It was the third Saturday of July, and it was a gorgeous day.
Touré sat on a bench in front of the low wood barrier that marked the edge of the Garden Street side of Cambridge Common. Slung between two trees a few yards to his right, there was a big white banner that read:
WELCOME TO 2129!
The first thing everyone did, without fail, was laugh at the sign. Then they’d look around and stop laughing. Reactions after that varied. A lot of them screamed. Some broke down and cried. A few fainted.
Not one of them got up, looked around, and said, Oh, cool. Touré was dying for that to happen, just once, because he knew whoever did that was going to be his best friend for life.
They always came through lying down, wearing whatever they’d been taken away in. Thus far, thankfully, it had always been outdoor clothing. No pajamas or lingerie or straight-up nudity. That would have just made an awkward situation even worse than it already was.
The first ones through had it the toughest. None of the Apocalypse Seven had known what to expect, so after the initial shock and the screaming and crying, they didn’t have anything else to tell the new arrivals aside from, Sorry, but this is your life now.
They’d gotten marginally better at it since. Adding ten people a month was a huge challenge at first, because it took everybody about three months to stop freaking out and start being productive assets to the society they were trying to rebuild. Now, two years into the process, that society gained ten more useful people every month.
These days, Touré had an entire welcoming party organized, with grief counselors, a minister (Paul, usually), and some physicians. There was also food and water, and a housing assignment for the first night.
Pretty smooth operation, he thought.
He saw Bethany on the other side of the field. She waved hello and headed over. “Hey, dummy,” she greeted. “Looking sharp.”
“You too, little girl,” he said.
She stuck her tongue out, but smiled about it.
Bethany hardly walked with a limp anymore. The ankle didn’t heal correctly, but they’d gotten an orthopedist in a few months earlier, and he had some suggestions for how to help. Touré didn’t know how much of a physical change there had been, but she certainly seemed to be in better spirits about it.
They exchanged a quick hug. It was a far cry from back in the early days when they wanted to strangle each other. But a lot had happened since then.
Touré couldn’t help but notice how much Bethany was turning into an actual young adult. This became especially obvious once Noah’s collection of humans went from seasoned medical professionals and tenured scientists to genetically promising twenty- and thirty-somethings, because that was when Bethany became a regular member of the welcoming committee. More to the point, a lot of those twenty- and thirty-somethings noticed her too. She noticed them right back, although when Bethany flirted, she tended to stick to the women.
“How close are we?” she asked.
“Another half hour, I think.”
“Cool. I’m gonna talk up Rhoda. Back in a bit.”
She headed over to Rhoda, one of the nurse practitioners. Touré was nearly positive her name wasn’t really Rhoda, but that was what she was calling herself now. She’d shown up almost a year back speaking only Urdu. Like all of them, she’d come a long way in a year, but that was especially obvious for the folks who’d arrived not knowing any English.
Touré double-checked the time and laughed, because the watch on his wrist had the answer, and that was a remarkable thing. It had taken forever to get watches working and showing the correct date and time again.
Noah had provided them with a year and a month, but not a day. Ananda was able to figure out what a calendar for 2127 looked like, but couldn’t narrow it down to a specific day until the equinox. That involved recording the time of the sunrise and sunset every day, which required the use of a timepiece.
They had access to all the wind-up watches they wanted, but they were useless if nobody knew what time to set them for. However, Ananda just needed to record how long the day was; as long as she was using the same watch for both the sunrise and the sunset, nothing else mattered.
Frustratingly for Touré, finding the day of the equinox wasn’t as simple as marking down the first time the day was exactly twelve hours long; it turned out that wasn’t how equinoxes really worked. We don’t measure sunrise from when the middle of the sun first appears, Ananda said. Then she never elaborated, which was just annoying.
But anyway, it worked eventually. As soon as she figured out when the days had officially started getting shorter, she had the month, day, and year, and even the correct time, and they were set.
Some time over the course of these internal musings, Robbie showed up behind Touré’s bench.
“How much longer?” Robbie asked.
Touré didn’t know he was there, so he jumped up and yelped in surprise. “Hey! Dude! A little warning!”
“Sorry.”
“Ah, forget it.”
Touré embraced his friend. “How you doing, man?” he asked. “You never come out for these.”
“I know,” Robbie said. “It’s been a while.”
Robbie looked thin and ashen, which was actually an improvement. He had on sunglasses to hide the fact that he wasn’t getting a lot of sleep, which was also a step up; he got no sleep at all, for long stretches, for the first year after Noah. Then he and Touré stopped hanging out altogether, and Touré lost track of Robbie’s sleep cycle. Presumably, it had improved.
“Yeah, you can use the sun,” Touré said. “Get you running around, get the blood moving. How’s Carol?”
“She’s okay. Busy. We haven’t talked lately, but you know.”
“Sure.”
Robbie and Carol were either on-again, off-again, or were just so used to each other’s company that they didn’t know how to undo that more permanently. Nobody was sure, and nobody knew how to ask.
Carol was active, certainly. She’d been helping clear out the coywolves from the neighborhood by domesticating entire packs. Nobody was quite sure how she was doing it, but it worked; there hadn’t been an attack in thirteen months.
The pigs in Boston were a much larger problem. Win took the lead with that one, and she wasn’t making pets. There was a long way to go before the whole city was livable, but in the meantime, they had plenty of pork to go around.
Thankfully, there was other food now too. Post-Noah arrivals who knew what they were doing started growing vegetables and fruit. Touré stopped worrying that he was going to die from scurvy.
Robbie stepped around the bench and sat down with Touré, just staring at the middle of the park. It was a good choice, this location. Even in the middle of winter. Touré used to wonder if Robbie picked it because it was only a few yards where the three of them had first met. He never did get around to asking.
“What’s on your mind, man?” Touré asked. “Or do you just want to greet the new crew?”
“No, no, I’m not staying,” Robbie said. “Just popped in for a quick . . . It’s been a while since we talked, you and I.”
“Sure has!”
“So . . . yeah. I’ve been thinking a lot. About that day.”
He didn’t need to explain what day he was talking about.
“Sure,” Touré said.
Truthfully, that particular day was never far from Touré’s mind, either. It was probably the last thing he thought of when he went to bed at night, and the first thing to wake him up in the morning—and sometimes in the middle of the night—and he knew for a fact he wasn’t the only one who went through this.
Robbie, though . . . it’d hit him hardest.
“What about that day?” Touré asked.
“I was remembering that there were two of them,” Robbie said. “At the end. Do you remember?”
“The Tachyonites. Yeah.”
“I talked to Ananda. She thinks they were attempting to communicate at first. At first for them. You have to think about it backwards, right? The last time we saw them was the first time they saw us. There were two of them, and they were curious. What we saw after . . . was just one of them then. Trying to free the other one.”
“It really doesn’t help to dwell on this,” Touré said. “You know that.”
“Yeah, I know,” Robbie said. “But they weren’t aggressive. You understand? We did that.”
“It wasn’t us.”
“Right.”
“No, man, I mean it,” Touré said. “It wasn’t us. You can’t let yourself think that way.”
Robbie nodded just long enough to sell the point that he was going to keep right on dwelling on this.
Maybe we’ll get a psychiatrist in this next batch, Touré thought.
“What do you tell them?” Robbie asked.
“Who?”
“The new recruits. What do you tell them?”
“Are you talking about the patter?” Touré asked. “It’s pretty standard. Stick around and you’ll hear it live. Unless you want me to do it for you now.”
“I want to know what you tell them about what happened.”
“Oh, that. We all agreed—”
“I know what we agreed.”
“We agreed on a version of the truth,” Touré said. “I tell them we were taken off the planet by an extraterrestrial, then came a great plague, and now the danger’s over and it’s time to rebuild. I mean, it’s close. Enough so they don’t dig too much further.”
There had been a number of doctors who came through, heard this, and wanted to know the details of the plague that never actually happened. They were told not to worry about it, but at least a few would probably keep looking for an explanation. It couldn’t be helped, but it wouldn’t matter, since they weren’t going to find anything where they were looking.
“Is that exactly what you tell them?” Robbie asked. “In those words.”
“Maybe not those words, exactly.”
“Rescued,” Robbie said. “You tell them we were rescued. Don’t you?”
Touré sighed.
“These people are scared, Robbie. Their world just got upended, and . . . they want to believe something good happened and that now they’re okay. They need a good story; it gives them hope.”
“We agreed to never tell them what we did, because they wouldn’t understand,” Robbie said. “That’s fine. But do not make him a hero. Okay? Promise me.”
“I don’t think that’s what I’m doing.”
“That’s exactly what you’re doing.”
“Okay,” Touré said. “I promise.”
“Thank you.” Robbie stood. “I have a meeting with the council. Come by for dinner, you and Win.”
“Love to.”
They shook hands.
“See you around,” Touré said.
“Yeah, see you.”
Robbie walked off. He was intercepted by Bethany, who gave him a quick hug on his way by. Then she gave Touré a What’s his deal these days? shrug, and went back to what she was doing.
“It wasn’t your fault, Robbie,” Touré said. “We all did it together.”
Robbie couldn’t hear him, but it wouldn’t matter if he had, because Robbie wouldn’t have listened anyway.
Touré sighed and checked his watch again.
It was time.
A dark patch opened in the middle of the lawn, expanding quickly to the size of a school bus. Several of the people near the tables, even people who had seen this all before, gasped at the sight.
Then the shadow bubble popped out of existence, leaving behind ten people. They were spread out on the grass, asleep, unaware that their entire life was about to get turned upside down.
Touré jumped to his feet and picked up his megaphone.
Let’s get this show started, he thought.
“WELCOME, EVERYONE!” he said. “IT’S THE YEAR 2129, AND BOY DO I HAVE A STORY FOR YOU!”