As the man – he couldn’t remember his name – became conscious, he was aware that he was covered by liquid but was somehow being covered yet again by liquid; he was drowning. He was awake, and drowning.

A memory of being awoken early in the morning, in the dark, and pulled out of bed with no warning; the unfairness of it; it made him angry – but he realized he had to fight;

He fought against the water. He was enclosed in something and slipped out. He tried to force his eyes open, but they were covered in gel which was now being submerged in water.

He shook his head and tried to breathe, but he was under;

And now hands grabbed him. A strong hand on each arm. They pulled him out, and then up over the edge of a small boat. They sat him down on its floor, handed him a blanket, and tried to get him to calm down.

“Tranquilo, tranquilo. Ya está.”

They tried to assist him getting the gel off his face, and they laughed.

“Tranquilo, todo bien ahora. Todo bien. English?”

He had been drowning, and covered in gel, and trapped in a sinking case, all at once; plus he had no memory of his name, nor how he had gotten here, nor where he was.

He cleared his eyes in time to see one glimpse of the Torpedo before it sunk entirely into the deep.

The boat was a sailboat. The two men sat near him but called to two women, also on board, to bring towels.

The couples found spare clothes for him, barely – a pair of swim trunks, and a jacket – and took him to a hospital. A car was waiting for them at the dock. The two men climbed in with him, and the car drove itself. It was nearly silent; the hum of the tires rolling on the pavement was the most noticeable sound.

“What is your name?” one of them asked. The vehicle made virtually no sound apart from its wheels running on the flawless road. The men waited for him to answer.

The question seemed impossible. He was someone who had been bobbing in the ocean and had almost drowned; that was all he knew of his story.

He could only shake his head. He said nothing.

The car rolled quietly past orderly croplands and occasional steel and glass buildings. At one point it shifted slightly to move around a bicycle. The bike, at least, was familiar; the usual frame, black tires, a laboring rider.

“Perry,” he said. “I’m Perry.”

*

The hospital kept him overnight.

“Yeh look ellright bet we’ll keep yeh here at least a deh,” a doctor told him. The man sounded slightly Irish, to Perry, but everyone else who spoke English did too. The car that drove itself clued him in that many years might have passed, but he only asked about it when he heard how much the language had changed. (Somehow the Mexicans’ English, when they had switched to it, had sounded more like his own than everyone else’s did, which seemed an irony.)

“I’m afraid I don’t remember what year it is,” he said now.

“Twenty-two twenty-eight.” The doctor paused. “Is that whet yeh were expecting?”

*

The Mexican men had told the emergency room staff that “he came out of some kind of case” that had been floating, for a moment, in the gulf; that was all anyone knew about his origin. Perry would have liked to have seen more of his cocoon, but all he had was the one glimpse as it dropped below the surface, became obscured by the water, and then vanished.

“Yeh can remember no more than that?” the doctor asked. He was tall, white, bald, and appeared extremely attentive, with his eyebrows raised high. He had introduced himself as O’Toole, with no honorific.

“I don’t know what that thing was that I came out of. I’m glad I made it out. I wonder . . . I could have drowned in that thing. I’m just baffled about what happened.”

O’Toole made no answer.

“I do remember that I had a wife. And a daughter.”

“Do you know their nehms?”

“Just their first names. Jennifer. And Araceli.”

The doctor looked down, then back up.

“I’m sorry yeh don’t remember. It may be hard to find them.”

“And I think I remember – when I am from.”

O’Toole waited for him.

“Twenty twenty-five.”

“Twenty twenty-five,” the doctor repeated. “Two hundred years ago?”

“That’s what I remember.”

“How do you know that?”

“I just remember. My daughter turned ten, that year; that’s one thing. I remember seeing it on calendars, also. And I don’t remember any calendars later than that.” He paused. “I wish I could think of more.”

“And where have yeh been since?”

“I don’t know. Maybe just floating in that ocean. I think someone would have seen me, though, in all this time. Don’t you? Maybe I was submerged, somehow.”

The doctor wrote something down. Perry noticed that he used a metal stylus and a clipboard-size screen.

“Although that’s the least of the problems with this story, I know,” he added.

O’Toole kept writing.

Perry asked him: “Is it possible for you to – put people in suspended animation? Now?”

The doctor shook his head.

“We ked pet them under anesthesia for some time. Not two hundred years, though.”

“Do you think I’ve lost my mind?”

“No. Just some memory. But we cannot find yeh as a missing person. A current missing person, I should say. And certainly not as someone from two hundred years ago with just your first name to search for. Yehr case is – unique, Perry. I will say that.”

*

He was given a private room in the hospital. Some things were the same, others very different. His vitals were displayed on a screen above the bed, but they were apparently monitored by the bed itself. Food was brought in for him from time to time, but it came on a near-silent rolling platform under a dome cover that would retract and wait for him to select something.

Nurses and assistant doctors made rounds. One of them showed him how to activate a display screen that was built into the wall facing his bed, which had been invisible to him up till then. It was voice activated and could answer questions. He vaguely remembered such technology from his first life, but this version seemed uncannily smooth.

“Can you display Paris?”

A still picture appeared on the wall.

“I mean live. People walking in Paris, right now.”

The scene switched to an apparent live shot of a street with the Eiffel Tower in the background.

“Show a giraffe.”

A photo appeared.

“I mean a live one. Walking around.”

The picture switched to a video of two giraffes in savannah.

“Well, giraffes and the Eiffel Tower have made it,” he said to himself.

“How about the bottom of the Mariana Trench? Live?”

The scene changed to a blank seafloor.

“Is that really live? This instant?”

The wall turned gray; that seemed to mean no.

“Stumped you.”

The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

The panel could also display a literal wall of text if he asked for things to read. When the screen’s voice spoke, it was in the same somewhat-Irish accent everyone else spoke with. The articles he found were in English he could follow fairly easily, although there were so many unknown references in them that he felt they, too, seemed foreign. The word order and verbs also took him time to parse, especially in headlines:

“Reports SA Orlando Domes Second Opportunity Spur” meant that the Space Administration was reporting that an interplanetary settlement consortium based in Orlando had completed a dome over a new expansion of the city of Opportunity on Mars. To “dome” something in this way was now a verb. Sorting all this out left him fatigued.

*

“Sleep well?”

“I did.”

“So yeh’ve had two nights here, now, and we’ve no rehson to keep you any longer. Have yeh remembered any more?”

“Nothing much helpful. I lived in Virginia.”

“That’s progress.”

“And I was an archaeologist. I suppose I still am.”

“Well, that’s good, you know; it transfers. We still have archaeologists.” O’Toole nodded. “There’s a tiny bit less for yeh to study, I’m afraid, if yeh’ve been away for two hundred years. Unless yeh’re a diver.”

It was perhaps not a surprise, it turned out, that he had been found floating in water; the oceans were far larger than in his earlier life. The chance of finding oneself in water these days was much higher. South Florida was mostly gone. Venice had been abandoned. Leptis Magna was gone.

“Do yeh happen to remember exactly any projects you worked on? As an archaeologist?”

“I can’t. I have memories of digging. Of being underground.”

Being underground

“Because if yeh did, we might search for scholarly articles from the time. If we could find any. Yeh might recognize yehr full name on one.”

“It’s been a very long time.”

“Yes.”

“You know, I have no illusions that history would remember me. Out of my own century.”

“Well, this is your century too, right now. Yeh just skipped one, from what yeh tell me. And don’t sell yehrself short. It’s something yeh could work on.”

The doctor was being kind, Perry knew, but there was something in his tone in that last phrase – “you could work on” it – that sounded patronizing; as if O’Toole did not believe he had actually been in stasis for two hundred years, but would not shoot down what would be a harmless activity for this patient.

“But regardless. We have a placement staff who will work with yeh, so yeh can get set up out there. Come back if yeh need to.”

*

Later on a second doctor stopped by, and then a third. Perry got the impression that his story was unusual enough that they wanted to hear it in person before he left. He told them everything he could remember, which ended up being mostly a list of everything he could not remember.

He asked one of them:

“Do I seem coherent to you? Apart from this gap in my memory? Now that you’ve listened to me?”

The doctor told him that he did seem coherent; and she sounded almost surprised that he did.

*

Dr. O’Toole later wrote, in his notes:

Male, 35 to 40, near total retrograde amnesia. Otherwise good health. Absent from current directories. No indication of brain trauma. Aware and alert. Admitted subsequent to possible near-drowning, observed for 72 hours. No underlying causes identified. Discharged to Placement.

*

There was one more thing Perry remembered, which he did not tell the doctor:

He remembered a woman moving into his apartment. He felt that she was, or became, his wife. The apartment was white, full of light.

He remembered the hem of a dress, or a skirt. A smile. A necklace. A twist of hips, a turn of a body. He remembered warm skin; the curves of collarbones.

And love. And touch. The love was almost a physical presence; it was heat, light.

He remembered feeling that his life had multiplied, somehow. Expanded. If now he had been asleep for two hundred years and locked in a shell floating in the ocean, the widened horizon he felt when it had cracked open and released him was still nothing like what he had felt – what he remembered – when that woman had moved into his space.

He didn’t feel this was concrete enough to share with the doctor. And he had also felt it would be a violation of something if he did.

*

Housing – basic housing – was free in 2228. A social worker from the hospital moved him into an apartment on the outskirts of the city. This was Citronelle, Alabama, the successor to inundated Mobile.

Food was also free. Again it was basic food, but stores with staples would distribute to anyone who stopped by.

“I wish I remembered more,” Perry told the social worker, “but I’m certain survival was more of a struggle in my time. Maybe ‘survival’ is too strong a word. But food, clothing, shelter.”

She was a young Black woman, named Tolliver, every bit as attentive to him as O’Toole had been.

“Well, we’ve had problems since 2025, but we’ve sorted out some things, also,” she said. He felt that she was humoring him somewhat by referring to the date he had given them; she seemed to say it the way a parent might play along with a child who reported an invisible friend. But she was kind enough to remember it, at least.

The apartment was a small one, in a row of them. A fence in back surrounded a small patch of grass and also some flowers.

“My wife would have liked these,” he said. “And my daughter – I do remember her playing on grass.”

“Yeh haven’t remembered more about them?”

“Not really. Just images. Impressions, almost. It’s hard to describe. I hope I get more.”

*

And again there was a memory which he didn’t share; not a fiery one, like the one of his wife, but nevertheless something he didn’t want to tell Tolliver.

He remembered mending his daughter’s dress.

Mending clothes had seemed to be his job, in the family, not Jennifer’s.

Araceli had accidentally cut through the fabric while crafting something else on her lap, with scissors. She had presented it to him, and he had held it in his hands.

But the searing memory was not the cut; it was Araceli’s earnestness and remorse when he had said that she needed to be careful.

He remembered her – a miniature Jen – standing beside him as he sized up the slit in the fabric.

“I’m sorry, Daddy.” Her voice had been anguished; far too anguished for a crafting mishap.

“It’s okay, darling. I know you didn’t mean to. I just don’t want to you to cut yourself too.”

And she had breathed in relief.

*

“I am going to search for contacts in archaeology for yeh,” Tolliver told him, the following week. “To try to find yeh employment.”

“I would be more of an asset to them if I could actually remember anything, I know,” he said.

“Yes. Because then yeh might be able to tell them exactly where to dig for something, mightn’t you, Perry.” She was half-joking, half not.

“If they wanted to dig up a video store,” he said.

She looked at him with a smile, and her eyebrows up.

“A place where people used to obtain videos to watch. But anyway, yes, I wish I had more to offer.”

“It must be frustrating, I know. But at any rate, we’ll try to put yeh to work.”

*

There were, indeed, many opportunities for archaeological work, as O’Toole and now Tolliver had alluded to. Perry had learned from reading articles on his apartment’s wall display panel that, while he had been away, a frozen and nearly-intact Neanderthal woman had been found in Siberia; a Phoenician trading vessel had been excavated just off Bermuda; and a Ming Chinese camp had been found in northwest Oregon.

Further afield, animal fossils had been found on Mars. The creatures were primitive – one-centimeter trilobites – but there had been life there.

“But that didn’t really prove enethin about life outside the solar system,” Tolliver had told him. “Specks of life could have been blown from Mars to Earth by asteroid strikes. Or vice versa. No one can prove, still, that life arose in both places independently, based on those fossils.”

But a metal disk, with a uniform thickness of about nine inches and a diameter – in a perfect circle – of just over four miles had sailed through the solar system forty years before. It had entered near Neptune, passed by Earth within the orbit of Mars, and exited the orbit of Neptune again over the course of four years.

“So it was clearly made by aliens,” Perry asked Tolliver.

“Clearly. It wasn’t natural.”

“So there is other intelligence in the universe.”

“There is.”

“But nothing more was learned about it?”

“Nothing. It simply passed through. It was inert. As far as we could tell.”

“And there has been no communication with anyone else? No alien beings anywhere?”

“None. There has been no one out there to converse with. That whole time you were away, no news in that regard I’m afraid.”

*

Tolliver learned that Auburn University was conducting a dig at the site of a tiny, centuries-old camp further north in the state.

“Tiny?” Perry repeated.

“Tiny, but it might be from de Soto. And they have room for a laborer.”

“I can’t thank you enough for setting that up for me.”

“I hope it brings it all back to yeh, Perry.”

“We will see.” He was outside, in the back yard, holding an empty watering can. He rotated it in his hands.

“This may not sound very humble,” he said, “but I would have guessed that someone – someone like me – who had been asleep for two hundred years, and then woken up, would have garnered more attention. But the extent of my fame is, what, one or two doctors who found my story curious. And not really my actual ‘story,’ you understand; but just the fact that I have this gap in my memory but still seem sane.”

Tolliver just kept listening.

“Do you know what I mean? Imagine if you were to go asleep for two hundred years and then wake up still your age. You would think that would be at least as impressive as – building a dome on Mars. At least worth some notice, no? Some attention? You know?”

“The talk of the town,” she said.

“That’s right.”

“Well, yeh don’t know exactly what the future holds for yeh. You’ve seen that depository of articles I sent you?”

“I did, yes. Thank you. I haven’t had time to look into them yet. All of them are old archaeology papers?”

“They are. They seem to go back through the right years. Yeh can check them, and their notes. Maybe you’ll find your name. Then we could find out more about you.”

“I’ll search them for a Perry. Until then, I’ll be screening dirt and taking free food.” He turned the pitcher in his hands one more time. “Well, it could be worse. It’s better than drowning out in the Gulf would have been.”

“That’s the spirit, Perry.”