Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
““Arthur C. Clarke

Welcome to the Future

October 10, 2145: eighteen-year-old Charity Northquest’s whole future is ahead of her–and the future sucks.

October 11, 2145: she unexpectedly has a chance to fix it.

When her best friend is reported killed, but then re-appears the next day as an old woman, everything Charity has been taught is called into question. Even if she does not believe in time travel, she has little choice. So the ill-prepared Charity travels back to the mysterious and captivating 21st century where her single purpose of changing the future fades with the increasingly more urgent question of whether she can survive the past.

 

How can women change their future?

Here is something from the book:

As Charity exited her fifth room, she heard raised voices. She squinted down the halls. The unspoken rules of the Home was no loud voices and certainly no big displays of emotion. Charity was shocked to see Mirabella’s mother. Charity was again engulfed in a wave of wrenching sorrow at the loss of her friend. Her mother must have felt the same pain, but to display it so loudly!

Mirabella’s mother was crying, yelling and hiccupping creating a bigger scene than anything Charity had ever seen on TV.

“Nothing has changed!” Mrs. Singh wailed. “The sacrifice, the credits, my husband!”   she wailed, her voice echoing up and around the bare ugly halls. The servants scurried away from the two women, and quickly closed room doors.

“You don’t know that.” Her mother’s voice surprised Charity. She never raised her voice. And did she even know Mirabella’s mother? Wives didn’t talk to one another much, that was a normative: mothers kept to themselves, raised the children well and communicate through their husbands who took care of everything through RC. It was easy and took little thought. Real time visiting wasn’t really done. The most real person in your life was the husband, and women took care of her husband’s needs. Anything extra was taking away from the family and the man who needed full time care here on the outside.

Was that the truth? Charity suddenly wondered. Or just what she read in the One True Word Bible?

“You are here, I am here!” cried Mirabella’s mother gesturing to the walls, their hats, their shapeless dresses. “Then nothing has changed.   How can that be? She was a smart girl, she was curious, you know that, you know how she got in trouble. She was perfect.”

“There, there, you don’t know. She may have made a difference. Your family is well off, your husband still holds a good position. Maybe it has changed.”

“Not enough!” Mrs. Singh snapped. “Not fucking enough! And the Company, Knight Industries, the electricity surges, the RC, just, he will be, “ She caught her breath her sobs ending her partial statements.

“There, there, come, the servants will create some tea.” Mother snapped her fingers and a servant instantly emerged from one of the rooms and bowed.

“Tea,” Mother commanded, “we’ll take it in the lounge.”

The small woman scurried away.

“Come, come. You did the right thing. It’s the only thing we can do, the only way. We never know. One of them will make the change.” Murmuring other platitudes, she led the grieving woman to the visitors lobby.   Charity squinted down the hall. Where had they come from? What room? All the elderly looked alike to her. All the rooms were the same. Charity waited for her mother to disappear, and with only a brief thought to her own sisters, she dashed down the hall and searched for the right room.

The only door ajar was room 509. She pushed the door and entered.

“Ah, Charity.” A little old lady, barely ninety pounds, lay in bed, her arm and leg clearly withered, her face a mass of wrinkles so deep her eyes were barely discernible. But they twinkled in recognition.

“Charity, don’t tell me you don’t recognize your old friend. It hasn’t been that long.”

Shocked, Charity hovered in the door, unable to move.

“How do you know me? Did I bring you cookies last week?”

The woman laughed, a throaty, gritty sound, then immediately started to cough. She gestured for the water, in a plain glass pitcher and Charity automatically poured a glass and handed it to her.

“Crappy, but it will do.” She drank it then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

“Damn cigarettes. Don’t take up smoking, no matter what they tell you. Will make your final weeks just hell.”

Charity couldn’t take her eyes off the woman’s face.

“Who are you?”

“Mirabella. Don’t you recognize your best friend?”

Charity almost crumpled to the floor. “But you died, you died in the riots.”

“That’s what they say, huh? I guess that way even If I did return, they wouldn’t need to acknowledge me. They visit. I do appreciate that.” She tipped her head. “Your mother took my mother out?”

“They are having tea in the lobby.” Charity responded automatically.

The old woman nodded and smoothed the blanket over her emaciated form with her intact hand.

Silence fell between them. Charity heard the footsteps of the attendants, the voices of her own sisters, finally emerging from one of the rooms. They must have hid there during Mirabella’s mother’s tirade. It wasn’t polite to watch someone break down; you left them to themselves. She was surprised that her mother even approached the bereaved woman, but this was not an ordinary day. She saw that now.

“I don’t believe you.”

Charity heard Hope demand to be reunited with her mother. Charity listened to the attendant respond in low tones. They weren’t suppose to address the mothers and daughters directly, but could generally say what was necessary.

“Of course you don’t. No one would, that’s the beauty of it,” the old woman said.

Charity heard both her sisters walk away, down to the lobby. She fervently hoped her mother had calmed down Mirabella”s mother. It would be bad for her sisters to see such an emotional display.

“Remember when I said that these women had great stories? About cars and horses and blue skies?”

“Blue skies?” Charity repeated. She searched the woman’s eyes. They were really the only part of her body that was recognizable at all.

“Yeah, that sky was irresistible. I didn’t get very far after all. Just stayed around the desert. Married a miner. We dug for silver in Virginia City. Met a guy named Samuel. He kept selling his writing for bad mine shares. It was pretty hilarious.”

The Grandmother frowned. “Can you give birth to your own grandparents?” She considered it for a moment. “Great, great grandparents. I went too far back, couldn’t do any real good. Did have some children thought, that’s always satisfactory. They say children are our future.”   She leaned back and closed her eyes, cutting off Charity from her tenuous link with what could or could not, be her best friend.

Charity finally blurted out, “What is my favorite color then?”

“Pink, but all the girls say that.” The other woman who may or may not be Mirabella didn’t even open her eyes.

Charity smiled. “Mirabella always said that.”   She glanced at the bare room, the worn flooring at her feet, they didn’t even make this kind of floor anymore, that’s how old the building was.

“Then why did you come back?”

The woman nodded. “I’m dying, that’s why I came back. We sometimes come back to check.”

“Check on what?”

“See if anything changed.” She said tiredly. “I’m surprised I don’t have the bruise from that pinch you gave me. You’re pretty strong for a girl.”

Charity’s eyes widened. She reached out a hand to touch the old lady’s arm, then pulled back.

“And did it?” Curiosity got the better of Charity.   Mirabella or not, this woman knew something. Information that Charity realized, was more important than learning about cars and blue skies.

Her eyes fluttered open and she looked directly at Charity.   “No.”

 

Send the Girls for Change

Many Science Fiction writers are not specifically or even self identified, scientists. Yet we write about science and technology anyway. Why? Because we use technology every day and feel familiar with it, because we depend on science and many of us watched Star Trek as kids. What else is there to know?

What I learned from reading and writing is that a book or story that is just about science isn’t a story, it’s a list of weird useful stuff, like the show catalogue for CES.

Writing about the future is less about technology and far more about plot. If you’ve ever read a tech heavy story (that is often little more than a list of, well, you know) you understand the problem. My idea of time travel came to me not from any technological inspiration ““but rather from encountered repressive cultures and wondering ““ if the women in Syria are forbidden to take part in business and public life ““ what are their compensations? If half the population is sequestered away, what do they do? In my dystopian future, I theorized that if the women are all kept from participating in the overwhelming suck of the Reality Cloud (like the hologram in Star Trek, but far more insidious and addictive), what is their recourse? In the Future Girls books their recourse is to invent and use time travel. The goal is to send girls back in time to do something to change current society. Does it work? Charity won’t know until the very end.

 What do you think?  Can we time travel?  Should we?  

And what would you change if you could?

Respond to me here and

I’ll choose two change agents to receive a free e-book of Future Girls.

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