleaguered sigh, the concessioner retrieved a blanket and pillow from the linens. She cozied herself and sipped as the chronorail’s hyperlight melted away her dilapidated Charing Cross.

Then she spat a mouthful and a half. “Blech! Tastes like rainwater.”

“Sparkling,” Simeon said. “You’d best avoid causing a scene. Else, the conductor may examine that ticket more closely.”

“Yeah sure.” She sloshed the rest of the bottle. “When are you heading, anyway? Figure a guy like you must be bound for a swell decade. ”

Simeon glanced at his watch. “I’m due to stop in 2350 for an energy grid inspection.”

“Tidy. Is your family already there, or…?”

“I’m widowed,” Simeon said after a long pause. “My wife took ill before I commuted.”

The intercom spared him the unsavory topic. “Next stop, 2250.”

“Sixty years?” Kite asked. “I thought we stopped every ten.”

“Not after a trouble decade. I’m surprised we’re stopping at all.”

The hyperlight tunnel retracted on near-total wilderness. A single hyacinth-covered arch was the only piece of Charing Cross that had not yielded to encroaching swampland.

The constable’s grizzly hounds, now freed from domesticity, lounged in mangrove branches, enjoying their new hegemony as apex predators. Only a few heritage landmarks endured in the otherwise empty skyline. Big Ben. The Tower Bridge. The London Eye. All frozen in gelatinous amber.

An automaton boarded the chronorail, lugging a fallen satellite. Five meters tall, it hunched to fit inside the compartment. It should have ridden commercial. Either the chronorail infrastructure hadn’t progressed as planned or the future’s architects viewed that satellite’s data worthy of disrupting the business class commuters. What a nuisance.

Clomp clomp clomp went the tin man. The girl barely noticed. Her gaze fixed on the window.

“Beautiful,” Simeon said. “Nature reclaiming the world.”

She glared as if he’d just shown her his best Sieg Heil. “What the hell are you talking about? Everything’s gone! Where’s London? Where are the people?”

“Those who remain have reverted to tribal lives. All part of the plan, Love. Earth must recover. When we lay our roots again, temperatures will have cooled, the monsoons abated, and the nuclear fallout washed away.”

“That was the plan? Just abandon humanity in the past?”

Simeon bristled at the comment. Why had she snuck aboard if not to escape her troubled era? “It isn’t abandonment. We are simply allocating resources to when they will have the greatest impact.”

The girl appeared unconvinced.

“Nine hundred thousand years ago, humanity nearly went extinct. Our entire species numbered only in the hundreds. Yet, we endured. Enough will remain to fill the world again. Even if it’s just us commuters.”

“Bollocks.” Her eyes grew dewy as she slammed her pillow on the seatback. “I want to get off. I want to go back.”

“I’m sorry, Love,” Simeon said, mustering his best attempt at sympathy. “The chronorail only moves in one direction.”

A long silence filled the compartment as the train reentered the hyperlight tunnel and their fellow automaton passenger powered down. Simeon was grateful for the pause, pregnant with sorrow as it was.

Kite shuffled over to the window seat, her pillow wrapped in her arms as she rocked back and forth. As the rainbows danced on her face, she soothed herself by humming a tune that rang strangely familiar.

“What is that?” Simeon asked. “I’ve heard it somewhere.”

“Just something my mom used to sing. She loved old music.”

“Ah. Is she… ?”

“Next stop, 2320,” the intercom chimed.

“Back on schedule,” Simeon said. “You’ll want to look outside for this one, Love.”

She removed her pillow from its current position wedged against the window. Charing Cross was no more. But the swamp was terraformed into veridian hills, the kind that people once believed housed fairies.

Eco-Shires dotted the rolling landscape. Geodesic bubbles of glass and solar panels afforded space for communities of a hundred people and all the commodities they required. All within a short walk. They appeared as bucolic as the conceptual paintings from Simeon’s office.

Horse and bicycle trails connected the shires, permitting trade of specialty goods and tourism between them. Humanity was still constrained to an artisanal economy, but more than a few strategic planners retired to this decade after earning their pensions.

“Looks nice,” Kite said, breathing in a heavy sniffle. “Guess you were right. People came back.”

“Indeed. Time heals all wounds.”

“Wonder if they’ve cured leukemia yet.”

A prickle flared across Simeon’s forehead, as if someone lodged a splinter. “Leukemia?”

“Yeah, your wife—”

“I never said she had leukemia,” Simeon barked, sweat pooling on his brow. Beneath the young lady’s grime and beneath her feminine charms, he caught a familiar countenance that he’d missed.

“Pretty sure you did,” she said. “Or maybe I—”

“Excuse me.” He launched from his chair on shaking legs. By the time he stumbled into the washroom, his hyperventilating lungs felt like a pair of overtaxed bellows.

He splashed cold water on his face, but only unearthed buried reveries. Another panic attack in the bathroom. The pregnancy test he’d spotted in the rubbish bin. Those damning pink lines.

Even for a man of his station, commuting was a privilege. One the company would have revoked with a dependent on his records. Much less one with a sick mother. He’d swallowed his scruples and done what needed to be done. Sure, it took some dickering. Some browbeating. Calling in more than a few favors. But he needed to be on that train, damn it.

Simeon wasn’t like the other riffraff, squeezing out the last few good years on a dying planet. He knew the plan. He knew what waited for him in the past.  

With trembling hands, he dialed the company voice box in his satellite phone. “It’s Smythe. I needed to disembark early in 2320. Something came up. I’ll catch the fifteen-year line.”

When he opened the door, Kite pointed a pistol at his temple.

“Hiding in the washroom. Not a smart play.” She shoved her pillow into his hands, knocking him onto the privy. “Hold that, would you?”

“The pregnancy test,” Simeon babbled, bordering on incoherence. “That was—that was…”

“My mother. Your daughter. You did a number on her, disappearing before the world turned to shite. She thought there was some misunderstanding, some emergency calling you away. We visited the station every day. We won’t live like this forever, she’d say, your grandpa’s a commuter.”

“I couldn’t—” Simeon’s bladder evacuated. “I couldn’t have brought them.”

“Oh, I know. I kept visiting the station after she died though, but not for rescue.” She clicked the safety off.

“Please don’t. I’m—”

Her pillow muffled the gunshots that she planted into his chest.

“Save your apologies. The woman who deserved them died long ago. I just came to even the score. Past or future. Whenever you leave your mistakes, they’ll always come back for you.”

Simeon choked on his own blood as the train doors opened. His estranged granddaughter stepped off into a brighter future.