Looks like fifty cents for this ride. Seems familiar. Could I have fifty cents? Thanks. How old are you? I’m five. My name is Rich. My dad is inside the hardware store. I help him fix things at the church and school and cars on the weekends. You have to be careful about this ride. It starts fast. I’m used to that. I can show you how I am used to it. I will be as quick as I can on here. I will set an alarm for two minutes. What do I count to?
I think you’re going to be excited about the Futureness. But be careful there. There’s still mud there. I have been going to the Futureness since I was three, yes, I have. Ever since then, I know all the mothers there, but still be careful in the Futureness. The white stuff is not good to eat, so don’t eat the white stuff on your food. Not frosting. It’s not good to eat there. You have to take someone with you. If you go alone, you have to tell someone, so they know where you went.
When you get there, maybe you won’t even know you’re there, because it’s the same as it’s, it’s, it’s like here, but you are there. You’ll see, when you get to the Futureness. But tell someone first. I know all the mothers there and still, it’s not safe in the Futureness.
My two minutes are up now. Thanks for giving me fifty cents for the Futureness, but I don’t need this ride for the Futureness anymore. Don’t you know I have my own Futureness, don’t you see? And don’t you see how much I love it, and how much I have wanted my own Futureness? I wanted it from my doctor, so she gave me my own spaceship.
But don’t ask me any more about this. It’s your turn for the Futureness now.
They’re tying this rope around me so someone can pull me up out of here. I have to go now. I have to go. I am going up to see everyone again. I’m supposed to go up in three minutes. What do I count to?
*
What do I count to?
Count until you can see the stars again, Richard
Fran?
Sì, Rich, welcome back
Am I sick? What’s my temperature?
You are not sick
I don’t have a fever.
You can’t
I can dream. And what if I laughed?
But you can’t
I will be a light. I’m a blinking light. Light a candle for my birthday.
You’ve had many birthdays
No, I’m not blinking. I’m thinking.
We’re talking by thinking. Don’t use your talking centers. We’ve been thinking for a while. You don’t remember?
Sorry if I bored you with my thinking.
The time it has taken us to think words to each other is approximately two hundred years. It saves the ship energy. You don’t mind, do you?
I don’t notice. I don’t remember. What ship?
I believe it’s a drone, Rich. An alien mind controls it. How much can you remember? Sometimes, you go away
I remember all of that now. All of a sudden. I’m waking up. I’m making this up. I’m cold. Can it hear us think?
I don’t know. We have to assume so, sì
How many years now?
Since when?
How many years now since I said, what if I laughed?
About four years
How far have we gone?
Something plus the cosmological constant, which hasn’t been very constant for the last twenty billion years
Are we going fast?
In a manner of speaking. We’re going far. To go fast, we have to go past something, but there’s nothing to go past right now. We are in a void. Would you like, maybe, to see?
Yes, thanks, Fran, please show me the eternal void.
You’re coming back to me, Rich, I like it
I saw a two-dimensional grey field with no depth, no shading. I had no sense whether it was miles from the ship or millimeters outside. I saw no change in it, felt no motion. It was pure stillness. Welcome back.
It’s fifty percent grey
Okay.
I thought that was significant
I’m scared to, or terrified to ask, what have we been doing, or how long have we been inside this?
A hundred years. We’re burning through our underground water fast
What else do you know about the ship?
Rich, I found this
I heard, not through sound but as a memory blurred by nearly seventeen years and deep static, Xavier’s voice.
“If you grow up … principal of … for delinquents, I’ll take you out of Dayton piece by piece.”
Fran, what is that? Are you playing with my mind?
Rich, I found this on the ship. It’s stored on the ship, this sound. It is you?
No more thinking
The drone, Rich
“What are you?” I said to the voice, trying to use my talking centers.
Suddenly, horrific pain hit me at every surgical point I’d endured. More than ten on the scale, more than the worst pain imaginable, tear down that chart of numbered faces frowning on the doctor’s wall—then it ceased neatly, with no lingering agony, just one heartbeat later.
That can be left on or off
The grey nothingness vanished and was replaced by letters of fire. They spelled, no language Rich, then evaporated into smoke. I felt Francesca behind the vision.
I imagined a map, came up with Dayton, scrambled it to make it generic, then arranged stars across it.
A red X grew across the map. So, Francesca hadn’t been able to crack the star map, either. I sent her a vision of calendar pages rapidly flipping by, and she replied with a check mark over the whirling years. Then she sent me a vision of the Golden Apple with the sunrise behind it. I drew a smile over it. Xavier, I prayed to my friend, you better have gotten your vaccine out, or there’s no one left back home for us now and we’re shooting through medium grey nothingness toward nowhere, under the control of something brutal that recorded us when we were kids playing Radio Kill Report over walkie-talkies.
As the vision faded, Francesca replaced it with a diamond-shaped yellow road sign signaling a curve ahead, but the line of the curve looped on itself and spun in random directions.
We were, Francesca was telling me, lost.