On June eighth, 2060, Ariyl and I arrived to the west of the Clock Tower Building. It was noon but there was a nice cool breeze coming off Santa Monica Bay, and we inhaled delicious aromas of food, an intoxicating blend of global spices. Two blocks away we saw a crowd of people, many holding signs. There was festive music that ended in applause...followed by an amplified voice.
It all added up to some kind of political rally in the park.
“Well, we got our answer,” said Ariyl, looking around. “A year and a half after the impact date, and no ice age. World saved. Let’s go.”
“Hang on. I want to check out the park.”
I headed west. There were people in odd, colorful clothing everywhere. I saw one older lady’s windbreaker change color—apparently a primitive form of SmartFab. The self-driving electric vehicles we saw last time were still around. But the tent city in the park was gone.
This was Santa Monica, “the home of the homeless” as Harry Shearer called it. Yet I didn’t see anyone sleeping on the street, nor camping in the park, nor panhandling. I picked up my pace. Ariyl caught up.
“David, look around. This is not a world that’s been hit by an asteroid. Not even a glancing blow.”
“Exactly. How did they avoid that? There must have been a successful Stheno mission.”
“Seems like. Can we go now?”
“And it looks like they got a handle on global warming—look at the park.”
I pointed to the south end of the palisades, which now ran all the way to the pier, the way they did in my time. The collapsed cliffs we saw in 2057 had not occurred in this timeline.
“See? Either the sea level rise is under control, or they somehow reinforced the cliff. Or both.”
“Yay for the pre-Changers. Now let’s go!” She put out her hand, impatient.
“What’s your hurry? I want to linger a bit. C’mon, it’s my seventy-third birthday!”
“You’re twenty-nine.”
“Sure, physically. But legally, I’m...” I trailed off as I heard a familiar phrase from the amps.
“‘Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.’”
The speaker’s back was to us. But she was young, dark and slim. And I knew that voice.
“Anyone know who said that?”
“Lincoln!” shouted an older black woman in the crowd.
The speaker turned and pointed to her.
“Correct!”
Yep, the person on the podium was Ms. Olivarez, my erstwhile banker. Apparently not anymore, unless banks were closed on Tuesdays.
“He wrote that in 1861,” she said. “They didn’t call him a socialist, but that’s what he was. In fact, he was a radical! He said slaves were not capital! Not property! They were people. They were labor. And they must be paid!”
The crowd cheered. She went on.
“They did call Franklin Roosevelt a socialist, and during the Great Depression, that was not a compliment. But he didn’t care what they called him. FDR said, ‘I welcome their hatred!’ With a quarter of America out of work, he said Americans had the right to a decent job at decent pay and a decent retirement!”
More cheers. The colors of people’s SmartFab clothes kept changing, like mood rings, growing more vibrant as their emotions built. The wild hues reminded me of old footage of the 1960s, except these weren’t young hippies. Most of these people had white hair. They were my contemporaries, grown old.
There were plenty of picket signs in the crowd. Many of them high-tech, with changing colors and animation, but the same basic message:
DEMAND ANTI-AGING DRUGS
IMMORTALITY IS FOR ALL, OR FOR NONE
WE WANT TO LIVE!
I also noticed a trio of those walking police drones like the one that fired on us in West Hollywood. They were standing silently at the edges of the rally. As nice and humane as this future seemed, the powers-that-be still had killer robots ready. Just in case.
Ariyl was getting antsy. Alexandria was really working up the crowd.
“And back in the Twenties, after the Constitutional Crisis, the fight was for emergency action on climate change, and decent health care for all! And we got both, because of a socialist president named –”
“David, we’re leaving now!” declared Ariyl. The next thing I knew, she had tucked me under her arm and swept me into the cool darkness of the nearby Camera Obscura building.
The place was well soundproofed, because I could no longer hear Ms. Olivarez. I only heard the excited cheering.
“Goddamn it, put me down!” I told Ariyl.
“No.”
“Goddamn it!” I wriggled and kicked.
Ariyl snickered. I knew it was no use.
She marched up the stairs, still carrying me. Belatedly I noticed a couple who had been viewing an art installation on the ground floor. They now gaped up at me.
“Is there a problem?” asked the man.
“No, no, just helping with her workout,” was my airy reply.
The actual camera room was deserted.
“I said, put me down!”
She ignored me.
I couldn’t tell if she was angry, because I was still slung over her hip, facing her butt. I wasn’t going anywhere unless she let me.
“Like to try that again?” she inquired.
“Would you please put me down?” I said in my gentlest tone.
“That’s better,” Ariyl said. She set me on my feet. But she stood with arms crossed between me and the door. I still wasn’t going anywhere.
“What the hell is your rush?” I demanded. “I don’t like being carried off like a disobedient toddler!”
“Then stop acting like one. You know damn well why I had to get you away from there. The chronology protection thingy. You and Sven sold me on that, remember?”
“Yeah.”
Did we sell her? I thought. Or is she just telling me what I want to hear?
“Look, I just want to –”
“David, you can’t know your own future! If you hear something or see something that could change this future, it could make returning to your own time impossible.”
Damn it, she was right.
We had unfinished business. After what I overheard the two of them say at the biker bar, it was more important than ever to locate Dylila. I had to convince her that she and Ariyl could get their own future back.
Otherwise Dylila might change everything.
I couldn’t risk all that for a peek into my nation’s tomorrow.
“I’m sorry, you’re right. Let’s go.”
Ariyl took my hand, held her Crystal, and began to recite the coordinates for our next destination.
In those last fleeting seconds, I looked at the tilted circular white table on which the periscope atop the building projected a fuzzy, pastel-hued image of the park outside. A camera obscura is ancient tech, even prehistoric, yet it never gets old for me.
I’d seen this particular angle on the walkway of Palisades Park many times before. But now there was something that, while obviously decades old in 2060, was new to me. It was a large bronze statue of some honored hero. I was looking at the back of the figure, and wondered who it was.
A military leader? Nope. No uniform.
A star performer or artist? Doubtful. It looked like an old man in a baggy suit.
It must be an important politician. Perhaps a president.
Certainly not our 2019 one. That would have required an asteroid’s load of copper, tin and arsenic.
Whereas this figure was thin and wiry. Also balding, with no attempt to hide that fact.
And my last impression, as we shot back into time, was that it must have been taken endless trial and error for the sculptor to successfully cast those thin wisps of flyaway hair in bronze.