dianepm
Professional Insomniac
I can't believe we're almost done this...
There are two more chapters after this one. It seems like yesterday we started and that was close to 3 years ago. Where the hell does the time go???
This is not true. It's not even real. It could be said that it's all imagination.
On behalf of Alison and myself we'd like to present Chapter 18...
here's the bit from last chapter -
"This is it," Edge said. "If this doesn't work, I don't know what I've done wrong. But it's going to work," he said, determined. If willpower worked on the cupboard, why not on the guidance system?
"We believe in you, Edge," Bono said, touchingly sincere.
Ignoring the Random button, Edge entered the date they'd left Dublin into the digital display, and guessed at the time. As long as they arrived home after they'd left, it wouldn't matter too much if they were a few hours late. With a look at his colleagues, he pressed another button, a green one this time.
Chapter 18 -
The sound system started up as the familiar special effects swirled across the view-screen. It wasn't until the first verse started that Edge recognized one of their own songs: A Sort of Homecoming.
The four of them exchanged a look. Edge squashed a niggling worry and forced himself to remain positive. This was going to work.
The song ended, the special effects faded, and the smoke cleared. They all crowded around the view-screen, and there were whoops and cries of relief as they all saw the back of Edge's familiar, present-day house.
"You did it, Reg!" Bono yelled, clapping the guitarist on the back. He hadn't moved yet, staring at his house.
The first thing Edge had noticed was that his roof had changed colour.
Then he realised that they shouldn't be able to see his house at all. His shed was gone.
Edge checked the instruments again - the date was right. He checked the dimensional indicator, and froze. It was flickering between red and green, apparently undecided.
"What the hell does that mean?" he asked, staring at the little LED. The DUMASS proffered up no explanation.
The celebrations had died away as the others noticed Edge's consternation.
"What's wrong? Aren't we home?" Adam asked.
"I don't know. IT doesn't know," Edge said, pointing at the flickering light. "Something's not right, things are different. My roof used to be grey, but now it's red, and the shed I built is gone." Edge scowled.
"Try it again," Larry suggested. "Maybe a wire got crossed..."
Edge looked at the battery indicator, checked their temporal and spatial co-ordinates again, added a few minutes, and pressed the green button. More smoke and lights, but the same view greeted them when the smoke cleared.
Edge swore, then activated the cloaking device. The house shimmered on the screen as the lemon became effectively invisible.
"What's wrong, Edge?" Bono asked in a small voice.
"I don't know!" Edge said again. "I need to find out. Stay here. Don't touch anything." He made sure no one was nearby, then opened the lemon and slipped outside. It closed behind him, leaving three bewildered members of U2 in an invisible time-traveling lemon.
"What's going on?" Bono said after he was gone. He looked helplessly at Adam and Larry.
"You heard him, he doesn't know," Larry said grimly. That wasn't good news, for a start.
Bono fumbled for his mobile phone, and realised that the battery had gone flat some time during the Paleolithic era. "Do you have a charger?" he asked the other two.
Adam reached into a pocket in his jacket and produced a phone charger.
Larry peered suspiciously at Adam's jacket. "Are you related to that cupboard?" he asked.
"I just like to be prepared," the bassist replied.
Bono found an electrical outlet and plugged the phone in. He dialed Ali's number, holding his breath, and preparing an array of excuses, just in case.
"Hi love, it's me... Your husband. ... Who am I? Who are you?..." His expression close to panic, Bono glanced at his phone's display. "No, I'm sure this is the right number. This is Ali's number... Can you tell her... but this has to be her number! If this is some sort of joke... Look, it's Bono here, okay? ... What?"
Adam and Larry had watched as Bono's face had gone white, then red, then white again.
"Bono... from U2. ... The band, U2. You know, Pride, Where The Streets Have No Name... Beautiful Day...?" Bono looked honestly frightened now. "You're in Dublin, right? ... Okay, Ireland at least. You've never heard of U2? ... And you don't know Ali Hewson?"
They all heard the unknown woman on the other end of the line say "No!" and hang up. Bono blinked at them.
"I don't think she was joking," he said.
Larry grabbed the charger cord from Bono and plugged his own phone in, and hit Ann's number on the speed-dial. He listened for a long moment, then hung up.
"Well?" Bono couldn't read Larry's expression.
"It said it was an invalid number," Larry said. He scowled at his phone. "I can't have got it wrong." But he dialed again, with the same result.
Larry handed the cord to Adam, who shook his head. "If it didn't work for you, it won't for me," he said.
"It's not the cord," Larry said. "Someone else has Ali's number, and no one has Ann's. We need to find someone..." He trailed off.
"Someone who's heard of us?" Adam asked. "Edge went to find out what's wrong, I'm not sure he'd want us to be ringing random people."
"He told us to stay here, and we're staying here," Bono said. "Why can't we try to work out what's going on as well? Just give it a try, Adam."
Adam sighed, accepted the cord from Larry, and pulled out his own phone. He plugged it in, and after a moment's hesitation, rang his parents' number.
"Hello, is Mr or Mrs Clayton at home?"
Pause.
"I'm terribly sorry, I must have called the wrong number. Sorry," Adam said again, and hung up. Then he tried Suzie.
"Hello, Suzie? ... It's Adam. I..."
There was a longer pause, and Bono and Larry could hear a female voice, raised angrily. Then silence.
Adam looked poleaxed.
"Was it Suzie? What did she say?" Bono said, on tenterhooks.
"She said, I had a hell of a nerve ringing her out of the blue, and if I was desperate enough to change my number so she wouldn't recognise it, she'd get a restraining order," Adam said faintly.
"What?" Larry and Bono said in unison.
"At least she'd heard of me," Adam said.
"What's going on?" Bono said, starting to panic.
"Let's just wait for Edge to get back, all right?" Larry sat down, and started to poke through his vegetarian hamper, just for something to do.
--
Upon leaving the lemon, Edge had escaped with some difficulty from his own back yard - or the back yard that should have been his own. The higher walls he'd put in were also not there any more, so climbing them had been easier.
He'd then thought about knocking on his front door and seeing who was in his house, but then decided that if it was yet another version of himself, he didn't want to know.
Edge needed to find out whether this was their own timeline or not, since the DUMASS didn't seem to know. The first thing that came to mind was to find a record shop, and make sure that U2 existed for a start. Unfortunately, living away from an urban centre had a drawback - it would take a long time to walk, and Edge didn't have enough money in his pockets for a taxi. Not that there was much chance a vacant cab would drive past right when he needed one...
Edge peered up and down the road expectantly, hoping that the universe was feeling kindly enough to provide an empty taxi and a generous driver. But it wasn't.
Edge sighed and started walking, with his thumb out.
--
"Thank you so much," Edge told the 60-year-old man who'd given him a lift into town. The man had shown no sign of recognizing Edge, but that didn't necessarily mean anything. The radio in his car had been tuned to a talkback station, and he'd regaled Edge for 10 minutes with his opinions on the Youth of Today and the scourge of Modern Music.
Edge found the nearest record store, went to the "Popular" section and looked up "U". All he could see was UB40. He stared at the rack of CDs, hoping that all U2's albums had simply sold out. But there wasn't even a label for U2, like there was for UB40 and a lot of other popular artists.
"Can I help you, sir?" said a young, female shop assistant.
Edge pulled a smile onto his face. "I hope so," he said. "This is a little embarrassing... Do you have any U2 albums?"
The assistant smiled at him blankly. "You Two? Is that a band? I can check the computer..."
Sweating, Edge tried to convince himself that she was pulling his leg. "It is a band, a local band in fact," he said, following the girl to the counter. "It's the letter 'U' and the number '2'," he went on, seeing her starting to type "You Two" into her computer.
Shooting Edge an odd glance, the girl typed in "U2", and pressed Enter. The computer beeped.
"Sorry sir, we don't have anything by that group. You can try Tower Records, or Borderline, they have more obscure artists," she said helpfully.
Edge swallowed. "Thank you," he said faintly, and left the shop.
Out in the street, he looked around. There were dozens of people walking past, locals shopping, tourists taking photos of the buildings, businesspeople in suits talking on their mobile phones. None of them paid him the slightest bit of attention. He liked Dublin because he could usually walk around without being mobbed, but even then, he attracted glances, people he didn't know would say Hi to him, and sometimes he would be asked for an autograph. But now... now he felt completely anonymous. People were only staring at him because he was staring at them first. He was no more remarkable than anyone else on the street.
It was at once liberating, and unnerving.
Edge wondered how much of his discomfort about his sudden anonymity was due to simply being anonymous, rather than the obvious conclusion that something had gone seriously wrong with the band's history. Was he so used to fame that he felt uncomfortable being normal again? Being just like everyone else?
Edge forced himself to think about the problem at hand. Somehow, U2 didn't exist here, and may never have existed. Something had altered their history, despite their best efforts to avoid this sort of problem.
But how? They hadn't moved from the DUMASS while they'd been in 1976, which would have been the most obvious time for something to divert the band from its course. Could their presence in Washington DC in 1963 have somehow caused U2 to not exist? Or in the Paleolithic era, or even the Cretaceous?
Surely not. Surely, if they had changed anything that far back in time, everything would be different now. The absence of U2 from that record shop was too specific a difference.
Edge was baffled. He needed to learn more, and the best place to do that was from the DUMASS. He shouldn't have left, he realised, and hoped the other three hadn't managed to blow anything up while he was gone.
The guitarist found a bus stop, and a map, and still had to ask someone for help about which bus to get on. Luckily he had enough change in his pocket for a one-way trip to the area he needed.
As the bus traveled through Dublin, Edge stared out the window, trying to work out what had gone wrong. He barely noticed a woman sit beside him.
The bus stopped twice more before she spoke.
"The Edge," she whispered, leaning towards him.
"Hmm?" He looked up distractedly, then realised what she'd said. "You know me?" he asked, looking at the woman sharply.
She looked to be in her 50s, light brown hair greying and hanging to her shoulders. She was dressed ordinarily enough, but she seemed nervous, her light blue eyes betraying some excitement, even while the rest of her face was serious. Edge didn't recognize her.
"Of course I know you!" she said, then took hold of herself again and resumed in a lower voice. "I think I can help you..."
Edge was hopeful that this woman recognized him, but suspicious as well. "What makes you think I need help?"
She glanced around. "You must have noticed that things aren't right," she said. Her accent was English and cultured. "No one knows who you are, your music has disappeared... Your history has changed." She was almost speaking under her breath, trying to be inconspicuous. Edge had to lean close to hear. "Your history is my history... and your future is, too."
"You're from the future?" Edge murmured as casually as he could.
She nodded. He gave the woman another glance - she didn't look as if she was from the future, but then, how would he know?
"And we've somehow messed up our pasts?"
She nodded again, a nervous smile briefly cracking her serious demeanor. "And mine, and this whole timeline. Without your band, none of the time technology happens, not until much later. We take particular care in guarding U2's history."
"But... how...?"
"We shouldn't talk here," she whispered. "Can we go to the DUMASS?" She seemed incongruously excited at the thought. In fact, she was almost acting like a fan...
The only U2 fan on earth, Edge thought. She knew about their predicament, she knew about the DUMASS. He had to believe her.
"All right," he said. The woman beamed, then settled down for the rest of the bus ride.
In due course, they arrived close to the house that wasn't Edge's, and walked the rest of the way. He led the woman to the back wall, and they both scrambled over. Edge noticed the imprints of the lemon's wheels in the lawn, and winced slightly.
The woman gazed at the apparently empty lawn, visibly delighted, and surprised. "I didn't realise you'd completed the cloaking device at this stage," she said, with the air of discovering some fascinating new fact about a much-loved topic.
"I did that before I finished the guidance systems, the last time we stopped," Edge muttered, and pressed the remote control. The lemon's steps appeared outside the cloaking device's refraction field, and Edge proceeded up them with the woman on his heels. It was certainly an odd sensation, walking up the steps with nothing visible at the top, and then passing through the field and suddenly seeing the lemon's interior only a foot away.
"Edge!" Bono cried. "We rang Ali and Ann and Suzie and some of them weren't there and Suzie was going to get a restraining order and the woman who had Ali's number didn't know who I was and -- who's that??"
Bono had stopped short when he noticed the woman accompanying Edge. Adam and Larry stared as well, wondering what could possess Edge to bring a random person into his time machine.
The woman, for her part, was staring around her at the interior of the lemon, a rapt, reverent expression on her face. One hand reached out to touch one of the speakers, but she pulled it back again.
"U2 doesn't exist any more," Edge told his band-mates. "Somehow we've done something to wipe the band out of existence. She..." Edge realised he didn't know the woman's name. "She's from our future, she says she can help."
There are two more chapters after this one. It seems like yesterday we started and that was close to 3 years ago. Where the hell does the time go???
This is not true. It's not even real. It could be said that it's all imagination.
On behalf of Alison and myself we'd like to present Chapter 18...
here's the bit from last chapter -
"This is it," Edge said. "If this doesn't work, I don't know what I've done wrong. But it's going to work," he said, determined. If willpower worked on the cupboard, why not on the guidance system?
"We believe in you, Edge," Bono said, touchingly sincere.
Ignoring the Random button, Edge entered the date they'd left Dublin into the digital display, and guessed at the time. As long as they arrived home after they'd left, it wouldn't matter too much if they were a few hours late. With a look at his colleagues, he pressed another button, a green one this time.
Chapter 18 -
The sound system started up as the familiar special effects swirled across the view-screen. It wasn't until the first verse started that Edge recognized one of their own songs: A Sort of Homecoming.
The four of them exchanged a look. Edge squashed a niggling worry and forced himself to remain positive. This was going to work.
The song ended, the special effects faded, and the smoke cleared. They all crowded around the view-screen, and there were whoops and cries of relief as they all saw the back of Edge's familiar, present-day house.
"You did it, Reg!" Bono yelled, clapping the guitarist on the back. He hadn't moved yet, staring at his house.
The first thing Edge had noticed was that his roof had changed colour.
Then he realised that they shouldn't be able to see his house at all. His shed was gone.
Edge checked the instruments again - the date was right. He checked the dimensional indicator, and froze. It was flickering between red and green, apparently undecided.
"What the hell does that mean?" he asked, staring at the little LED. The DUMASS proffered up no explanation.
The celebrations had died away as the others noticed Edge's consternation.
"What's wrong? Aren't we home?" Adam asked.
"I don't know. IT doesn't know," Edge said, pointing at the flickering light. "Something's not right, things are different. My roof used to be grey, but now it's red, and the shed I built is gone." Edge scowled.
"Try it again," Larry suggested. "Maybe a wire got crossed..."
Edge looked at the battery indicator, checked their temporal and spatial co-ordinates again, added a few minutes, and pressed the green button. More smoke and lights, but the same view greeted them when the smoke cleared.
Edge swore, then activated the cloaking device. The house shimmered on the screen as the lemon became effectively invisible.
"What's wrong, Edge?" Bono asked in a small voice.
"I don't know!" Edge said again. "I need to find out. Stay here. Don't touch anything." He made sure no one was nearby, then opened the lemon and slipped outside. It closed behind him, leaving three bewildered members of U2 in an invisible time-traveling lemon.
"What's going on?" Bono said after he was gone. He looked helplessly at Adam and Larry.
"You heard him, he doesn't know," Larry said grimly. That wasn't good news, for a start.
Bono fumbled for his mobile phone, and realised that the battery had gone flat some time during the Paleolithic era. "Do you have a charger?" he asked the other two.
Adam reached into a pocket in his jacket and produced a phone charger.
Larry peered suspiciously at Adam's jacket. "Are you related to that cupboard?" he asked.
"I just like to be prepared," the bassist replied.
Bono found an electrical outlet and plugged the phone in. He dialed Ali's number, holding his breath, and preparing an array of excuses, just in case.
"Hi love, it's me... Your husband. ... Who am I? Who are you?..." His expression close to panic, Bono glanced at his phone's display. "No, I'm sure this is the right number. This is Ali's number... Can you tell her... but this has to be her number! If this is some sort of joke... Look, it's Bono here, okay? ... What?"
Adam and Larry had watched as Bono's face had gone white, then red, then white again.
"Bono... from U2. ... The band, U2. You know, Pride, Where The Streets Have No Name... Beautiful Day...?" Bono looked honestly frightened now. "You're in Dublin, right? ... Okay, Ireland at least. You've never heard of U2? ... And you don't know Ali Hewson?"
They all heard the unknown woman on the other end of the line say "No!" and hang up. Bono blinked at them.
"I don't think she was joking," he said.
Larry grabbed the charger cord from Bono and plugged his own phone in, and hit Ann's number on the speed-dial. He listened for a long moment, then hung up.
"Well?" Bono couldn't read Larry's expression.
"It said it was an invalid number," Larry said. He scowled at his phone. "I can't have got it wrong." But he dialed again, with the same result.
Larry handed the cord to Adam, who shook his head. "If it didn't work for you, it won't for me," he said.
"It's not the cord," Larry said. "Someone else has Ali's number, and no one has Ann's. We need to find someone..." He trailed off.
"Someone who's heard of us?" Adam asked. "Edge went to find out what's wrong, I'm not sure he'd want us to be ringing random people."
"He told us to stay here, and we're staying here," Bono said. "Why can't we try to work out what's going on as well? Just give it a try, Adam."
Adam sighed, accepted the cord from Larry, and pulled out his own phone. He plugged it in, and after a moment's hesitation, rang his parents' number.
"Hello, is Mr or Mrs Clayton at home?"
Pause.
"I'm terribly sorry, I must have called the wrong number. Sorry," Adam said again, and hung up. Then he tried Suzie.
"Hello, Suzie? ... It's Adam. I..."
There was a longer pause, and Bono and Larry could hear a female voice, raised angrily. Then silence.
Adam looked poleaxed.
"Was it Suzie? What did she say?" Bono said, on tenterhooks.
"She said, I had a hell of a nerve ringing her out of the blue, and if I was desperate enough to change my number so she wouldn't recognise it, she'd get a restraining order," Adam said faintly.
"What?" Larry and Bono said in unison.
"At least she'd heard of me," Adam said.
"What's going on?" Bono said, starting to panic.
"Let's just wait for Edge to get back, all right?" Larry sat down, and started to poke through his vegetarian hamper, just for something to do.
--
Upon leaving the lemon, Edge had escaped with some difficulty from his own back yard - or the back yard that should have been his own. The higher walls he'd put in were also not there any more, so climbing them had been easier.
He'd then thought about knocking on his front door and seeing who was in his house, but then decided that if it was yet another version of himself, he didn't want to know.
Edge needed to find out whether this was their own timeline or not, since the DUMASS didn't seem to know. The first thing that came to mind was to find a record shop, and make sure that U2 existed for a start. Unfortunately, living away from an urban centre had a drawback - it would take a long time to walk, and Edge didn't have enough money in his pockets for a taxi. Not that there was much chance a vacant cab would drive past right when he needed one...
Edge peered up and down the road expectantly, hoping that the universe was feeling kindly enough to provide an empty taxi and a generous driver. But it wasn't.
Edge sighed and started walking, with his thumb out.
--
"Thank you so much," Edge told the 60-year-old man who'd given him a lift into town. The man had shown no sign of recognizing Edge, but that didn't necessarily mean anything. The radio in his car had been tuned to a talkback station, and he'd regaled Edge for 10 minutes with his opinions on the Youth of Today and the scourge of Modern Music.
Edge found the nearest record store, went to the "Popular" section and looked up "U". All he could see was UB40. He stared at the rack of CDs, hoping that all U2's albums had simply sold out. But there wasn't even a label for U2, like there was for UB40 and a lot of other popular artists.
"Can I help you, sir?" said a young, female shop assistant.
Edge pulled a smile onto his face. "I hope so," he said. "This is a little embarrassing... Do you have any U2 albums?"
The assistant smiled at him blankly. "You Two? Is that a band? I can check the computer..."
Sweating, Edge tried to convince himself that she was pulling his leg. "It is a band, a local band in fact," he said, following the girl to the counter. "It's the letter 'U' and the number '2'," he went on, seeing her starting to type "You Two" into her computer.
Shooting Edge an odd glance, the girl typed in "U2", and pressed Enter. The computer beeped.
"Sorry sir, we don't have anything by that group. You can try Tower Records, or Borderline, they have more obscure artists," she said helpfully.
Edge swallowed. "Thank you," he said faintly, and left the shop.
Out in the street, he looked around. There were dozens of people walking past, locals shopping, tourists taking photos of the buildings, businesspeople in suits talking on their mobile phones. None of them paid him the slightest bit of attention. He liked Dublin because he could usually walk around without being mobbed, but even then, he attracted glances, people he didn't know would say Hi to him, and sometimes he would be asked for an autograph. But now... now he felt completely anonymous. People were only staring at him because he was staring at them first. He was no more remarkable than anyone else on the street.
It was at once liberating, and unnerving.
Edge wondered how much of his discomfort about his sudden anonymity was due to simply being anonymous, rather than the obvious conclusion that something had gone seriously wrong with the band's history. Was he so used to fame that he felt uncomfortable being normal again? Being just like everyone else?
Edge forced himself to think about the problem at hand. Somehow, U2 didn't exist here, and may never have existed. Something had altered their history, despite their best efforts to avoid this sort of problem.
But how? They hadn't moved from the DUMASS while they'd been in 1976, which would have been the most obvious time for something to divert the band from its course. Could their presence in Washington DC in 1963 have somehow caused U2 to not exist? Or in the Paleolithic era, or even the Cretaceous?
Surely not. Surely, if they had changed anything that far back in time, everything would be different now. The absence of U2 from that record shop was too specific a difference.
Edge was baffled. He needed to learn more, and the best place to do that was from the DUMASS. He shouldn't have left, he realised, and hoped the other three hadn't managed to blow anything up while he was gone.
The guitarist found a bus stop, and a map, and still had to ask someone for help about which bus to get on. Luckily he had enough change in his pocket for a one-way trip to the area he needed.
As the bus traveled through Dublin, Edge stared out the window, trying to work out what had gone wrong. He barely noticed a woman sit beside him.
The bus stopped twice more before she spoke.
"The Edge," she whispered, leaning towards him.
"Hmm?" He looked up distractedly, then realised what she'd said. "You know me?" he asked, looking at the woman sharply.
She looked to be in her 50s, light brown hair greying and hanging to her shoulders. She was dressed ordinarily enough, but she seemed nervous, her light blue eyes betraying some excitement, even while the rest of her face was serious. Edge didn't recognize her.
"Of course I know you!" she said, then took hold of herself again and resumed in a lower voice. "I think I can help you..."
Edge was hopeful that this woman recognized him, but suspicious as well. "What makes you think I need help?"
She glanced around. "You must have noticed that things aren't right," she said. Her accent was English and cultured. "No one knows who you are, your music has disappeared... Your history has changed." She was almost speaking under her breath, trying to be inconspicuous. Edge had to lean close to hear. "Your history is my history... and your future is, too."
"You're from the future?" Edge murmured as casually as he could.
She nodded. He gave the woman another glance - she didn't look as if she was from the future, but then, how would he know?
"And we've somehow messed up our pasts?"
She nodded again, a nervous smile briefly cracking her serious demeanor. "And mine, and this whole timeline. Without your band, none of the time technology happens, not until much later. We take particular care in guarding U2's history."
"But... how...?"
"We shouldn't talk here," she whispered. "Can we go to the DUMASS?" She seemed incongruously excited at the thought. In fact, she was almost acting like a fan...
The only U2 fan on earth, Edge thought. She knew about their predicament, she knew about the DUMASS. He had to believe her.
"All right," he said. The woman beamed, then settled down for the rest of the bus ride.
In due course, they arrived close to the house that wasn't Edge's, and walked the rest of the way. He led the woman to the back wall, and they both scrambled over. Edge noticed the imprints of the lemon's wheels in the lawn, and winced slightly.
The woman gazed at the apparently empty lawn, visibly delighted, and surprised. "I didn't realise you'd completed the cloaking device at this stage," she said, with the air of discovering some fascinating new fact about a much-loved topic.
"I did that before I finished the guidance systems, the last time we stopped," Edge muttered, and pressed the remote control. The lemon's steps appeared outside the cloaking device's refraction field, and Edge proceeded up them with the woman on his heels. It was certainly an odd sensation, walking up the steps with nothing visible at the top, and then passing through the field and suddenly seeing the lemon's interior only a foot away.
"Edge!" Bono cried. "We rang Ali and Ann and Suzie and some of them weren't there and Suzie was going to get a restraining order and the woman who had Ali's number didn't know who I was and -- who's that??"
Bono had stopped short when he noticed the woman accompanying Edge. Adam and Larry stared as well, wondering what could possess Edge to bring a random person into his time machine.
The woman, for her part, was staring around her at the interior of the lemon, a rapt, reverent expression on her face. One hand reached out to touch one of the speakers, but she pulled it back again.
"U2 doesn't exist any more," Edge told his band-mates. "Somehow we've done something to wipe the band out of existence. She..." Edge realised he didn't know the woman's name. "She's from our future, she says she can help."
