The Apex Book of World SF 2 by Lavie Tidhar

Author:Lavie Tidhar [Tidhar, Lavie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Apex Publications
Published: 2012-08-02T06:00:00+00:00

Nothing Happened in 1999

Fábio Fernandes

Fábio Fernandes teaches creative writing, scriptwriting, and game writing at Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, Brazil. He is the author of one novel in Portuguese, Os Dias da Peste, and his short stories, as well as articles on science fiction, have appeared in several languages.

Humankind discovered time travel in the early twenty-second century.

It wasn't on purpose, as it were. As happens with many scientific discoveries, sometimes you are looking for one thing, then another gets in the way with results you are most definitely not expecting. Take Viagra, for instance. Or antigravity associated with superconductors.

The time travel process was discovered during experiments in locative media and augmented reality applied to elevators.

Anyway, it happened at a very interesting time in History. The human race had suffered a long period of wars, diseases and, even though it was far from global peace and understanding, now it seemed to be entering, if not a golden age, at least a time to start dreaming and making plans. A post-virtual environment embedded in anti-gravitational elevators as part of an ambience designed to soothe and distract people during the long rises and falls through the more-than two hundred floors of the arcologies seemed as good a place as any to give this age a jumpstart with such an invention.

As it were, the environment turned out to be not only a virtuality, but also a time displacement device that took its occupants to a very different set of co-ordinates from those originally expected. Suffice it to say that, when the doors of the elevator opened, the dumbfounded passengers were no longer in Kansas—at least not in 2113 Kansas anyway (for the building really was located in that American state) but in a shabby building in 1999 with a mere fifty floors.

After a few minutes of absolute confusion and, in some cases, total denial, the discombobulated denizens of the future returned to the elevator and told it to get them back to where they had come from. Fortunately, it was able to do so.

The First Prototype, as this elevator is called today, is on permanent exhibition at the Smithsonian—but not before the post-virtual environment was carefully dissected and examined in search of what caused it to behave so unexpectedly. Something to do with quantum teleportation, apparently, but the details were never disclosed to the public. (Perhaps, as some media pundits said, because even the scientists didn't know how the hell such a thing happened.)

Be it as it may, time travel rapidly became a fad, and—who would have expected that?—a sort of escape valve for the stressed citizen. People cherished the idea of travelling to a fine, quiet time, not to any turning point in History where they could be attacked by terrorists or die in an earthquake, for instance. Nobody tried to alter the past in order to change the future.

One of these Safe Years—as they were called—was the very first year reached by the elevator: 1999.

(Now, there were some dissenters who argued

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