The Oldest Bird and the Younger Fool

I returned to 2016 on Midway Atoll, which was an inconvenient place to discover that I had wasted ten years. There was no glamorous street to run through, no old girlfriend waiting around a corner and no shop where I could immediately buy the future. There was a temporary work assignment, a room I remembered and a bird outside whose business was considerably more important to her than mine. I was twenty-six again, with four thousand six hundred dollars in savings and sand in a shoe I had once thrown away in another decade.

My name was Dan. In 2026 I had been a media contractor who could make other people’s ideas attractive enough to sell while keeping his own in a folder called later. I had fallen asleep after losing another promised promotion. Now my old phone said January 2016, and the notebook on the table contained practical field notes instead of unpaid invoices. I had returned during an authorized temporary assignment. Midway was not a town of permanent civilian neighbors waiting for me to open a business. My second chance would begin here and earn its money elsewhere.

Mia was twenty-eight, a biologist on the rotation, and the first person to notice that I was behaving as though ordinary objects had become historic artifacts. She asked why I was staring at a kettle. I said I had missed it. Mia examined the kettle, then me, and suggested I drink something before becoming sentimental about plumbing. I had liked her in my first life without finding the courage to ask her to dinner after we returned. The sight of her alive inside a decision I had not yet missed made the room seem warmer than the tea.

I remembered one small piece of the coming season: Wisdom’s chick would hatch on 1 February. The famous albatross belonged to the real life of the refuge, not to a script I could improve by becoming important. I followed the same instructions as everyone else, kept clear of disturbance and did the work I had been assigned. When the news of the hatch reached us, my impossible situation became harder to dismiss as exhaustion. The future had answered a question without requiring me to touch it. Mia watched my expression and asked whether I had secretly wagered against a bird.

Tess laughed at that. She was twenty-nine, worked in logistics and could make a man feel very young by asking whether he had checked the actual weight of the thing he intended to carry. She caught me drawing an absurd little bird in the margin of a packing note and asked what it did. I said it retrieved things people lost, usually after they had become too confident to keep holding them. Tess studied the drawing, smiled and said it appeared to have found its first suitable human. She kept the sketch when I offered it and asked whether I had any other talents I was hiding beneath equipment labels.

Joan coordinated part of the rotation. At thirty-two she had no patience for a worker who forgot the ordinary job because he had discovered an extraordinary ambition. I did not forget. I completed the work, respected what belonged to the project and used my own free notes for a separate original idea. Joan found me drawing again after supper. She sat beside me, asked how the puzzle worked and beat my first solution in a way I had not anticipated. Then she said a man who could enjoy being corrected might be worth seeing over a meal that did not arrive on the work schedule.

Kim made photographs for an agreed project. She was twenty-six, funny and delighted to find me trying to record an idea before I lost the nerve to have it. We talked only where and when the work allowed. After the rotation, on the mainland, she showed me a picture of myself listening to Mia and asked whether I knew my face had stopped looking so defensive in it. I told her I had been having a better month. Kim invited me to dinner, put the camera away and said she wanted to find out whether the improvement survived without an audience.

The original game idea was small enough to sound foolish: a wind puzzle in which a stubborn seabird returned lost ordinary objects to people who had underestimated the world outside their doors. It would use fictional characters and original art, not claim to be an official refuge product. I remembered the appetite for short games that were easy to begin and surprisingly difficult to put down. I did not remember this game because it had never existed. For the first time, knowing the future had given me permission to make something rather than copy a destination.

Mia listened to the idea over dinner after we were back from the assignment. She wore blue, her hair loose instead of arranged for work, and seemed amused by how carefully I was trying to make an evening look casual. She asked whether I wanted advice about birds or wanted her to notice the man telling the story. I admitted the second motive. Mia reached across the table, adjusted the collar I had been worrying at and said the man might begin by relaxing. When she smiled, I forgot every useful thing I had planned to say.