The sheen took us to 2020. We stepped out into a quiet alleyway.
“This is your favourite café,” she said.
Again, it was news to me.
The place was grimy. Yellowing newspapers dotted the tables, and people drank from old-fashioned mugs. It seemed highly unlikely that I would ever, in a trillion years, have expressed a desire to eat in such a place.
Diane stopped me from sliding into a plastic chair and instead pushed me onto a sagging sofa. We collided in the middle, with the cushions and a heat between us.
I spoke into her hair. “How do you know this is my favourite café? Who am I?” I’d meant to saywho are you?
Diane’s answer to my question was to fling her arms around me and growl. “Only the best lesbian in space. We have our first date here,” she whispered. “In about two months. First kiss outside. It’s a good one.” She clamped a hand over her mouth. “Shit. I’ve ruined the surprise now.”
I struggled up from the sofa and made my way to the bathroom. My head was obliterated.
I locked myself in the cubicle.
It wasn’t long before knocking at the door brought me back from the abyss.
It was Diane. “Your lunch is going cold. B?”
“Ugh,” I said.
“Just ignore anything I said. I was talking shit. Let’s have lunch and we can go back to work. B?”
I was long past polite conversation. “Ugh.”
To my horror, Diane scaled the door and scrambled into the cubicle with me, leaning on my lap in a heap.
She gripped my shaking hands. “Listen to me.I know youin the future. We’ve already done this first-day-at-work crap. Wethought it’d be fun to relive the first day. I wasn’t intending to freak you out. If you want, I’ll take us back to the future and we can forget all this. You’re going to kick my arse though. Today was supposed to be fun.”
People re-lived occasions, got married-married-married, had children, visited favourite places, and laughed all the laughs many times over. It wasn’t a new phenomenon. Afterwards, they went back to their lives and watched recordings. Everyone had a gadget that replayed the sheen experiences. People lived parallel lives, and nobody died unless they never did time travel. Even then, they could appear in someone else’s threads. Sometimes the strands merged, and the various forms of a person would catch a memory from another time.
Me? I’d never done it because I didn’t have anyone to relive things with.
Did I?
Theoretically, merging strands was not difficult to believe. What sent redness creeping through my body and zinging up my back was the unlikely knowledge that Diane and I were friendsand more.
I let Diane lead me back, but when we got to the sagging sofa, she held out a chair instead. “Here. Sit here. You’ll like it better. I shouldn’t have kept touching you. Eat up.”
I ate a forkful of the food and, after a while, was able to speak again. “It’s good.”
She winked. “Told you. Are you feeling better?”
“Yes, thank you. Do I keep the job?”
“Of course you do.” She rubbed my shoulder, then withdrew quickly. “Oops! I keep forgetting. No touching.”
“How far in the future are we?” I asked.
“Six months from your first day.”
“Are we watching this?”
Diane covered her mouth with both hands and made asound like whooshing wind in the weather simulator. “I forgot to bring the recorder. You’re going to be so mad.”
I thought about being cross at her, but it seemed too strange and unlikely to understand. “I get cross with you?”
