Love is what we’ll cling to after the collapse
After the collapse, survival’s not assured. We won’t know whether we’ll fall to raiders or radiation, drought or desolation. Our dwindling population ekes out survival in civilisation’s remnants, strewn across sunburnt lands, running resources and correspondence between camps, humanity caring for each other.
We won’t talk of the despots who razed us or the profiteers who pillaged us. It’s a legend left over from times forgotten, remembered all too well while we continue writing this story of our own.
Mark my words, we’ll meet one day; you bearing news, and me a warm welcome because I love the way you say my name. We’ll go about our lives, parallel and intersecting, twin stars locked in orbit, twin particles that spin together. Whatever the era, future or past, love is what we’ll cling to when time and space no longer matter.
Until We Met Again by JL Peridot
A time traveller absconds to the past in search of her lost love.
One word: my name. A call from Origin through the neural lace grafted to my brain and nerves, connecting me to another place in another time. A reminder of what I’m here to do.
I clutch a bottle cap; its sharp metal edges ground me in the present. It’s funny, don’t you think, to consider this moment the present, as if the past and future I came from aren’t supposed to exist? If you were here, I’d ask. You’d smile and kiss my forehead and say you love my nonsense questions.
But you’re not here. They want me to forget you ever were.
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Excerpt
Connecting me to Origin, the Lace works like any other organ—unthinkingly, like lungs breathing and the heart beating. It’s a sense tuned to an imperative beyond the five. At baseline, it’s a hum so deep inside my body, I barely catch it. It’s an ache in the feet I’ve gotten used to, grit in the nose that goes unnoticed until it triggers a sneeze. It’s the constant love for another person, even when attention diverts elsewhere.
At peak, the Lace is fire from within, lightning inside a tree. It consumes, overwhelms, contained within my brain and body. And for that brief moment, there is only Origin.
Back in the Annex, I climb into the tank while it fills with gel. Albert optimises the temperature and buoyancy for my body this morning. Slightly cool, a blessing on a day so warm we feel it even in this underground cavern. It’s already too hot to travel overland.
Waiting in the tepid gel, I search for Tarkan through the Lace. But all I get back is the flimsy sense of his fingers around my hips, and his mouth on a mole that might not have always been there. Origin yields some data at last, there but not there, not really pressed against my body, sucking at my skin. It hums through the Lace, vague and disconnected. It could be someone else’s gasp I hear, someone else’s fullness in my mouth, someone else’s tongue darting into tight spaces.
Qing.
Origin’s call delivers the countdown. Fifteen seconds to traversal, and details of the task ahead.
About JL Peridot
JL Peridot writes love letters to the future on devices from the past. She’s a qualified computer scientist, former website maker, amateur horticulturist, and sometimes illustrator. But most of the time, she’s an author of romantic science fiction. She lives with her partner and fur-family in Boorloo (Perth, Australia) on Whadjuk Noongar country.
Visit her website at jlperidot.com for the full catalogue of her work.