Welcome to the Year 4202

by Joel Van Valin

If placed before the controls of a bidirectional time machine, most of us would take the safer road and travel the past. Visiting an older era we have, as it were, a superior van­tage point; we know, in a rough way, what to expect, and what is going to happen. Yet here we are, over two thousand years in the future! Splendid. Everything is bound to be indecipherable, and everyone will know far, far more than we do.

We are about as far forward in time here as the Roman Republic was in the past. One would expect a Bladerunner scene of artificial landscapes, floating cars, and robots serving cynical cyberpunks with laser guns. Yet we find ourselves in ... a forest?

Yes it seems like an ordinary forest, filled with oaks, birches, maples, birds, squirrels, brambles, concealed violets, a mushroom here and there… For them nothing much has changed in the intervening two millennia. We could be stand­ing in 2024 as easily as 4202, though a sharp birder might spot a slightly different species of sparrow, or notice the absence of a particular type of woodpecker.

But where are the people? Oh, there is a house. I mistook it for a big tree. Now that we examine the branches and leaves up close, they do appear to be artificial. You only know it's a human dwelling because of the door and windows and a gravel road leading up to it. It's like some house out of Winnie-the-Pooh. Well, inside we go!

Things are looking more familiar here. That chair and table could have come from Ikea, and surely that's an ordinary fish aquarium in the corner. The kitchen has a sink and faucet, just like in our age, though some large complex machine dom­inating one counter seems to have replaced the refrigerator, stove, oven and microwave. There is a screen with a digital menu, and though letters and language have changed a bit, surely that option in the lower right is for popcorn…

Onward! The bed is still a bed. The bathroom—we'd rather not know. Interesting that there are still print books here and there—they are behind glass cabinets and up high on shelves. But where is the family?

Ah, here is a spiral staircase, going up the "trunk" of the "tree" to a little sitting room that overlooks the woods. She is standing in the middle of the room wearing some outlandish helmet that covers her eyes, and talking. Presumably she is conversing with a friend in some online world they are both currently inhabiting. The language she speaks is unintelligible, if faintly familiar. It isn't English, but it does have a lot of recog­nizable root words, and "okay" and "bye" seem to have come across the centuries unchanged. Now the woman throws off the helmet and whistles down the winding stair. She seems roughly to be in her forties but it's hard to tell. Something about the eyes and voice suggest older age—a very healthy older age.

After taking a cup of something smelling like tea out of the big machine thing in the kitchen, she has come to a stop beyond a small glass door on the other side of the "tree." Here in a nook formed by two limbs is a delightful patio with a small table. She sits for awhile in quiet contemplation, just as they did in ancient India, or Greece, or (now ancient) St. Paul. After some time, she spots a shy pair of deer approaching the house from the forest. She gabs a handful of seed from a pail and spreads it on a board a few paces out in the underbrush, then withdraws. The deer approach eagerly.

We have traveled twenty-two centuries into the future—to watch deer being fed? We want to demand an explanation, but being from the past, we are like ghosts to her—and so we go inside to snoop. We try the helmet first, imagining it to be a virtual reality device, but it apparently operates based on retinal scan or some other biometric identi­fier. On a shelf in the sitting room, I find some actual print photo albums next to the linens. And down in the kitchen, behind a framed picture of a child's drawing of a dinosaur, you find the motherload: a red-framed screen with the numbers "911" discernible on the bottom, apparently an emergency communications interface. We access what looks like the good ol' internet, and are able to make some queries in our ancient English (which apparently is still a language taught at some uni­versities, as Latin was in our day). You are better at computers, so you organize a translator for whatever this modern-day lan­guage is, while I grab an uncommonly tasty apple from the refrigerated compartment of the big kitchen machine. We begin to figure some things out.

The human population on Earth has dwindled, and people in this era seem more introverted and solitary, living alone or in far-flung villages. They mostly interact in the cyberworld, which has grown elaborately and from which most daily busi­ness takes place. A dweller of the year 4202 decorates their online portal with art and architecture just as one would deco­rate a house. Currency, which seems rather an abstract concept in this age, is mostly used to buy and sell objects and entertain­ments in the cyber world in some large trading market. People don't have "jobs" as much as hold positions in various semi-independent public organizations, where they interact with one another and AI "personages" that tell computers to tell worker machines to do the work that runs civilization. Appar­ently, some few centuries ago there was an AI-orchestrated uprising of some kind, and things looked pretty dark, but the humans prevailed and now live more or less in stasis with nature, machines, and one another. Yawn.

Most people still live cozily on Earth, as it turns out living in space is hard, expensive, and boring. Still there are a few sci­entific outposts elsewhere in the solar system, as evidenced by some photos in the album I'm thumbing through that seem to have been taken on a high school field trip to Mars.

We watch a self-driven delivery truck roll up the gravel road and deposit a cardboard box from a lift with a robotic arm. The woman rushes out and brings it into the tree house. Inside the box, among groceries and other household items, is a little paper bag with a golden "m" imprinted on it. Could it be, after all these years…?

The whirs of a helicopter sound in the distance, and a little boy winds down the stairway from an upper bedroom of the "tree trunk" with a smaller version of the virtual reality helmet on his head. He is walking blind with a smile on his face, much as we are in this time period. His mother gives him some words of half-joking reproval and yanks off the helmet, and he squeals with delight and laughs at her. The two share an ageless moment of tenderness before she rushes him down the narrow gravel road.

In a nearby meadow a self-flying transport is waiting. Looking rather like an amusement park ride, it is painted to resemble an eagle with long outspread wings, but the main propulsion seems to be from a turbine mounted in an under­neath compartment. After mother and son are safely buckled, we just manage to hop in the back seat before it whooshes off with a whispery helicopter sound.

As we rise up into the sky, we see most traces of humanity have been erased. O where are the refineries, railroads, water towers, interstates, garbage dumps, housing developments and strip malls of yesteryear? Only faint pencilmark lines on the terrain suggest human presence in the form of narrow lanes, with more of those delivery trucks crawling along them like ants. As we move over what looks like a vast forest, a whisper of woodsmoke, a disused cemetery, and an overgrown golf course are all that suggest human habitation. Nature is trium­phant.

But now we come to a city, nestled in the bend of a great river. It has the feel of a theme park, with an enormous tree-like structure, wearing a dopey smile, dominating the land­scape. Nearby rise five-story-high statues in the shape of a Great Dane, a black mouse, and what appears to be a giant yel­low sponge. They, too, are smiling, and bear a faint but unmis­takable resemblance to cartoon animals of our time. The "tree" and statues are all in fact buildings, and what little activ­ity we can see in this sparsely-populated metropolis surrounds them. But that dome on the bluffs—surely it's St. Paul's Cathe­dral, standing still after two millennia? And the miniature cas­tle of the Landmark Center can be spotted just east of the dog statue. Yes, we have arrived in St. Paul!

The flying machine touches down just across the bridge­less river, and the mother and son jump out and board a sort of chair lift apparatus that whisks them across the Mississippi to their final destination in the city.

But our own magical machine is telling us that time is up. Goodbye 4202! Au revoir strange monolithic architecture in the shape of cartoon characters! We happily return to our own little noisy, overpopulated, polluted corner of space-time.