The Future Utopia Ch. 01

Chapter 1: That Time I Leapt Forward into the Future by Accident and it was an Erotic Utopia

Hey, everyone! Today I'm going to tell you about that time I leapt to forward into the future by accident and it was an erotic utopia. Honestly, I didn't want to believe it was a utopia at first. I was sure that it would turn out to have some horrible, dark, dystopian secret. You know: the suffering child under the beautiful village of Omelas, the cannibalized clones in Cloud Atlas, the bloody pagan rituals in Midsommar, that kind of thing. No "perfect place" in this world is perfect forever; that's why it's called a u-topia, no-place. And besides, one person's heaven is another person's hell, so how could there be an entire society where everyone is happy?

But as far as I saw, it was as close to a true utopia as we humans can get, at least in the city that I went to. I just had to get over the paranoia of a few thousand years' worth of "utopias-are-always-deceptive-dystopias" stories. Once the future people helped me with that, I was able to learn something I'd always resisted: how to fully and freely enjoy the pleasures of the flesh. So you don't have to worry about anything evil or corrupt hiding under the shining surface of the places and people I'm about to show you. This isn't going to be one of those moralistic tales about the flaws of the human race and Why We Can't Have Nice Things. This is a story about the time I had a chance to experience a world of hedonistic pleasures at its best, and how I learned to enjoy it. I'd like to bring you along to the future utopia with me--if you'd like to come, that is.

So, imagine this: a society full of beautiful, diverse, mostly naked people, where sensual pleasure is more freely tasted than ice cream is today. (I'll get into what happens with those of us who don't like "ice cream" later. Believe me, I am one of you.) Imagine a world where simple experiences like walking in a park can include some kind of gratification, and orgasm is enjoyed in public as well as in private. Imagine you can have sex any time, with anyone who wants to, and with no further obligations besides mutual enjoyment. Now imagine what a shock it would be to suddenly pop into this time, fully clothed, with all your current hang-ups about your body and guilty fetishes and inhibitions due to past relationships that didn't work out like you wanted. That's what happened to me. I'm not going to lie, it was kind of rough at first.

I started out in 2021, so actually that was really rough. 2021 was a bad year, not just for me, but all over the world, with the COVID pandemic still flaring up and things closing down and protests spilling over everywhere. I won't dwell on it, but let's just say I was not in the peak of mental well-being and financial prosperity. Let's say I was a single woman, aged 35, working remotely and living in one room of a dilapidated old house in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada where everyone else was bubbled with other people and socially isolating from me. Let's say I was anxious as fuck and mostly broke. Hashtag millennial problems. Anyway, the only thing I could do each day to maintain my fragile grip on sanity was go for walks around the neighbourhood. There was a little park--ok, some trees and grass instead of pavement-- that I would walk around. And around. And around.

Now, for the past ten years or so, ever since grad school, I've had this mental image that comes to me when I feel frustrated or overwhelmed, where I imagine reaching up and pulling the whole sky down, just hooking it with my nails like a big curtain, tearing it off, and wrapping it around me, so the entire world is dark and empty, and it's just me cocooned inside the shredded blanket of the sky. Kind of apocalyptically violent, but also comforting in a way? Anyways, I was really frustrated that day, and looking up at the cloudy grey sky I thought about it again: reaching out, grabbing onto that sky, yanking it as hard as I mentally could, and pulling myself into it. Only this time, as I tore at the sky in my mind, I noticed something actually happening: a kind of silent but also deafeningly loud RRRRIIIIP and everything going dark and for a second it's like falling and then--

Ok, I'm being dramatic. I just open my eyes and I'm standing in the future. No time-tunnel lightshow. No actual falling. I'm not even sure I've really heard anything or done much more than close my eyes for a second. But I am 100% sure I'm in the future because I'm standing in a very high-tech fancy white lab inside a glassy-looking cube, and a bunch of scientists are staring at me with varying degrees of surprise. I can tell they're scientists because they're all wearing white lab coats. I assume (wrongly) that they must have skirts or shorts on underneath, because I can see their bare legs below the hems. Even the men's legs. And they don't have shoes on either, which seems like a weird safety oversight. They're all different heights and builds, several different skin tones, and I can't identify all of their genders right away, but they're all impossibly beautiful in their own ways.

Of course, I ask the most obvious question.

"Where am I?"

The tallest of the group, who looks like a distinguished Black woman with literal liquid silver running in shining veins through in her dark, curly hair, responds,

"You're in the city. This is our time travel research lab."

The shortest and roundest one, who looks like an adorable chinchilla if that chinchilla were a human, adds,

"And it's the future for you."

So I ask the second most obvious question.

"What year is it?"

"The year is 1782," says the tallest.

"1782? By what calendar? I mean, seventeen hundred and eighty-two years since what happened?"

"Seventeen hundred and eighty-two years since the birth of this city."

I puzzle this over for a minute, looking around the room for clues about "this city." There are no windows, so I can't see any landmarks outside. There are curvy white forms emerging from the floor that I assume are computer terminals, or maybe furniture, but I can't tell when or where they might've been made. I'm guessing not Ikea, though the clean, minimalist fixtures would give Scandinavian product designers wet dreams for weeks. The scientists don't offer any explanations or even talk among themselves. They just stand there as a group, waiting while I process it all. I start to mildly panic.

"Ok. Um, I don't know where this city is or when it was founded. Can you tell me how many years you brought me forward? And, and why did you do this to me?!"

"We didn't bring you here," a man with sun-bronzed skin and blazing blonde hair explains soothingly. "You came through to us. We were trying to lock onto an animal about your weight from 148 million years ago."

"We hoped it would be a small dinosaur!" Says the second-shortest researcher, a doll-like person of indeterminate gender who bounces on the balls of their feet enthusiastically.

The tanned man smiles at the enthusiastic doll, then says to me, "That's why you're in the box, just to be safe. Here, I'll let you out."

While I'm glad to be out of the glassy, cage-like cube, I'm beginning to get a strange feeling about these people. Besides their unusual looks, there's something too happy and open about them. And the way they talk! It's like they're Wikipedia set on "Simple English." Later, I'd learn that they're not actually speaking English at all; the city I find myself in has an automatic translation service, and they speak to me simply in order to make the translation come through clearer. But I don't know that yet, and so these people seem almost childlike somehow, not like serious, mature scientists who've just had a time traveller show up on their doorstep. I'm freaking out. Why aren't they freaking out?

Before I can start to seriously panic, the tall woman with silver streaks continues the group's infodump in a more reassuringly scientist-like way.

"You must have been standing in the exact same geolocked spot as our target, and so your body came through instead. You see, the device we made locks onto an object's coordinates in both space and time, because otherwise time travel would likely send you into outer space. The earth is moving through space incredibly fast, and the galaxy is also spinning through the universe, so time travel without simultaneous teleportation to recenter you in space would be a death sentence in 99.9% of cases. To prevent that, we first select a location on the Earth's surface to geosync, adjusting for the natural rise and fall of the crust, tectonic shifts, erosion--"

"--and so on!" the shortest (and apparently most impatient) interrupts.

"--and so on, and then we begin scanning for other objects to make sure that you don't end up inside a wall or, worse, another human. Once we've located a clear, synchronous spot, we lock onto it so that the person who travels back in time will have a safe space to land in. We've got the geosync problem mostly solved. We can detect objects by weight and matter type all around the world in the present. Next, we've been trying to lock onto a target object in a particular space and time. Timesync is our real research project, after all. This time we were aiming for a dinosaur, but I guess we missed by a hundred million years or so, and you grabbed onto the timesync signal and locked yourself with it instead. We weren't trying to take you from the past. We just wanted to try getting a complete lock on something long ago, to establish its spacetime coordinates. In fact, it's our hypothesis that nothing can be brought forward unless it wants to come here and actively engages with the timesync. It seems like you wanted to come."

I shake my head, bewildered.

"I don't remember doing that. I mean, yeah, I was thinking about the future and wishing I could get past the rough patch I was going through faster. Then I felt like I wanted to reach up and claw the whole sky down with my nails, so I...ok, yes, I do remember doing that. Kind of reaching out with my hands in my mind and pulling myself forward. But I've had that feeling before and nothing like this ever happened. It's just a dramatic fantasy I have when I'm frustrated."

The research group members look at each other meaningfully, but I don't know what the meaning behind the look is.

"Maybe the other times you reached out, you missed," suggests a young man with soft, faintly iridescent white scales for skin.

"Missed what?"

"The timesync. We have tried a few times before in the same general area."

"A few thousand times!" The shortest one adds with a snort.

"So let me get this straight." I say. "Basically, I'm in a city in the distant future and you're time travel researchers who didn't mean to bring me here, but by coincidence you opened a timesync portal right where I was standing, and I accidentally walked through it. And now I'm here."

"Yes."

"Ok." I take a deep breath and ask another obvious but crucial question. "Do you know how to send me back to my own time?"

I expect them to say no, but the tallest one says,

"In theory, yes."

"But in practice?"

"We'll have to...make some adjustments to the equipment. It would be very dangerous to make a geophysical or temporal mistake in sending you back, even a small one. You could end up crushed under the surface of the earth."

"Or in the ocean."

"Or one hundred years too early."

"Or one hundred years too late."

"Speaking of time," the shortest one interrupts before the others can add any more examples of my possible doom, "what year are you from, by your calendar? I was thinking mid- to late-twentieth century Common Era, based on what you're wearing. Those things, aren't they called 'blue jeans'?"

"Yeah, they are. But I'm from the early twenty-first century. 2021. People still wear jeans then."

"Ok then, we definitely don't want to send you a hundred years too late."

"Why? What happens a hundred years from 2021?"

"We probably shouldn't tell you, but it's not good. You don't want to go then."

Well great. Now I'm feeling more anxious about the idea of trying to go back home than I was about the prospect of staying here.

"No need to rush it! Please take your time figuring things out. I'll just, uh, wait here, I guess?"

"Oh, you should go out and see the city!" The enthusiastic doll suggests. "I know some people who are fans of your time period. They'd be happy to give you a tour. I'm sure people will want to know about your life in 2021. We have some records from then, but they're spotty because of the...let's just call it The Change. You know. In a hundred years from your time. Less, really."

"Less...? No, never mind. Actually, I'd love to see a future city. Let's do that." Then, picturing something out of Blade Runner, I hastily add, "Is it safe, though?"

"Yes, it's very safe. My friends are on their way to meet you now."

Huh. I wonder how they contacted their friends, since I didn't see their mouth or fingers move except when they were talking to me. But I decide not to ask about it because I don't want to get into another big infodump-style conversation. The group seems eager to start working on sending me home, and I don't want to hold them up. In the meantime, why not see the city?