Further Into The Future!

Chapter 3

A knock on the door awoke me the next morning. "I have your breakfast," a voice said.

A nurse opened the door a crack and peeked in before she fully swung it open. She was beautiful and very young. I estimated her age to be about nineteen.

"Good morning," she said absentmindedly.

"Good morning," I replied, the words stretched out as I yawned.

"How did you sleep?" She drew a circle on the wall with her finger and the orb hanging from the ceiling brightened the room. I shielded my eyes from the light with my arm. I never quite became accustomed to the bright interior lighting of the future.

"I slept well," I said, "but I would have slept better if that horrible movie weren't playing all night."

She turned to the video on the wall. "Why did you leave this on all night?" she asked, pointing her finger at it.

"I don't know how to turn it off."

I learned how to lower the volume from seeing Laura do it, but I couldn't figure out how to turn it off, despite trying about every logical verbal command I could think of.

On the wall now Jimmy Redd, the eponymous hero of the movie, dove into a river to save a man who drove off a bridge. I knew from before that after the rescue he would arrest the saved man for drunk driving.

The nurse looked at me suspiciously. It is considered very strange in the future to not know the verbal commands to operate a wall video.

"Disengage," she said. The image compressed into a dot and then disappeared. The wall was spotlessly white again.

"'Disengage'? Why couldn't it just be 'off'?"

She ignored my question, turning her back to me and walking to the cupboard, where she pulled out a small plastic bottle and a plate.

I could hear pills rattling in the bottle as she fiddled around at the counter. When she turned around she was holding the plate with two pills on it, one red and one blue. She put it on my lap.

I rolled the pills around on the plate with my finger, then lifted them up and examined them.

"Is this my breakfast?" I asked.

She gave the look of exasperation that teens use so skillfully, rolling her eyes, slouching her shoulders and sighing. She paused and seemed to consider scolding me for what she thought was intentionally annoying behavior.

"That's your medicine," she said. "The red one is a stress pill, and the blue one is for your weak heart we detected."

"I have a weak heart?"

"Your breakfast is out here," she said, fetching a cloth-covered cart from outside the door. Curls of steam rose from a covered plate on top. My stomach rumbled, sending vibrations through my body all the way to my fingers, and soon it accompanied this with a very audible growl.

She set the tray on top of my legs and pushed the cart back into the hallway, closing the door behind her without a word.

I pulled the tray up my body to my chest and lifted off the cover. The plate was divided into three sections. In one were scrambled eggs, obviously scooped out because they were molded into a half-sphere. In another were strips of bacon and in the third was a plastic container that said "BLUE BISON CEREAL" on the lid. Under the name was a cartoon bison smiling and giving a thumbs-up. There was also a cup of orange juice on the tray.