By SM Reine

I’m a time traveler now, though I didn’t used to be. I knew the way the world was in the moment where I stood. I could tell you which buildings stood at which corners—they had always been there—and when I looked outside the window of a car, I saw cars that looked like mine. Everything was right. 

But it was hard to stay there, in that moment, with time dilated out so that I lived moment-by-moment and second-by-second. 

If you close your eyes, you can feel the beating rhythm of the world.

If you close your eyes too long, you are carried on the pulsing heart-rhythm of sunrise, sunset, getting up too late, reading terrifying news, watching the sun fall, sleeping restlessly, having nightmares about abduction, waking up when the sun hits your eyes, doing nothing for hours, feeling afraid of other humans, falling asleep too late, sweating in your bed, until you wake up again, and sleep, and wake, and—

Time constricts.

You travel.

For me, I was carried on the slipstream for months, for years, from a hazy Before Time to where we are now.

The cars weren’t what I expected anymore. They came from the future. Round lines yielded to hostile geometry. The future-headlights burned my eyes. If I looked inside, the dials and buttons became touch screens, which was never what I had expected. 

(They didn’t used to tell me the future would look like that.) (They never warned me everything would happen by subscription.)

Where once there were fields stood buildings: ranch land turned into a warehouse, a park turned into storage units, an empty stretch of highway flanked by the seventeenth tire store and another identical coffee shop. Rurality grown into endless suburban sprawl, all the exact same shade of desert-tan under smoke-orange skies.

Everywhere I used to walk became private property with fences and signs, and I couldn’t walk anymore, so I tried to go back.

I thought school would still be the same—that it would make sense. It was still classrooms in a building and you learn things. But I brought text books from the past (I was supposed to download that) and I wrote things by hand (like a caveman) and my teachers were on websites (submit through the portal) and, most confusingly, I was surrounded by children.

The children are robots. Their research questions are answered in a few summarized lines by networks they access through permanently attached devices. Their worth is determined by statistics. Grades, yes, but also likes, views, comments, subscribes. 

They look the same, smile the same—they don’t have house parties; they don’t have houses. I’m not sure who was taking care of them while I was in the slipstream. I didn’t help them. Did anyone help them?

I thought, “I’ll get used to this.”

The slipstream will let me go. I can stop. I can make this my time.

I wasn’t always like this, either.

But now that I travel, I can’t stop hearing the rhythm of the world, or stop seeing the spinning colors—with the pulse of night and light, seasons rolling into seasons, years becoming decades—and I’m still rooted in some distant place that no longer exists—with a modernity that will always confuse by comparison—and what was once old has been forgotten; what once was new has become old.

I’m a time traveler now, and that’s what I’ll always be.

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NYT bestselling author SM Reine writes fantasy from the soggier corner of Nevada, supervised by a dog with more legs than brain cells.