Records of the Future Perfect

Asteres, singular noun: The official term for what is now commonly referred to as space-time traveller on any of the four Asteres missions. Date of first known usage – bA. 2040, Dr. L. Robinson, ‘Records of the Future Perfect: The History of the Last Asteres Mission’.

She is always unsurprised by the ease at which her clients make themselves at home in her house. It is only this woman’s first session, but Asteres are used to adapting quickly to unfamiliar spaces and, more than that, transforming the unfamiliar into familiar through a detritus of objects, a snail-trail-comet-tail of evidence. It is through experience that she has learnt that this evidential scattering is not a show for her sake, not the nervous over-arrogance of a therapy first-timer, but for the client themselves. Octavia Leonard – announcing her name slightly louder than the non-travellers do (where she comes from it is important to stress crucial details like names and percentages) – shrugs off her coat at the door, unwinds her scarf, places it on the hook and uses the heel of one foot to discard her shoes, kicking them further into the hall absent-mindedly as if used to doing at home so no-one trips over them coming through the door.

Octavia looks around the room, assessing its contours and contents openly and unabashedly: the plants gathered in one corner – all real, since Asteres (her main client base) dislike the fake – include an avocado tree that reaches up to her hip when standing that she grew from a stone in a glass container on this same room’s window ledge, the desk, uncluttered but for a series of coloured notebooks, and manuals of psychology carefully alphabetized on the shelf above, dates taped over, the always-empty umbrella stand in the corner. It has an air of always having looked the same, which was precisely her intention. She has been careful to place them both outside of time – Octavia’s at least – in a space that changes only incrementally despite the events outside of it, and inside of a time that still felt safe and secure, even when it was tipping over into its own destruction. Time is only measured in here by the four corners of carpet, by the slowly sprouting sapling and the perennial flowers. It is more solid, heavy in wood and wool, than the glimmering, spinning silk of the world beyond them as she and Octavia know it. Ironically, what changes most is the evidence, each client leaving behind something different. Today, cowboy boots and a bright sunshine-yellow scarf, yesterday brand-new trainers and small leather bag, between-today-and-yesterday a pair of exoskeletenic gloves that peeled off their client like skin, leaving burns behind. Augenblick, and everything alters – but only she can know this.

When she began in the profession, she was defeated. She worked with the first generation of the Asteres – she cannot count herself, for she had no name when she ranged across space-time, trying to piece back together a world that fractured apart at the moment she finished soldering. The majority of her clients had PTSD, but they all had the task of reckoning with failure – a failure that would cost the Earth, a failure they could not share with anyone else around them, because of the non-disclosure agreements meant to prevent mass panic that she herself had put in place. They did not know who she was of course. Those in charge disturbed the timelines just enough that they would not recognise her, though she had trained all of them, once. Her clients are no longer Asteres, no longer caught in the glare of endlessly shifting time. They do not look through her, but at her, and, unlike the second generation Asteres, who are desperately racing ahead to fix the errors their predecessors have scattered through spacetime and have a mere fifteen (in this world) minutes before they are gone again, they have more hours than ever, more they know what to do with. Octavia, for instance, has only just finished her meticulous appraisal of this space – a hangover from missions, but not something than any still-in-transit clients manage to achieve – and her eyes are focused, clear. They are so piercing that for a moment she wonders if Octavia may guess who – and what – she is.

*

She has had what feels like an eternity to reckon with a loss that has not yet taken place and that is inevitable. She feels it when she watches her children pass through the school doors, obscured by tinted glass. She feels it when the news speaks of future generations or a friend mentions grandchildren. She watches the forest for signs of it, sees it in the encroaching black edges of what were once bright green leaves. Paper singed at its edges. States burning at theirs. She watches the sky when it grows thick with ash like storm clouds and she and the children press cloths to their faces to breathe easier. Others watch, too, and suspect, but they do not know. She has clients with survivor’s guilt, but she does not have a name, yet, for its opposite condition.

Many of the Asteres she works with experience the same. She teaches them to limit their impact as much as they can and to live with the unbearable knowledge they are born to bear. To see crocuses and blossoms dappled with light and overcast skies like a dark summer’s night lit with lanterns. She teaches them to teach the next generation of Asteres what to expect.

Octavia speaks of burning, of hills edged with red and gold like a woman’s red hair in spring, and, later, hidden behind mountains of ash. She speaks of friends she lost and people who will never be born. She speaks of stepping through one timeline like quicksilver pours through her fingers and then being stuck and suffocated in another like quicksand, of the moment her team got something just right and the timeline snapped back into place like a bone that had been broken, of the pain in her limbs when she tries to sleep, a weight that a still-human body wasn’t made for. Of the way what she loved doing most was also what was killing her.

She listens and asks questions when she should and offers advice when she would have wanted it. It is all she can do, but it seems, in an infinitesimal way, to help.

*

She takes summers off. She has missed enough of them already. Octavia may be back in the autumn, but she may not. Over summers, she has found, many things can change. She is gone for only a few weeks, but those are a few weeks in which anything seems possible. People travel or move or change careers. By the autumn, she will have new clients who are struggling in new jobs their own impetuosity has rewarded them with, and she will have lost old clients who will initially contact her from far-flung regions and then gradually forget to until she never hears from them again. Their last meeting, in late May, the tree branches sweeping her window rioting with colour, has a feeling of finality about it they both try to ignore and then, begrudgingly, acknowledge. It is too hot and she spends five minutes at the beginning adjusting the fan so they both feel a breeze. Finally, Octavia shifts a little in her seat. ‘I have something-‘, she says, grabbing her bag up from where it’s been discarded on the floor and rifling through it, ‘for you. Just a little something to say thank you for all your help.’

She smiles. She has a shelf in her kitchen which is home to a collection of her children’s strange and wonderful creations and her clients’ equally bizarre, and equally significant, gifts, a marker for each stage of their growth they have shared with her: a piece of sea glass, a rusty mirror bequeathed to someone by their dead grandmother, a miniature painting of a house. She knows her clients are ready to leave at the moment she sees each item, the last mark of trauma they are deciding to hand over to someone else to guard, that they have transformed from something ugly to something etched with tenderness.

‘Ah! There it is’, Octavia says, brightly, and holds out, with a flourish, a small black book. As she reaches for it and takes it, their hands brush. She can see it has been written in, immediately. The cover is scuffed, the pages crinkled at the edges as if the notebook has been damp at one point, the spine straining as its contents grow thick with the foliage of writing. Octavia smiles and gestures encouragingly as she opens it carefully. On the first page, an inscription: ‘Octavia Leonard, Asteres 157’. She looks up, shocked. ‘But this-,’

Octavia nods, still smiling. ‘Yes. It’s my diary from the mission. Everything I saw, everything I thought, everything I wished I’d done differently’. She clasps her hands together in her lap and leans forwards. ‘I have one last confession to make. It’s not just an account of my travels. You see, I came to you not just because you’re recommended by the centre. I knew who you were right from the start, even though with the confusion of the timelines, I shouldn’t have recognised you. But how could I forget? I grew up watching you speak, listening to your voice. I grew up knowing you were right and knowing I would do whatever you told me to do. You were the first of us. So, this isn’t just my history, it’s yours, too. And it’s yours, to do with what you want. Keep it, publish it, whatever you want. Whatever you think is necessary’. Octavia looks intently at her, telling her without words that she knows she’ll publish. Of course she knows. In her world, this notebook must already exist as no-longer-a-notebook, sitting alongside classics on bookshelves. Something inside her lightens to see – although she, theoretically, already knows - that physical books do still exist, are treasured and abused as they were when she was only a child, in a future world in which even people can shrug off their bodies like people, now, here, are shrugging off their jackets.

She looks down at the notebook sitting on her knees. She has never understood the expression your heart is in your mouth until this moment. It beats a pulse of words that come too fast. ‘This is … this must be worth a fortune’. She doesn’t mean literally, but Octavia, kindly, tactfully, takes her words at face value, and laughs.

‘I guess so. What did they offer you for your records?’ Octavia’s voice comes to her and, for the first time in all of their sessions together, she hears the distortion of space-time, the vowels long and slow and lagging. ‘They told me at least $20, 000.’

‘With the money, you will continue your research and, with it, you will obtain the funds for another mission, one that, this time, won’t fail’. Future tense definitiveness, present tense certainty.

Of course it won’t. Across from her, its evidence, like the shoes clients shed on her floor, relic of a salvaged future, an Asteres who has wandered back to her, is sitting - and summer is just beginning.