Time Flies When You’re Sitting Down

There’s a saying at Orbita’s head office in downtown Tulsa: “Time flies when you’re sitting down.” It actually used to be the company’s slogan, but was retired after lukewarm consumer reception. Now it’s only a conversational quip, spoken by technicians as they walk their client into a red-lit room and have them sit down in a complicated-looking chair. What happens next proves the truth of the motto. After the technician leaves the room and a meter-thick polyglass panel seals the exit with a pneumatic suck, the client’s chair begins moving on a carefully calibrated track toward the opposite wall some hundred feet away. At the same time, a small black point materializes on the surface of that wall, like an ebony marble balanced on a bright pink plane. You can’t see its edges, and it’s hard to estimate where the darkness ends and the air around it begins. It doesn’t resolve into focus as you draw nearer, nor does it change in size as perspective ought to dictate. It just hangs there inscrutably, more like a speck in the gel of your eye than a concrete external object. This pea-sized paradox is of course a controlled, localized black hole—what the employees at Orbita call a “clob.” It can take anywhere between ten and thirty minutes for the client to be transported up to and back away from the clob, after which time the whole apparatus is powered down, the client released from the automatic restraints of their chair, and the polyglass barrier retracted from the room’s exit. At this point a technician will walk in and greet the client. It may be the same technician who led the client into the room, aged a matter of days or decades; it may be an entirely new technician speaking with an accent the client has never heard or wearing clothes or accessories the likes of which the client has never seen; or there may be no technician at all, and the client, after some period of mounting puzzlement and then dread, will be left to exit the room and see what unforeseen catastrophe has interrupted Orbita’s first-rate customer care.

***

Sebastian is flicking the clip on the cap of his pen with his right thumb, catching the hard tab in his nail and dragging it from the shaft until it twangs back with a satisfying slap. It’s an idle way to amuse himself waiting on clients to finish their trip and be escorted to his office. Apart from the clients, only technicians are allowed inside the dilation chambers—and Sebastian is not a technician. Sebastian is a debriefer. His job is to get clients up to speed with whatever’s happened in their social networks and the world at large while they were “away.” Depending on the duration of their trip, his job can be very short and simple or fantastically complex and time-consuming. He expects today will, mercifully, be the former. The client is a 52-year-old woman with chronic renal failure who’s gone in to skip the otherwise fatal delay for a kidney transplant.

Sebastian likes and dislikes clients like these, of whom there are quite a few week to week—medical patients jumping the temporal queue to undergo life-saving procedures. On the one hand, they are, naturally, not in the highest of spirits. Usually they come attached to some downer of a story about relatives scraping cash together to fund their dilated journey to the future (to say nothing of covering the cost of medical care). A good health insurance plan might pay half your travel expenses, but that still leaves potentially tens of thousands in out-of-pocket fees. The price of dilated travel is contingent on the objective duration of the trip, which determines both the energy needed to open and maintain a suitable clob as well as the amount of time the room will be occupied. Property costs are, after all, not negligible in major metropolitan areas, and if a client is going to inhabit a 1,000-square-foot space for any considerable length of time, they’ll be expected to pay rent.

The upside is that Sebastian finds it easier to talk to and—if need be—console this type of client. They aren’t closed off to him by the expanse of grotesque wealth, and he doesn’t have to feel, looking into their eyes, a vague mixture of loathing and karmic numbness knowing they’ve just spent half his salary skipping the weekend their lover was out of town.

The door to the office creaks open as Sebastian achieves a thwap of particular acoustic clarity with his pen cap. A tall, dark-skinned woman with pink lipstick and bob braids—Mathilda, one of Orbita’s technicians—enters the room followed by a short, round-faced woman whose clay-colored cheeks and forehead are inordinately lined with wrinkles. Mathilda introduces Sebastian to the client and departs with another creak. Sebastian could oil the door’s hinges but chooses not to. It’s all part of building a grounded, organic space that doesn’t feel sterile or overly futuristic. The idea is to give clients familiar nuisances to latch onto after a decidedly unfamiliar experience. Hence, also, the slightly wobbly walnut coffee table, and the ever-so-marginally off-center Persian rug beneath it. These contrived imperfections might be overkill for clients speeding forward a handful of days, but they’re therapeutic necessities for people like Marietta Calvo, age 52, who’s just compressed four objective months into ten subjective minutes.

Sebastian shakes Marietta’s frail hand and invites her to sit down in the brown leather recliner on one side of the coffee table. At the same time, he wheels his own desk chair over to sit a regulation seven feet away—close enough for her to see the cat hairs on his sweater and the early crows feet around his eyes, but far enough that he’s still a benign blip on the edge of her comfort zone. There’s also a couch on the other side of the coffee table, pushed up against the wall under a row of windows where the yellow branches of a budding willow tree bend in the breeze. Sebastian used to offer visitors the option of where to sit, but later found that most clients—especially ones who’d taken long trips—were averse to any kind of overt decision-making so soon after finishing dilation. Even the most innocent choice between two simple alternatives seemed to carry a tremendous symbolic weight, being as it was the first step of the rest of their lives.

Marietta sinks into the recliner with a sigh of compressed cushioning and glances out the window, where a blue spring sky congested with clouds peeks in between the branches of the willow. It’s important for clients to get this first incontrovertible proof of time’s passage, be it days or months or years. When Marietta came into Orbita’s offices, the trees were bare and the cobblestones around the fountain out front pearled with December frost. Though less than an hour elapsed for her, the seasons have turned at their own immutable pace. Sebastian says something to this effect, pulling from his expanding arsenal one of many well-worn tropes about the relative passage of time. Clients don’t always understand the concept of time dilation. Sometimes they don’t care. Sebastian finds that the less absorbed people are with the phenomenon, the less likely they’ll be to work themselves up about it. Panic attacks aren’t uncommon during the process, and can occur at any stage—sometimes before it even begins. Occasionally clients will turn up unconscious in the dilation room, having passed out from anxiety or shock while the clob was active. That’s part of why the chair and straps are there in the first place. But more often than not, the panic strikes after the trip is over and the client has safely emerged on the “other side.” There’ll be some moment of dawning comprehension—a look out the window is enough to do it sometimes, or a streak of gray in their technician’s formerly all-black hair, or perhaps some subtler cascade of micro-observations: a change in the scent of the cleaning formula used to mop the halls; a browning of the caulk around the square methacrylate cutaway in the dilation room’s door. Realization will sprout like a seed and spread—a dawning comprehension not of how much time has passed but of the terrible finality of its passage. Nobody goes into the dilation room without a thorough explanation of what to expect and why it matters, but living the experience is of course different from hearing about it. Questions clients were too preoccupied to consider suddenly lurch into focus. Will the people and places they love no longer be familiar to them? Will the span they’re absent for, be it days or decades, become a chasm separating them from the life they once led? Most importantly—if the client is analytical and self-reflective enough to distill things to such a point—will they recognize themself in a world that has changed without them?

Sebastian scans Marietta’s face as he offers her something to drink. He doesn’t like to dilly dally—especially if there’s important or unfortunate news to report—but he does want to make sure the client is level-headed and attentive before piling on more shock. Marietta accepts a very wide, round mug of peppermint tea and holds it balanced in the gap between her knees. The steam curls off in thick ribbons, faint white against the dark blue of her loose cardigan. She seems well enough adjusted, Sebastian thinks. Granted, four months isn’t a very long trip. The language is the same, the fashion is the same. The country’s government and the stock markets and the general balance of world power are all more or less as Marrietta left them. Not enough time has passed for anything to feel fundamentally different. The zeitgeist, despite its usual, insidious rapidity, has hardly flushed out a fraction of the trends. People will still be discussing the same political issues, the same shows and podcasts, the same sports teams and celebrities.

There’s also the fact that, like other clients who go into the dilation room for medical emergencies, Marietta hasn’t really had a choice in the matter. The worst panic comes from clients who’ve time traveled as a luxury—as a frivolous shortcut between point A and point B that’s faster than the path ticked out on the second hand of a clock. Because while time travel at regular speed (that is to say, day-to-day life) drags on with or without one’s approval, dilated trips are a choice—one whose irreversible consequences can elude even the most perspicacious of people. Clients who make the trip out of necessity seem less likely to struggle with this sort of alarmed regret. As in all matters, resignation is the best safeguard against distress. Even so, there are occasions where clients will emerge after considerable stays in the dilation room—as many as five years, which is as long as Sebastian’s been employed with Orbita—showing no awe whatsoever at the transition they’ve just made. They merely stride out as they strode in, with the unanalytic eagerness of a child deplaning in a foreign country. Sebastian’s spent countless idle hours wondering how this can be. Even he, after the compulsory 24-hour trip all Orbita employees undertake, was stuck in a philosophical rut for weeks afterward, pondering the nature of time and the world and the self. He’s had to concede, reluctantly, that people are simply different from one another.

By the time Marietta’s tea is cool enough for her to sip, Sebastian’s already broken the worst piece of news: her elder son slipped carrying the Christmas tree up their front porch and had to visit urgent care for a fractured ulna. Fortunately, the recovery went well and his wrist is more or less back to normal. Marietta removes her hand from her heart, which she placed there in a sudden, matronly gesture one can only guess has traversed several generations. Sebastian then summarizes a short list of important world events from the last four months—Russo–Canadian hostilities in the northern passage; a controversial repeal of regulans in the NFL; a catastrophic pressure cave-in at Manarite’s flagship server center. As a rule, he includes only the most momentous news the client missed—stories major enough to penetrate the average social circle. Anything more is likely a waste of both parties’ time, and better picked up organically through the client’s family and friends. Not all the shock of reintegration can be eliminated, nor, arguably, should it. It’s the job of the therapist—which Sebastian often considers himself to be here in his capacity as debriefer, a position that requires training and credentials equivalent to a practicing psychiatrist—not to cure the patient but to furnish them with the tools to manage their disease.

Debriefing is, in the very literal definition, a sanity check for clients. Most present fairly stable and could just as well be sent home directly, but there are enough profoundly disoriented cases to necessitate blanket screening. Years ago, before Sebastian ever got involved in the field and still believed professional sports therapy to be his calling, a man committed suicide shortly after a two-year dilation trip. There wasn’t any mandatory debriefing back then. Clients were, of course, informed of what to expect during and after the process. But there was a dearth of data on how ordinary citizens—as opposed to, say, NASA astronauts with rigorous preparation and a general occupational resilience—would react to the psychic shock of time dilation. Much shallow, low-effort speculation ensued about whether the man, an ex-CEO turned rich widower, had been planning to take his life before he hit the fast-forward button on two years of Earth time. He was, after all, only “gone” for a matter of subjective minutes—a short enough time for any serious thoughts of self harm to linger. Orbita, being the legally and fiscally cautious entity it was, managed to avoid any liability. If anything, the incident brought their business further into the limelight. But knowing the fickleness of public perception and motivated, perhaps, by whatever trickle of genuine care can leak through the fingers of the invisible hand, the company enacted mandatory “debriefing” sessions of no less than 30 minutes.

For the most part, Marietta remains very quiet. She sips her tea intently and lets Sebastian say what he needs to. When he asks if she has any questions for him, she merely shakes her head and brings the mug to her lips. Sebastian wonders if she’s anxious. For her, the time she’s spent in the dilation room is a small and relatively painless prelude to a more arduous journey—the transplant she has scheduled for three days out. There isn’t much Sebastian can do to prepare Marietta for that other than wish her a heartfelt “good luck” and offer a piece of candy to go, which she declines.

Sebastian walks Marietta through the thickly carpeted corridors back to the reception room, waiting in the doorway as she signs a few last forms and verifies the remainder of her payment plan. The room, a breezy, open foyer where ferny shapes sway vaguely behind wallpanes of frosted glass, is devoid of other visitors. It often sits empty for days at a time. The employee helping Marietta at the counter—a puerile man with smooth, almost translucent skin that looks never to have known a pimple—spends most of his time with payment processing and legal work, only interacting with clients when the erratic turnover of the business demands it. That isn’t to say he’s unskilled at doing so. His disarming boyishness puts people at ease, and Sebastian sees Marietta break into quite a few more half-smiles than she did in his office. When she’s finished, Sebastian says goodbye again and gives her directions to the first floor, where her son is waiting with a GreenCar by the exit. He watches her go with the same odd mixture of melancholy and relief he feels with every client’s departure. Marietta has only known Sebastian for a matter of minutes, but he’s known her for months. All that winter and part of spring, he checked in with her family weekly, monitored her friends’ social media accounts, and scanned the daily news with an eye for things she might find important. That is, after all, the bulk of Sebastian’s duties. Orbita’s Tulsa office employs five debriefers, and each sees only a few clients per week. The remainder of their time is spent researching and preparing for those sessions. The stakes aren’t so high in Marietta’s case, what with the relatively short duration of her trip and its uncomplicated necessity, but Sebastian likes to be thorough all the same. Every client is different, and he can never accurately predict how critical they might find his services.

“Everything work out alright?” Sebastian says, popping back into the hallway so he can come around to the other side of the front desk.

“Define alright,” says Sean, the boyish-faced man. His eyes are fixed on a pair of monitors, pupils darting from one to the other as he clicks between windows and keys in data on the luminous, two-dimensional rectangle projected on the surface of the desk.

“Insurance cooperating?” Sebastian asks.

“Mmm…” Sean says, stalling his response. He’s clearly busy, locked in some deep, clerical tunnel vision. “As much as they ever do.” His fingers patter against the hard wood as he continues typing away.

Sebastian has some idea of the work Sean and the other processors do—enough to know why they earn a higher salary than he does. Arranging dilation trips involves more than just scheduling and paying a bill. There’s a complex legal dimension as well. Tax penalties and credits have to be arranged with the IRS. Trips totalling more than 30 days in a one-year period need to be greenlit by the federal government lest birth dates become meaningless. Clients have to be vetted against both local and federal law enforcement databases to prevent the embarrassing but not unprecedented scenario of harboring a wanted criminal. Payment capture is particularly dicey. Because the cost of dilated travel (or at least trips longer than a couple of months) essentially boil down to rent (for the room clients will be occupying) and utilities (for the energy required to sustain the clob) pricing has to account for fluctuations in the property market and inflating costs of fuel. The longer the scheduled journey, the more these metrics will be expected to vary, along with the general value of the U.S. dollar. Orbita offers a few payment methods to accommodate these unique circumstances. The first, which is mandatory for trips shorter than 100 days and usually the only option available to clients billing through insurance, is to pay a flat fee up front that Orbita calculates using data and algorithms well beyond Sebastian’s expertise and interest to understand. An alternative option is to put a larger amount of funds in a sort of escrow account, which Orbita’s affiliates manage and invest during the client’s absence. If, at the end of the trip, the “actual” cost of the service turns out to be lower than what was projected, the company releases any excess funds back to the client. For clients embarking on very long trips with extremely high costs and gaping margins for market fluctuations, this is the only logical arrangement.

Sebastian holds his pen a few inches from Sean’s right ear and flicks the tab on the cap. Sean makes a sort of confused grimace, as if the sound has penetrated his reverie but the context and origin haven’t. Sebastian doesn’t know why he likes to bully his colleague like this. It’s probably the baby face. So unlike Sebastian’s rugged, stubbled face, its wide jaw divoted with old acne scars, its hairline prematurely receded from a D1 collegiate career of anabolics. Sometimes he wonders if he has a deep-seated homoerotic attraction to Sean, on account of the smooth skin and general waifishness, but long ago decided it doesn’t matter one way or another. He flicks the pen cap in Sean’s other ear and walks over to the coffee machine.

“I’ve got that seven-year guy coming out on Friday,” he says, loading a capsule into the lid and jamming it down harder than he meant to. The machine begins to hum in a matter of moments as the water comes to a boil. Someone must have been in recently to use it.

“Oh yeah?” Sean says after at least a ten-second delay.

“Yeah, the fracking guy. I think I’m gonna tell him the Green Party won the election after a freak jet accident took out the Dem nominee. I’ll say all his shit got dismantled, like his son got thrown in the rainbow gulag and the company went bankrupt.”

“Right,” Sean says, his face close to one of the screens, trying to read some miniscule piece of vital data.

“I think I might tell him meat is illegal now. There’s just soy and everyone gets drafted to work two years in the soy fields. It’s like the PETA version of military conscription, only there isn’t even a military anymore because everyone lost their killer instinct when the isoflavones zapped their T.”

“Mmm…” Sean hums again, or maybe it’s the coffee machine, which makes a whining, gastro-intestinal sound as it begins ejecting a frothy stream of hot latte into Sebastian’s mug.

“I’ll say, ‘Don’t panic sir, but you’re the only man left with viable sperm.’ Like I guess the soy thing got really out of hand and everyone’s sterile now, in this situation.” Sebastian picks up his mug and draws a tiny, cautious sip through extremely pursed lips. “I’ll say, ‘Yeah, we really shit the bed with this soy stuff, but thank God you’re back, sir. The human race—no, the American race—is counting on you. Better get to work.’”

“Uh oh,” Sean says, retracting his head bird-like from the monitor and scratching the smooth, hairless skin of his cheek where a man his age would ordinarily have to shave.

“Problem?” asks Sebastian, taking another slow sip. If he concentrates he thinks he can taste the faint, rancid tang of whatever lab-wrought chemical is filling in for milk.

“Wait, nevermind,” says Sean, his face relaxing. “I thought there was a C-13 we forgot to fill out.”

C-13. Sebastian tries to remember what the form is for. Probably some inventory of individual holdings. There was a lot of market manipulation when affordable dilation first became available to the public. People would divest entire companies and dump the money into derivatives portfolios. It got so bad you’d have shady hedge fund hawkers approaching Orbita clients at the door with offerings on corn futures. Eventually the SEC cracked down and abolished the practice, declaring “dilation trading” an unfair instrument that disproportionately favored the wealthy. People still find creative ways around it, of course, but the ban took the public pressure off, which was all Orbita and the SEC really cared about in the first place.

“I’m gonna take a little walk,” Sebastian says, moving back toward the hallway, coffee in hand. He steps on the threshold and takes as large a swallow as he can bear so the level of the liquid is comfortably below the mug’s rim.

“Soy you later,” Sean says, lapsing back into his hyper-focused state.

Sebastian treads down the hallway. The carpeting is so thick you have to deliberately raise and plant your feet to avoid dragging them through the fibers. The walls are roughly the color of Sebastian’s coffee, with a patchy Santa Fe–style texture that looks less chic than perpetually under renovation. Sebastian passes the door to his office and then several more before turning left at the bathrooms and swiping his keycard at the elevator. The cab is wood-paneled and unexpectedly spacious. Because clients often come in on wheelchairs or even roller beds with IV stands, there has to be enough room to maneuver. Sebastian selects “B3” from a row of buttons on a beveled steel plate and watches the double sliding doors noiselessly close. Orbita’s Tulsa facility has four sublevels, each lined with dilation chambers like rooms in an apartment complex. Levels B1 and B2 see the most turnover, with the average occupant spending anywhere from one day to one year of objective time in transit. Level B3 is a mixture of short- and medium-term clients, with most scheduled for at least one and as many as ten years. Finally, level B4 houses the “long-haulers”—elites with no exception, wealthy enough to afford decades in dilation.

        B4 was constructed before the other floors, back when there was no front end to the business, just a sterile hallway that squeezed behind an old publishing house and wrapped around to a guarded elevator shaft. Despite the name, B4 is actually five or six storeys deeper than B3. The equipment there is hooked up to a different set of generators than the other three dilation floors. This is because B4’s chambers run on an older version of the clob machinery—still extraordinarily efficient and razor-calibrated, but with one crucial difference from modern iterations: if the clob loses power mid-sequence, everything in the chamber is annihilated. This is a risk Orbita makes sure to drill into the heads of prospective long-haulers. The good news is that, if the worst comes to pass, death will be truly instantaneous. Probably a greater source of distress for long-term travelers is the thought that they’ll emerge into some post-apocalyptic wasteland. Orbita’s B4 generators can theoretically sustain open clobs in all 24 of the floor’s chambers for just under 117 years, but the maximum dilation time is capped at 100 years for, Sebastian supposes, ease of record-keeping and product promotion. That didn’t stop one particular client from arranging back-to-back century-long trips, however.

Most long-haulers go in to await novel treatments for terminal diseases, or else fast forward to the advent of total brain transplants or some other means of pseudo-immortality. But the man slated for the longest journey is neither ill nor elderly. At only 44 years of age, he’d amassed a fortune from his patent on polyglass—the very same polymorphic composite that made clob dilation possible. After several trips around the globe and a taste of most things money could buy, the insatiably curious trillionaire decided to leave the present behind and see what the future had to offer. Scheduled for ten trips totalling 1,000 years, he holds the single longest dilation contract ever drawn up. It’s thanks in large part to his outrageous upfront payment that Orbita was able to construct their first public-facing facility, built above the red-lit room he currently occupies. Sebastian sometimes wonders what it would be like to serve as the man’s debriefer, assuming any are still around a millennium from now. Where do you even begin? Will the language be so different you’ll need a classics scholar just to trade greetings?

        The elevator doors slide open and Sebastian steps off into a hallway lined with the same frosted wallpanes as the lobby, except no looping video displays shimmer behind these. Narrow ribbons of fluorescent tubing flicker on overhead, racing down the high ceiling as Sebastian begins walking the length of the hallway, coffee mug in hand. Like the other three floors, B3 houses two dozen chambers—12 on the left and 12 on the right, each with a locked vestibule off to the side that allows technicians to operate and maintain equipment without entering the chamber. Sebastian walks up to the door of the first room on the right and peers through the small, square methacrylate window and the meter of polyglass beyond. He sees the back of a chair, two thin arms balanced on the armrests. In the crimson glow of the room, everything looks very black and white. The rectangular platform beneath the seat is black, and a fan of white hair falls in a complex curtain over the back of the headrest. Sebastian knows that if he stares long enough and intently enough, some optic misfire will convince his brain he sees motion—a tremor of a liver-spotted finger, the quick glint of a separated strand of hair. But there can be no motion inside the chamber, or at least none perceptible to the outside observer. If he had the time and attention span, Sebastian could stand at the window for days and still not see any sign of life, save for a sudden recognition that things had incrementally shifted, the way one registers the glacial movement of plants. Conversely, were the woman in the chair seated with her face to the window, it would always look empty. With a dilation period of four and half years, a visitor would have to occupy the window for at least 17 minutes to amount to even a split-second flicker in the occupant’s field of vision.

        Sebastian takes a sip from his mug and resumes walking. There’s something both relaxing and dread-inducing about these strolls through the facility. Peeking in on clients feels voyeuristic in a special and eerie way, as if he were in a morgue, spying on corpses he was sure still had souls. But it’s a source of calm for him as well—a brief period of solitude in the midst of many people. It’s empowering to think that of all the brains churning and heaving around him, his is operating the fastest. He likes to imagine time isn’t sped up for the clients but slowed down for him—that he’s pacing these neutral-toned hallways and sipping instant coffee with superhuman speed. And then, when he rides up on the elevator, he’ll slow back down and emerge at normal speed, an ordinary person again. Sometimes if he stays in the basement too long and spends enough time staring at the clients—monochrome statues bathed in red, receding from view at the pace of tree growth—he feels a sort of whiplash upon returning to the surface, as though he’s just stepped off an escalator he expected to keep carrying him. People’s gestures seem jerky, their speech rushed.

        “Better hope that dog’s there waiting. Last thing he asked about before he went in.”

        Sebastian is back on the second floor, watching Mathilda’s mouth move as he stands talking to her at the entrance to the break room. Her lips are moist with a neat gloss it looks like she’s just reapplied. Sean is still at the front desk, fingers tapping away, half the back of his unmoving head visible over Mathilda’s left shoulder.

        “His granddaughter has it. Last I heard it’s fine. They only undershot a week.”

        The dog in question belongs to Sebastian’s upcoming client, the hot-blooded fracking mogul scheduled to emerge after seven years in transit. As is common with pet owners, he arranged for his four-legged friend to make the jump with him. The Tulsa office doesn’t offer travel for pets; that’s outsourced to dedicated branches. Pet travel is actually far more popular than human travel. It requires a fraction of the paperwork and is therefore logistically cheaper and more streamlined for customers. Anxious owners no longer have to worry about Fido feeling lonely while Mom and Dad are in Aspen for the holidays. As far as the pet knows, its owners never even leave. The only drawback to the process is accuracy. It turns out customers don’t like the idea of their pets being restrained with execution-grade bonds, and certainly not for an extended period of time. That means the apparatus conveying the animals to and from the clob has to move more quickly, and therefore less predictably. Customers are told to expect a margin of error of half a percent. While this only amounts to minutes for pet owners planning a week-long vacation, it can mean days or weeks for longer lengths apart. Sebastian once spent a day helping out at one such “pet sitting” facility and can confidently say he hated the experience. The turnover was much closer to a regular business’s, making the whole process much less meditative—the fast food of dilation travel. Though he did find something amusing about high-pitched chihuahua yips distending into minutes-long bass drones.

        Mathilda has moved to a cabinet and is rifling around for something with her back to Sebastian. He glances at the wall clock, an artsy installation with twelve metal studs and a single hand that at best approximates time and at worst is six hours off. After a few moments trying to figure out which way the hand is pointing, Sebastian determines it’s nearly five o’clock. He briefly considers asking Mathilda out for a drink but decides he’d rather be alone. He slips back to his office quietly and gathers his things.

Out on the street the air is warm, sweet with the microbial tang of mid-spring. A column of evening light stretches out down the avenue between terracotta facades that rise like the walls of a canyon. The sky is dark blue and amber at the edges. Invisible birds twitter in a willow. A homeless man is washing socks in the shallow fountain at the intersection.

On Friday, the cobbled streets will be crammed with protestors—a combination of anti-fracking environmentalists and hard-line anti-dilationists, who always show up in droves when high-profile Orbita clients are scheduled to emerge. As an occupational imperative, Sebastian has read and watched much about the anti-dilation movement. It unites a variety of dissent from a wide range of constituents. At one end of the spectrum is a fringe crowd who believe Orbita’s services are to blame for everything from strange new pathologies to government brainwashing and other incursions on Freedom. At the other extreme is a highly outspoken hard core of mostly Christian fundamentalists, who hold that any nipping and tucking of the spacetime fabric is an affront to God’s intended design. But most anti-dilationists fall somewhere in the middle of these two poles. They express skepticism about the long-term health impacts of clob travel, or else voice a general sense of distrust for any tool that could further widen the gap between the hyperwealthy and those of lesser means.

The psychoanalytical part of Sebastian’s brain wonders if what people really feel deep down is jealousy—the same sort of envy the aged can’t help but feel for the young, a shameful scorn for the next generation who get to continue on in an exponential age. The right to see what the future holds seems like something that should belong to everyone. Sebastian often questions how many people, if given a free ticket, would take the journey to the next decade or century. The irony of course being that if almost everyone jumped ahead, nothing would be accomplished by the time they came out. In order for a minority to reap the future, the majority have to stay behind and sow it.

Sebastian locates his GreenCar in the line at the curb and slumps into the cabin, suddenly exhausted. He feels a soreness in his lower back that he didn’t notice while he had better things to do. The car conveys him silently and automatically through the streets of downtown and out across the river. He glances through his own reflection in the window to the reflection of the car in the water.

Sebastian has a recurring nightmare. He can’t say how often it happens, only that several times a month he wakes to find the terror refreshed in his head. He’ll be walking down the hallway of his apartment building, glancing left and right from room to room, peering into the head-height cutaways at seeping squares of red light. When he reaches his room the interior looks dark. But as he opens the door a light comes on. Not a red light. A white light. And there is the spot at the other end of the room, a horrible black period on the paper-white wall. He feels something at his back. The door he’s just entered. The whole wall is pushing him forward, herding him inexorably and by inches toward the horrible singularity, a shade darker than black, which doesn’t grow even as he comes within feet of it, even as it draws level with the inky pupil of his own paralyzed eye and strips him down to nothing.