Forgotten Foreknowledge

Chapter 2

I emerged from a dream, lying on the bed in my apartment. As was common, Ilia was at my side, but this time she was set to dream for another hour. One week from today, the Blackout would hit. She'd be leaving two days prior, to fulfill an obligation to her other secondary. I met her a few times before she moved to the countryside, far north; we knew we wouldn't make for good friends.

I got out of bed, showered, and put on my clothes, which were already set to look like my work attire. I retrieved a platter of roast beef out of the insulation box and prepared breakfast. The food was still perceptibly the same temperature it was when I put it inside yesterday evening – as in, too cold for Ilia. I put it back in and pressed a button on the insul to reconfigure its contents' temperatures according to her profile. After eating, I put the dirty dishes into the washer. I removed fresh bedsheets from it and once again wondered why it was called a 'washer' when it didn't use any water. I had yet to wonder strongly enough to be bothered to spend a few seconds finding the answer, despite having spent a greater quantity of time over the years considering the question.

I went back to the bedroom, threw the clean sheets over a chair, and looked ponderously at the futureboard on my dresser. It read:

"Board of Phoebus Ibex:

Nothing of note.

4A98CAF7"

I retrieved my mobile from the dresser, and used the futureboard application to change the message body to read "January Summary: Ilia traveling Sunday, February 6th." The header line remained the same, and the footer updated to reflect the new message's signature. I had never needed to verify such a signature and didn't even recall probing the board on this day, although someone else may have. Aside from the recent craziness at work, nothing of note had happened in January. As the first day of the month, it was tradition to update the board to reflect on important happenings in one's life over the prior month. I never needed to probe today's board because I'd known for 20 years what its final message would be, written a week from now: "Still nothing past Blackout." A solution was never found, nor an explanation. No other information I might have wanted to know beforehand, either. I probed my mobile tomorrow morning, and it indicated no new high-priority messages.

Ilia had barely shifted from the position she was in when I arose earlier. I admired her unconscious form for a minute, then probed her board. She hadn't updated it in a day or two, as it still said "At Phoebus' place." She wanted to spend as much time with me as she could before leaving, although perhaps not enough to interrupt her dreams.

I started to think about her being gone, even if only temporarily. What with the Blackout, there was no way of saying what would happen with our relationship afterward. She could stay out there, for all I knew – assuming we survived. The fear of the unknown was a chilling feeling I was still having trouble coping with, despite its increasing incidence. Now more than ever I felt a longing for a primary, although finding one was essentially impossible as of late, no thanks to the Blackout. A short-term or casual relationship could be plausibly found, in the recent past, but finding a primary partner required being able to probe much further into the future, ideally at least a decade. By only looking into the near future, a primary was indistinguishable from a secondary. Whole departments of the Sociological Administration were shuttered due to this fact.

That was hardly the only arm of the government affected by the Blackout, however. I'd have to deal with my own challenges at work soon enough; no probing was needed to see the certainty of that. I continued to prepare for work, filled my pockets with requisite supplies, and coiffed my hair.

Shortly afterward I had left my apartment, and was walking to the nearest tubeway as I set my destination on my mobile. I figured I would go to work first and get my four hours in before anything else. Putting off dealing with the inevitable chaos would only taint what I did beforehand. The fact that chaos itself was even possible was enough to make my head hurt.