Amber saw her first time traveler the day they were wrapping up Episode 6. Tonya was right: they were annoying as fuck.She was hurrying down the last block to her job at Real World Productions, dragging deep from her cigarette to finish it off before she got to the building entrance. He popped up right in front of her, floating several feet off the ground, facing her square. Which meant the thing she saw – what stopped her in her tracks and made her gasp and jump back – was a wrinkled pecker peeking out forlornly from under a salt and pepper bush, right in her line of sight.
Startle reflex shot adrenaline into blood already juiced with a double jamocha. She yelled, “You fuckin’ perv!” Then she raised her eyes, taking in the splay of ribs on his bony chest, the thin, contorted face screaming silently at her, and realized who he was. She heard cries from all around her. “It’s one of them!” a woman behind her shrieked.
She looked around and saw she was in the epicenter of a scrum that had formed instantly around the time traveler, a flash crowd that trapped her in and grew outward like a ripple as more people came up from all directions. She saw the slack-jawed expressions, the looks of disgust in some of the women, the mocking sneers from a gaggle of teenagers. Hands dipped into pockets and purses and came up with camera phones.
Oh, come on, people! I’m late already, she thought. It’s not the fucking Rapture. Haven’t you seen enough of them online? She sighed, dropped her cigarette and stubbed it out with her boot toe, and got out her own phone. She supposed she should take her own video, for posterity or whatever.
She couldn’t step back to get a wide shot of the man, so she pointed her phone to shoot his face (she sure as hell wasn’t going to focus on his shriveled prick). She got half a minute of his red-faced mouthing before her image screen suddenly showed power lines against slate gray sky. He was gone. She put her phone back in her bag.
The crowd, mumbling disjointedly, broke up slowly, jostling up and down the sidewalk but steering clear of the patch of air where the time traveler had been. She weaved her way through, got to the portico of her building, went in, took the elevator to the fifth floor, and, after a quick scan to see if Stanley
Tonya peered over the divider. She said, “He’s meeting with the cable network guys. You lucked out, bitch. What happened?”
Amber hung her jacket on the coat hook and fired up her monitor. “One of them appeared, right in front of me.”
“One of what?”
“One of those time traveler guys.”
“No! Where?”
“On the sidewalk, almost in front of the building. You were right: they’re pretty fucked up.”
“I know! Right?” She disappeared, came around, and entered Amber’s cubicle. “What’d he look like?”
“Like all of them: naked, scrawny, screaming his ass off. You know: on mute.”
“How far away?”
“God, like five feet from me. Here.” Amber took out her phone and handed it over. Tonya played the clip. Revulsion wrinkled her nose. “One I saw was two stories up in the air. Girl, you could have stepped up to him and given him a blowjob.”
“Oh, Gaad!” Amber grabbed her phone back. “What the fuck, bitch?”
“What? You would have been sucking air. You can walk right through them, you know. They’re not there.”
“Who’s not there?” They turned to the cubicle entrance. It was just like Jeremy to sneak up on them.
“Nothing, creep,” Amber said at the same time that Tonya said, “A time traveler.”
“No shit,” Jeremy said, ambling closer. “Somebody saw a time traveler?”
Tonya said, “She did. Full frontal.”
Jeremy frowned. “They’re only naked because non-living matter can’t be projected back in time, not even clothes. Because inanimate objects don’t experience time. That’s what the quantum guys at CERN say, anyway.” He was the geek who kept all the office work stations and editing machines running. He was harmless enough, and smart some ways, but his earnestness made Amber and Tonya want to gag.
Tonya snorted. “So, what, they can’t hold up a, a kitten to cover their dicks?”
Jeremy blinked. “Umm, guess I never thought of that.” Then, to Amber: “You make out what he was saying?”
Amber waved a hand in the air. “Probably what they all say. They all just keep saying the same thing.” Lip readers had long deciphered their voiceless ravings from video captures.
Jeremy said, meditatively, quoting, “Stop before it’s too late. Don’t spread the satin glow.”
Tonya said, “Whatever the fuck that means.”
Jeremy looked somber. “Best guess: they’re sending us warnings so we don’t do whatever it is that’s causing some catastrophe in their time.”
Amber raised an eyebrow. “The satin glow.”
“Yeah.” Jeremy looked at her intently. “Whatever it is, three hundred years from now, it’s going to make them so desperate they’ll send these projections back to us – tens of thousands by now. Telling us to change our ways.”
Amber laughed. “What, to repent? So they’re not just pervy flashers, they’re like those loonies with the signs? ‘The end of the world is near’? Which makes sense, they’re all maniacs the way they keep screaming. What next, they’ll drool on us and ask us for spare change?”
Jeremy paused. “Maybe they are all crazy, three hundred years from now. Maybe this satin glow thing is what’s getting to them. Anyway, things might not be looking good for the species; our expiration date may be coming up fairly soon.”
Amber said, “Ahhh, I think we’re just seeing these guys ‘cause only the insane can time travel. Or else it’s a sicko joke.” She shrugged. “Things can’t be all that bad if they can transmit these holographic thingies back across frickin’ time.”
“Maybe. Though it’s hard to look at all those faces and not catch a little of their despair.” He looked at her again, morose. “Doesn’t it worry you, though? Doesn’t it make you sad? That just maybe we don’t have a future, our children’s children don’t have a future?”
Amber and Tonya looked at each other and laughed. Amber said, “’Our children’s children’? Jeremy, I know you wank off in the supply closet thinking of me, but I never thought you had dreams of having ‘our children.’ You gotta know there’s no way, right? You know what you should do? Go online at mygirlfriendfortonight.com; go see a girl who looks just like me. It’s just two or three Benjamins. You can go without comic books for a month.”
Jeremy’s face turned to stone. He was about to turn away when Stanley Stanley
Jeremy was gone, Tonya gave Amber a wink before taking off herself. Amber gathered her tablet and notes. She paused to look at her phone. She took it and played the video, watched the time traveler’s tortured face again. “That what you were doing, perv? Trying to tell us to change? Don’t you know you can’t change the past?” She pressed Stop, then Delete. Then hurried to join the meeting.
(December 2011)
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