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--"
