No one can do my job and carry regrets. The temptation to misuse our control of time would be too great. Still, we are human. We long for the same things everyone wants: recognition, friendship, comfort, love.
~ private conversation with Agent 5 of the Ministry of Defense I1—2073
Saturday November 1, 2064
Sydney
Australia
Iteration 2
As a girl, Sam’s least favorite book from the library had been Lost at the Park. In it, little Ellie Sweet took a dare to enter an abandoned amusement park at midnight. There was a plot somewhere in faded pages, something about foiling a bank robbery, but what stuck with Sam was the terror of the abandoned park. Empty benches. Row upon row of derelict cars. Buildings with paint peeling off smiling faces. The book had given her nightmares for weeks afterward, and she’d suppressed it all until the trip to the carnival when she turned six. Seeing the clown castle had sent her running back to Sister Mary Peter and refusing to leave the elderly nun’s side for the rest of the day for fear of being left there overnight.
Sydney reminded her of the abandoned park.
There were no clown castles or bank robbers, but the buildings were empty. Several had been torn down in the wake of the Yellow Plague, and many that survived did so with only a few floors lit at night. As the sun set, she looked out her hotel window at a stygian vista. This was the darkness that first drove mankind to find safety in fire. This was the blackness that swallowed the soul and left bleached bones in the desert.
She shivered with primal fear before securing the curtains tightly. Australia had been one of the nations hardest hit by the plagues. Seventy percent of the population was infected in the first wave. Over 50 percent of them died in 2045. A second wave in 2047, when the borders opened and another 20 percent were killed. Birth rates were down. A population that had soared past the expected 32 million was reduced very quickly to less than 9 million. Inadequate medical care over the intervening nineteen years had slowly chipped away at the population base.
The incentives offered to come and rebuild the country were tempting for many who wanted to escape the financial collapse of the northern hemisphere. Australia was at least self-sustaining, isolated, safe from the chaos of the United States nationhood vote and the collapse of the American dollar.
Sam flipped through the folder she’d been given upon arrival. There was a choice of lovely homes, all certified plague-free, and jobs to accompany them. She’d live tax-free for the first five years and be paid an incentive for marrying and having a baby—to the tune of a hundred thousand dollars per child. The woman who’d greeted Sam had talked about the joy of having families for over an hour. No amount of polite refusal could convince the Aussie woman that children just weren’t in the cards. Claiming to have a fatal disease would get her booted back to the Americas, where Commonwealth surveillance would tag her as a clone within a few weeks of taking over the United States. It wouldn’t matter if she told the truth, the early Commonwealth had been brutally clonephobic. Stating she was infertile was equally problematic. So she’d fallen back on the “waiting for true love” response.
That had gotten her a list of eligible Aussie bachelors in each town.
Sleep eluded her, so she packed her bags and checked out before dawn. She drove northward on the paid highway, her newly assigned, solar-powered car zipping along the empty road at an excess of 250 kilometers an hour.
A few hours before noon, she stopped to stretch and find food in Goondiwindi. The air was baking as she pulled the car to a stop at a strip mall with a small carnival going on. A group of students was holding a car wash to fund-raise for some vague event. One of the boutiques had rolled most their wares outside, children ran around mirrors with bright pink frames as their parents tried on sunglasses and held up shirts with the critical eyes of professional window-shoppers.
Sam dug through her purse for the Aussie money she’d gotten just for arriving and sought out the scent of hot dogs and caramelized onions that flowed on the breeze like the perfume of the gods. “One, please,” she told the vendor as she sorted through her change.
He gave her an odd look.
She held up her pointer finger, and he nodded. Probably the accent, but it was hard to tell. She could hear at least three different languages being spoken in the plaza. English was considered the main language, but the welcoming immigration policy meant people from everywhere were rushing to rebuild Australia. And she was beginning to realize her Eurocentric education wasn’t going to get her very far.
“Come pet a puppy! Dogs make the best pets! Come find the love of your life!” a woman shouted from somewhere in the crowd.
Sam swapped cash for lunch and went in search of puppies. She found them in the shade of the buildings romping in temporary playpens. Tiny teacup poodles, a terrier mix that looked ready to do flips on command, and . . . her heart lurched . . . a tiny tan mastiff with a black mask just like Hoss’s. Suddenly, she wasn’t so hungry.
“Would you like to pet one?” the woman sitting under broad white straw hat asked as she moved a braid of silver hair out of the way to reveal a name tag that proclaimed her to be Jill. “They’re all adoptable.” She held a poodle up for Sam’s inspection. “Microchipped, vaccinated, spayed or neutered, and they come with two weeks’ worth of food and a leash!”
“Can I . . . could I pet the mastiff?” Sam asked.
“Sure thing!” Jill said. “This cute little guy is Bosco, and he won’t stay small forever.”
Bosco was already a forty-pound bundle of wiggling, wagging, licking love. He squirmed on Sam’s lap, turned two circles, and collapsed in typical mastiff exhaustion.
“They get huge,” Jill said. “He’s a—”
“—Boerboel,” Sam said. “I know. I had one.” Her heart tightened. Sorrow squeezed her chest, and she pulled Bosco closer, sobbing into his fur. “I miss him. I miss him so much!”
Jill patted her tentatively on the shoulder. “Would you like a hanky?”
She nodded, forcing herself to release her death grip on the puppy. “I’m sorry, I just . . . I can’t believe he’s gone.”
“I understand,” Jill said. “I was the same way when my Tofu passed away. Silly thing, she was a Yorkie, and I adored her. It was the cancer that got her in the end. I cried for weeks! What was your puppy’s name?”
“Hoss.”
“Sounds like a real gentleman.”
Sam nodded reluctantly as she stroked Bosco’s back. “He was a wonderful dog.”
“What happened to him?”
“There was . . .” a serial killer who wanted me dead “ . . . an accident. It was over very quickly, but it felt like losing a limb. Every time I turn around, Hoss is missing. I have a dog-shaped hole in my life.”
Jill nodded.
Bosco looked up, noticed the uneaten hot dog in Sam’s hand, and obviously decided the delicious gift was for him. The hot dog was gone in two bites, and Sam was smiling. “Can he come home with me?”
“Sure!” Jill said. “Do you live here?”
Sam shook her head. “I’m moving north of here, near Airlie Beach? A city called Cannonvale. There’s a house waiting for me.”
“Oh . . .” The other woman frowned. “Bit brave of you to go back to a tourist destination. Half the town was burned, you know, to get rid of all the germs.”
With a weak smile, Sam nodded. “There are worse things than ghost towns.”
“I can’t think of any.”
Sam hugged Bosco to her chest. He licked her chin, leaving onion-scented drool behind. “I’m sure there’s worse.” Like being cast adrift from your own time and place. Or being tortured and hideously mutilated before being dumped back in time and buried in a pauper’s grave. Or being erased from history entirely. That was worse. Her gaze was drawn to the car on the other side of the crowd. No one here knew about the stability core she’d smuggled through time. They were all blissfully naive.
Bosco licked her again and gave a tiny mastiff growl of content.
“I’ll have a big, drooling, lazy mastiff to protect me!” Sam said with a cheery smile. “What could possibly go wrong?”
Jill sighed sadly.
“Don’t answer that,” Sam said. “Let’s just sign the adoption paperwork.”
Forty minutes and three hot dogs later—two more for Bosco, who was a growing boy, and one for Sam—and she and the lazy puppy were back on the road. And, for the first time since arriving in 2064, Sam thought she could see a light at the end of the tunnel.