“This is the fourth day since you were recovered,” the woman said. “You still don’t feel able to talk?”

“I feel slow.”

“Your speech should be over eighty percent functional, by now. And I’m communicating in your version of English. I am confident in it.”

She was not frowning, although she sounded to Perry like she was. The two of them were sitting in a courtyard garden.

“Perry Doran. That is your name. Your records are available.”

“I’m grateful. For reviving me. But I barely remember where I have been.”

“Again, you have been in a stasis device. For six hundred years. You have been recovered by this institution.”

“A hospital.”

“No, this is not a hospital.”

He looked down at the brick patio of the courtyard.

“Who placed me in a – stasis device?”

“Someone back in your own time. Likely medical staff.”

“Why would they have done that?”

“Lack of brain activity. Death.”

“I was dead?”

“By the standards of your day, you would have been considered dead.”

“And you said – six hundred years.”

“Again, yes, Perry. And we have mentioned this before.”

Perry still thought she looked just blank-faced despite her tone and seeming exasperation. She was a dark-complexioned woman he took to be about thirty. She wore a long, simple blue dress. She leaned back in a wooden chair. She kept her dark eyes on him, barely ever blinking, her brows motionless.

Her calm face and voice didn’t match the impatience of her words. He remembered learning, long ago, that a mismatch between his sense of motion and what he was seeing out of a car window could make him queasy. Her face reminded him of that.

He looked around at the plants in the garden. He recognized a hibiscus, and none of the others looked unusual either.

“This courtyard we are in – is it old?”

“No.”

“It looks like one we would have in my time.”

She didn’t seem to want to say anything more.

“These records you have of me. What are they?”

“You will need to speak to someone else about those.”

She rose and left.

*

September 3rd, 2695 is what they tell me the date is. Although I’m not clear if they themselves are commonly numbering years like that anymore.

Asked for a notebook and something to write with.

I’m writing this, I have learned, in the city of Nassau, Ohio. Or town – it’s not large. It didn’t exist in my time, my first life. The closest nearby city is Cincinnati, which is still called that.

Had anyone told me what this century would be like, I’d have assumed that the automation of absolutely everything would have been what I noticed.

Because everything seems to be automated. Growing food, transportation, the making of everything. And there isn’t much transportation needed, of people anyway; but when they need it, it’s just these sort of force-field giant fishbowl things that move around through the streets. No drivers, or conductors. It seems like they hover, but I’m not sure. I still need to ride in one.

I think a lot of what people eat may be grown – or brewed, whatever – in vats and tanks. I’ve also seen a few videos or live shots of farms, and people don’t seem to work at them at all. Many are indoors and vertical. Planting, harvesting, and shipment is all done by machines. And everything is vegan now, apparently, so no eggs to gather or anything like that.

Most people seem to spend the vast majority of their time on leisure. Just as predicted. There are still schools, or at any rate children are gathered together for something – education, I assume – and I don’t think robots teach that. And there are the people in the not-hospital, whatever it is, who revived me. But with so much else, nearly everything I’m seeing, there’s not much work going on. I haven’t identified any buildings that are stores. Even if you spend your leisure time skiing, biking, whatever, the equipment is apparently fabricated by machines and just gets delivered to you by more machines.

Anyway again I’d have thought all that would be the story, but it’s completely overshadowed by these people not talking. Or barely talking. I am not understanding this at all. I think this is beyond temporary culture shock.

People – the few I see – don’t talk to me, and will barely make eye contact. Their English is different, but you would think they’d say something, once in a while. I go for walks and no one looks at me. I tried to ask someone on the street about the force-field fishbowl car things, and I think she understood me well enough but she wouldn’t answer.

I had been standing in front of a building – I’d seen a few people walk in and out, but I had no idea what its function was – and all at once I noticed an older woman standing next to me, and also one of the transparent car things progressing down a street one block down.

I could barely discern the “vehicle” at all; I saw it was there because of just a slight blur as it moved around. Three people stood in it, two women and a man. They were facing each other. The thing disappeared silently behind a stand of ornamental trees.

I turned to the woman.

“Where do those stop?” I asked her. I spoke slowly. “How do they work? Can anyone get on?”

She looked up at me, and I swear she looked disappointed. She was maybe seventy and had a scarf over her head. Just like the brick compound I was staying in, she looked very familiar. Could have been an older person from 2025.

“Where need go?” was all she said.

And I told her nowhere, that I was just wondering how they work. And to that, she actually frowned – everybody here sounds like they’re frowning all the time, when they do talk, although they’re usually not; but she really did – and she just half-said, half-indicated that I should just ask when I needed to go somewhere.

And they don’t talk to each other much, either. One block over from me, there’s a sort of restaurant – it’s cafeteria-style, and the food just appears at a counter after you say what you want – with small tables, and there are often a few people there. And some of them sit together, but they don’t speak much.

I’ve seen the children gathering in groups apparently to enter their not-schools, whatever they are, but they’re also oddly quiet. They look like normal kids, and they have backpacks and whatnot, but they’re strikingly quiet.

*

I’ve honestly wondered if it’s just that the entire population is on the autism spectrum now, but I don’t think that’s it; they seem perfectly able to read my emotions. If I get impatient with them they can definitely sense that, and then they clam up even more quickly. They just shut down any conversation or interaction.

*

Another person dressed in blue at this whatever-it-is where I’m staying showed up yesterday. I assumed it was to do some maintenance, at first, because he wandered around the courtyard seeming to inspect it. But then he didn’t do anything; he just turned around and started to leave. I thought maybe he was just looking at the plants.

He knew I was there but said nothing to me, and after making his circuit walked right by me on his way out. But I stopped him. The conversation went something like:

“Are you a gardener?” I said.

“This is a courtyard,” he answered.

“Indeed. I haven’t seen you here before. Like the others I see here.”

No answer.

“Do you live here in Nassau?”

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

No answer.

“Tell me, do you understand my English? I know it’s old.”

“We understand,” he said.

“The people here told me they had to learn it. I know it may be like –” at this point I started talking more to myself – “Shakespeare would be to me. Or even Chaucer.”

And at that, he shook his head.

“We understand. Your English is more permanent. Shared. Now I go.”

And he went.

What the hell is going on.

*

Another question is just what people do all day. There is a lot of leisure, as I said; biking, walking. People sitting around a pond in a park. I don’t see road crews. I don’t see construction or maintenance workers. I don’t see people running to stores, and of course that means I don’t see anyone working in stores either.

I did come across a group of children playing what looked like an organized game, in a park. They didn’t wear uniforms, but they were all the same age, and some parents were watching. Chased a very large ball around a field, trying to move it according to some rules I didn’t understand. Sometimes several children pushed it; sometimes it was obvious that only one was allowed to. That looked normal enough, although again they were very quiet.

*

The only silver lining I guess is that this has served as a distraction from – everything else. My life. Jennifer and Araceli are gone. At night, at other times when I’m not thinking hard enough, I have a sense in the back of my mind that I’ll see them again. I wonder what Jen would have thought about, will think about, the room they’ve given me, or the quiet children. I wonder what Araceli would have thought of a rabbit I saw outside of town. I make a mental note to take her out there to try to see it again before I realize she’s gone.

*

The rabbit, as least, looked normal. It froze when it saw me, and then hopped off into brush. I wanted to thank it. This was on the edge of a field past the last buildings in town.

*

I’m still in the same room in the two-story building. I thought it was temporary after they revived me, but there’s no sign that I’m moving anywhere else.

I talked with the staff guy about it:

“So, this is not a hospital–”

“No.”

“But you are the ones who revived me.”

“Yes.”

“Are you physicians?”

“No. A physician would not do this work.”

“How did you come to do it, then? Do you volunteer? How does this place function?”

“It’s a place you can live. And anyone could have administered after you exited the device.”

“Did I need help exiting it?”

“We have explained this before. It became obvious you would be released. You recovered while you were in the device itself.”

“How did it become obvious that I was healed?”

“A light on it which had been green, turned blue. Also, we opened the upper cover and saw that you had eye movement.”

I moved on and just asked him:

“Could I live – anywhere else?”

I didn’t really feel any need to move. I was asking this just as another way of trying to get a sense of how this society was working. Was this some sort of benevolence association? Or a government agency?

“You could. There are various places around the city. If you see one you want to move to, you can do so.”

“I wouldn’t have to – pay any money?”

“We do not do that.”

I thought of something:

“By the way, about that stasis device, that tube – what happened to it?”

“It’s still here. We will put it in your room.”

*

The “staff,” whatever the blue-uniformed people are, did produce the records they spoke of. And they did it in an odd way, of course: they just put them on a table in my apartment one day while I was away, on a walk. I wonder if they intentionally waited until I had left so they could avoid talking to me about them. Because they were intense.

The records were printed out on papers.

Jennifer and Araceli both lived long lives, to 88 and 94 respectively. That means that Ara made it into the twenty-second century – 2109 – which of course seems like far into the future, strangely.

(That’d be an interesting quirk to talk with people about, wouldn’t it; if anyone here talked.)

Jen apparently worked her entire career in the same school system she’d been in while I was there. It was mentioned in her obituary.

There was nothing about her remarrying. I’d be surprised if she didn’t pair up with someone else; she was so young, still, when I left. And gorgeous. I can’t know. She apparently didn’t have any other children, at any rate. That was one thing she did, I believe, only with me.

Araceli did have children and grandchildren of her own. There’s a good chance I have descendants around. I could work on finding them if I feel like tracking fifteen generations or whatever it would be.

There was no news about me, no obituary (there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write), and I still don’t remember what exactly happened.

I remember up to 2025. We were living in a house in Richmond. Jen and I were thinking of trying for another child. Ara had come along before I had felt very settled in my job, and it was the same for Jen. But both of us had just nailed down more secure positions, her in her school system and me at the university, so we were feeling more confident.

I had worked on an excavation at a freedmen’s village in Virginia.

I’d been invited to another in Guatemala. Tunneling into a pyramid.

We had bought a new car.

Our roof needed to be replaced.

Ara had gotten a guinea pig. That was a story:

We’d gone out for the day to a large flea market and fundraising sale event thing in a rural area. We’d given Ara ten dollars and told her that was her budget; she could buy anything she wanted. Turned out she found a guinea pig. Wasn’t quite what we’d meant, but he was a good pet. She named him Whistler.

I remember all that, but can’t remember how I ended up dead (by the standards of my day).

(By the way I think “Dead By The Standards of My Day” would be my memoir title. Unfortunately I can’t imagine anyone here would read it.)

Anyway I had gone out with Ara a day after that flea market to get a cage for Whistler. So that cage would have been something she would have remembered about me, a solid memory, after I was gone. Because Whistler certainly outlived me. I wondered what Araceli remembered of me; how often she thought about me. That guinea pig cage, at least, would have been a reminder. She must have had it for at least several years, if Whistler lived a normal life. I keep thinking of things like this, and it seems to pull me down into a well that I don’t want to be spending all my time in.

*

I went into that restaurant thing yesterday. Several of the tables were occupied. Only one couple had been saying any words to each other when I entered, but they stopped.

It’s in the bottom floor of a residence building. It’s open to the sidewalk. There’s no doorway, you just walk in wherever. It’s actually very pleasant, airy. Jen would have liked it. You walk to a counter area in back, say aloud what you want, and then a door goes up after a moment and it’s there. I asked for tomato soup and bread – having no idea what they might have – and nothing happened. I switched to potato soup, and then the door went up and there it was. I’m not sure if they didn’t have tomato, or if the machine didn’t understand me.

I went to a table, and everyone else in there was just silent. No eye contact. It was so bizarre. I noted the sweater sleeve of a guy at a table across from me because he kept his arm down along the edge of it as if he were guarding his plate from me. They finished their meals and filed out. I was nearly alone there when I had finished mine.

*

I should make more of an effort to note the days in this thing, but they seem to run together. I imagine this is a sign of depression. Jen would have been worried about me.

Anyway, I just went ahead and grilled the staff guy about – everything, yesterday. I’d read some history of the past centuries. Once again, I would have thought that things like the dissolution of the United States, the geoengineering of the planet, et cetera, would have been what I focused on, but in reality I had spent nearly all the time trying to identify the disconnect between my culture and this one. The disconnect of silence.

“Listen,” I’d told him. “I want to ask – but first of all, what’s your name? I’ve never learned it. Do you have names these days?”

“Yes. Solman.”

“Okay then. So in my time, people talked a lot more. Are you aware of that?”

“I was not.”

“Really? And I don’t mean that I assume you’re especially interested in the twenty-first century, I understand that. But it’s striking. Do people from here just have a reputation for being really quiet, now? I mean, some people did, in my time. Like people from Finland.”

“We are no different than anyone,” he said.

“Are you all – telepathic? Do you send ideas to each other without speaking?”

“We do not.”

“Okay,” I said. “It was just very different in my day. You don’t know if any – major change happened at some point? The, uh, silence revolution? Something like that?”

“I do not.”

I felt I was really flailing, and I would have assumed he would try to ease the conversation a bit by asking me a question, commiserating, something, but he just stood there.

I stood there, too.

I didn’t know what to try to say.

He took advantage of my pause, and turned and left.

*

It’s nine days later.

I have a backpack. I’m going to go out on a hike.

I don’t know where I’ll go. I’m just going out to where I’ve seen that rabbit, and then past it. It’s in a green area, the edge of a field. I’ll walk across that and keep going.

It was six days ago that I realized the walls were listening to me, basically, and I could just ask for anything and probably get it. That’s how I got the backpack; I just said that I wanted one, aloud, in my apartment, and it was outside the door shortly after.

And of course once again the thing which I would have assumed would amaze me, back in my earlier life – the fact you can get things here just by voicing them to an interior wall, apparently – is overshadowed by the fact that these walls listen to me. And see me, for all I know. There is basically constant surveillance. And who knows who is watching it. I guess I was naive to have expected otherwise.

I had thought that the ordering system at that restaurant was just in place there, but it works nearly anywhere. Food appears in my pantry or in my temperature-control box (it’s not really a refrigerator; things in it just stay cold) if I just say that I want it. On one occasion, three or four days ago, I asked for a watermelon and Solman actually walked in with it – without knocking – and put it on a table.

Regardless, I asked for a backpack. I asked for better shoes, and they appeared in a closet. Then, a little tent. So I’m walking for some time. We’ll see if the fields out there listen to requests, too. If I break any rules, someone will have to tell me about it, and I’d welcome the conversation. I am taking off to see the rabbit, and beyond.