Time Travel Omnibus, page 1176
8. Ascertain the time period and location. You will most likely end up in North America, sometime between 1940 and 2030. If punching Nazis is widely considered patriotic and depicted on propaganda posters, you’ve arrived too early. If punching Nazis is punishable by death, you’ve arrived too late. If punching Nazis is morally ambiguous, bingo.
9. Don’t bother stepping on butterflies. Mathematical projections have definitively proven this is not an effective way to change the future. Instead, find the nearest Nazi and punch them in the face. Do this quickly and walk away before anyone has a chance to react. Cover your face and turn away from cell phones and cameras.
10. Keep punching. The fate of the future is in your hands.
The End
A MAN OUT OF FASHION
Chen Quifan
Waking from an endless dream, Du Ruofei found himself naked in bed.
For a long while he simply lay still. The dream had lasted so long that he had forgotten where he was supposed to be. Finally, he recognized the dilapidated apartment he had been renting for the last three years: unfashionable decor dating from the 1990s; sagging gypsum board ceiling; scratched wooden baseboard under wallpaper yellowing after many rainy seasons, with green patches of mold in the corners. The bed, desk, and dresser were all made from cheap particleboard. He knew which doors were broken, and which door was the dam holding back a flood of clothes redolent of mold.
He sighed. Nothing had changed. The dream was, after all, just a dream. He ran his hands over his pallid skin, examining his wrists, neck, and the insides of his thighs: everything was smooth, normal. In his dream, these spots had been stuck full of tubes and needles, connected to machines whose names he didn’t know, buzzing and humming so loudly that it nearly drove him mad. The noises from his dream persisted in his mind. He waved his arms, trying to chase away the invisible swarm of bees.
The curtained windows glowed white, making it impossible to tell the time of day. Out of one corner he glimpsed tall buildings drifting through the haze of smog. Pollution was the reason he kept his windows shut year-round, relying on air-conditioning for fresh air.
Without putting on a strip of clothing, he climbed out of bed and turned on his PC, confident that no one was going to intrude on his privacy. His roommate had just moved out, and for the time being, he was paying double the rent, a thought that made his heart sink a little. He was trying to make ends meet by working as a freelance translator, but editors frequently delayed paying his invoices for as long as possible, and the income stream was far from steady.
Something seemed to be wrong with his computer.
All signs pointed to the network functioning properly, but Ruofei’s favorite websites showed the same headlines as yesterday, June 26, 2018. He clicked on the somehow-familiar titles, only to be shocked anew by the content.
The final group of the fortunate few will enter hibernation today.
Familiar faces scrolled past the screen: business magnates diagnosed with fatal diseases, politicians past their prime, comedy stars, prominent mathematicians, hacking prodigies, Miss Globe . . . most of the hibernauts had received their coveted places in the hibernation chamber as the result of a complicated and opaque formula devised by the UN Future Affairs Office. A special drug would allow them to sleep for hundreds of years, accompanied only by their private dreams and wishes, waiting to be awakened by future generations.
Who may be robots! wrote the article’s author.
Among the processed commercial headshots of the cream of society, Du Ruofei saw a young face, sallow, stiff, peculiar, clearly out of place though not exactly repulsive. The face seemed to be struggling to smile, but utterly failing. The crooked lips and twisted muscles gave off an air of reluctance and awkwardness. He read the caption beneath the image.
Du Ruofei, aged 24, from Shanghai, is the only winner of the hibernation lottery!
He was looking at his own face.
Shaking, Ruofei stood up. He couldn’t understand any of this. Was his dream real? If so, how could he explain what he was seeing now? Or maybe he was only in the middle of yet another dream in the long slumber of hibernation. His fragile body was still trapped in the pure white cocoon, waiting for the right moment to emerge.
He walked up to the door and twisted the knob, expecting to see the familiar dim hallway that led to the cramped, dirty common room.
White light filled his vision. He saw—
—a milky-white bubble.
His whole room was wrapped inside the bubble. Against the smooth surface, Ruofei saw projections of the familiar sights of twenty-first- century Shanghai: skyscrapers, elevated highways, narrow alleys, streets lined with Chinese parasol trees.
Ruofei caressed the illusory city. The thin membrane of the bubble deformed under the pressure of his hands: the skyscrapers twisted and bent, the horizon undulated. He pressed harder; the membrane stretched thinner.
A sudden burst of fluorescent blue text, and the city swayed, creased, collapsed, dimmed. The translucent bubble, like a shed snakeskin, fell in heaps to the ground.
The sight revealed behind the collapsed membrane astonished him. He was standing in the middle of a space that reminded him of a sports stadium. All around him were rings of rising seats, in which countless maggot-like shadows wriggled. Blinding flashes came to him from every direction, and he shaded his eyes, unable to see anything. Some kind of noise-canceling system seemed to have been suddenly shut off, and he was inundated by waves of wild cheers and applause.
The cheers were at least human. He sighed with relief. Almost subconsciously, he bent down and covered his privates, realizing that he was nude.
The cheers grew even louder, now also mixed with laughter. Abruptly, all noise ceased.
A cacophony of male voices followed, speaking simultaneously in multiple languages. Somehow, Ruofei realized that the voices were introducing him to the crowd. Spotlights highlighted his nude body, and he wanted to escape back into his own room—but when he turned around, he found only emptiness. He was like a monkey who had been shaved smooth all over, exposed to the gaze of an innumerable multitude. He almost fainted from the shame.
A figure appeared some distance from him at the center of the stage and approached slowly. From the shape of the body, he realized that it was a woman. Her head was bald, decorated with strange, complex patterns. Her features suggested a Eurasian heritage. At first glance, he thought she was also nude, but as she got closer, he realized that she was covered by a skin-tight membrane that gave off a shimmering sheen as the light changed with every step.
Astonished, Ruofei made no move. The woman walked up to him, holding up a football-shaped device. She aimed it at him, and a spray of mist shot out of the nozzle. He covered his face with his hands and squeezed his eyes shut, terrified that the spray was poisonous.
Nothing happened.
He opened his eyes and saw that where the spray had struck his arms, a thin membrane had precipitated against his skin, plastic-like, but far lighter and breathable.
Understanding dawned on him. Embarrassed, he stood up straight, keeping his hands over his privates as the woman continued to spray him, covering him in a new outfit—though the outfit was crotchless, as he refused to move his hands.
An odd expression appeared on the woman’s face as she reached out and shoved him. He stumbled, his hands shooting out to keep from falling. By the time he had recovered, the woman had managed to spray a patch over this most critical part of his clothing.
She handed over a tiny device shaped like a termite with a long abdomen. She pointed at her ear.
Still confused, Ruofei placed the device in his ear. The woman began to speak, and in his ear, Ruofei heard proper Standard Modern Mandarin. The words didn’t match the movements of her lips, as though he was watching a dubbed film.
“I’m your mate” she said. “Azul450-Qin-Ye.”
Three hundred years have passed.
Du Ruofei stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling window of the apartment, gazing at a completely changed world. The same thought looped through his head.
His mother had given birth to him at the age of thirty-four, a premature, frail baby delivered by C-section. The only good news was that he was alive. The bad news, however, came in an unceasing stream in the following years: after a botched flu vaccination, he was diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder involving loss of control over his facial nerves; when he was five, his parents divorced; when he was eight, the principal of his school persuaded his mother to withdraw him because so many parents had complained that their children were suffering nightmares from looking at his face; between the ages of ten and seventeen, the long middle-school and high-school years, he suffered more than the usual share of pain and endured the nickname “Poker-Face”; at seventeen-and-half, he was rejected from art school as the result of a face-to-face interview, and could only specialize in foreign languages at a night school.
Any normal person would have blamed all of his misfortunes on that flu epidemic.
His eyelids did not close completely, and the left corner of his mouth was skewed, giving his face the general appearance of a sloppy rubber Halloween mask. Years of acupuncture and physical therapy improved his control over the twitching eye muscles—as long as he didn’t try to smile.
Over its long history, humanity evolved a marvelously sensitive system for processing facial expressions. At a glance, one could tell the subtle difference between an insurance salesman’s fake grin and the genuine smile triggered by a sweetheart’s bouquet. An electric shock to the face and a good joke would both cause the zygmaticus major muscles to contract, pulling up the corners of the mouth into a smile. The secret, however, lay in the orbicularis occuli muscles around the eyes. Only a smile from the heart would contract these muscles to tighten the cheeks and pull down the brows, leading to subtle creases around the eye corners.
Earlier in his life, Ruofei had locked himself in the bathroom to practice his smile in the mirror. His mother suspected him of masturbating because whenever the door opened, his face was filled with an expression of empty melancholy.
Since the orbicularis occuli muscles couldn’t be consciously controlled, the human mind was primed to notice this detail and tell real smiles apart from fake ones. But for Ruofei, since his orbicularis occuli muscles stayed loose, he could smile only one kind of smile, the kind deemed fake by everyone.
His smile was thus the source of all his tragedy.
Many times, his mother cried in private for his condition, but she never shed a single tear in front of him.
One time, when he was five, he lay in bed and heard his father scream He doesn’t even know how to smile! Then the sound of a slap to the face, a long silence, the slam of a door, followed by suppressed sobs. With all his strength, Ruofei, lying in darkness, forced a grin onto his face, but his father never returned.
After his mother had completed the paperwork to withdraw him from school, she cursed and swore the whole way home. His small hand, squeezed so tightly in his mother’s grip that it hurt, felt the tremors of her pain. His mother never once turned to look at him.
A bald man who claimed to be an expert at curing neural disorders ran into him in the hallway of the tiny hotel. He leaned down to squeeze Ruofei’s cheek. You smile just like your mother. His mother stayed in the bathroom for over an hour, and the sound of running water never stopped.
He knew all of it.
He could imagine the many silent weeping hours that still awaited her.
He decided to end this tragedy, to give his mother a chance at bowing out of the show. He imagined all the ways he could kill himself, and the method that called to him the most was to suffocate by overdosing on laughing gas. Such morbid humor was perhaps the only way he could imagine giving value to the world. Out of cowardice, or perhaps courage, in the end he chose the gentle exit of leaving his mother behind to pursue a new life in the big city.
Three hundred years earlier, he was a lonesome man living at the periphery of society. Away from family and friends, he struggled to make a living. But life cast him aside and imposed in his way obstacle after obstacle. His dreams, like soap bubbles, expanded and then burst, leaving no trace.
Then, overnight, everyone called him fortune’s favorite, just because he won the lottery that would allow him to leave the old world behind.
Azul450-Qin-Yes slender fingers brushed across Ruofei’s left eye, as if seeking proof of the truth of his story.
“You are cool,” she said. “You’re not at all like the others. You’re brand new.”
No one had ever described him that way. In his memory, from the time his father left, everything in his life was old, used up. Beat-up backpack, worn pencil box, used textbooks, frayed clothes handed down from older cousins, his father’s old shoes loose on his feet, socks so tattered that the patches had patches . . . he felt that even his heart was ancient. From the moment his parents had separated, he no longer grew, but only aged.
Yet, this “mate” from three hundred years in the future called him “new.” He found it incomprehensible. In fact, in this brave new world, the meaning of “mate” was also brand new.
The woman told him that since the birthrate had fallen so low, she and others like her had all been grown in incubation vats. “Azul450” designated her genotype, while “Qin-Ye” commemorated the family names of her foster parents. However, she preferred to be called “Jingjing” by her friends.
“In my time, that’s the sort of name we give to pandas,” said Ruofei.
“What are those?” she asked, utterly confused.
He realized then that pandas had probably long since become extinct, though he had seen many fantastical animals parading through the streets. This new world’s biotechnology had advanced to the point where new creatures could be assembled like Lego blocks, but the people seemed to lack interest in extinct species such as pandas, dinosaurs, mammoths, and dodo birds.
This was an age that worshiped novelty above all else.
According to Jingjing, the practice of bonding for life (or at least intending to be bonded for life) had disappeared. Mates negotiated and determined the duration of their time together. Monogamy had been abolished, and the law protected one-to-many as well as many-to-many limited-time bonds.
“In my time, this would have been considered a sign of fickleness in one’s affections,” said Ruofei.
“We think of it like this—” Jingjing spat out a string of syllables, a word he didn’t know. The basic idea was something like this: the old is already a part of me; only the new can unlock the potential of the future.
Ruofei thought this over.
“If you don’t like me, we can terminate the bonding agreement at any time and find you a new mate,” said Jingjing. “You’re our guest, after all. We have a duty to make you comfortable.”
Jingjing’s expression was so guileless that Ruofei looked away in embarrassment.
“How . . . how did they pick you to be my mate?”
Jingjing’s face lit up—even the patterns on her forehead began to swirl and change.
“I won the lottery!”
Aha, thought Ruofei. Apparently some things never change. But he had a more important question.
“What happened to the other hibernauts?”
Jingjing looked away. “You’ll find out . . . at the appropriate time. I can tell you that you’re the only one who’s ever awakened.”
Ruofei pondered the many possibilities encompassed by this answer.
“There’s something else you should know.” Jingjing pointed above their heads. “Thawing you out and maintaining your lifestyle both require funds. We’ve decided to grant your livecast rights to the three broadcast networks. A portion of the income generated by advertising and pointcasting will be directed into your personal account.”
Ruofei glanced up at the glowing ceiling. He couldn’t see any cameras, but he figured that saying “no” at this point wasn’t a possibility.
“I understand,” said Jingjing as she put a hand on his shoulder. “People from the past had a kind of obsession with ‘privacy.’ They were . . . overprotective of the sense of self. Believe me, put that old self away. You’ll be rich.”
As though suddenly remembering something important, she added, “At least you now have the possibility of becoming whatever you want to be.”
During the past three hundred years, two total wars and over four thousand regional wars had erupted over the surface of this planet. At least once, the world stood on the brink of nuclear annihilation. Three times, extreme ecological crises threatened mass extinctions. Governments and borders changed countless times.
In contrast, technological progress, made by generations of scientists standing on the shoulders of giants, had been steady. There were multiple breakthroughs in materials science and biotechnology, but due to the destruction of high-energy particle accelerators in war, theoretical physics never developed to the point of enabling interstellar flight.
For Du Ruofei, however, none of this was as important as one particular development.
He gazed into the perfect face in the mirror. The features were flawless, symmetrical. His eyes shone like the glint off the edge of a sword. His nose was straight and refined. The most striking feature was his mouth, whose lips were of just the right thickness. He smiled, and two sensual dimples appeared on his cheeks. Bright, impossibly straight teeth peeked between the lips.
He pulled back from the mirror, and the augmented reality effect disappeared, returning his face to its habitual, unnatural state, full of flaws and pockmarks. He glanced away, as though seeking an escape.
“How do you like the face I picked for you?” asked Jingjing.
“It’s . . . good. Except . . . except that it doesn’t look like me.”
“This is the most popular face this season,” said the sales clerk. “We can always make minor adjustments once you start wearing it. It takes just an hour to fix the mold. And if you get sick of it, we offer two free exchanges”
