Further Into The Future!

Chapter 7

It's hard to describe the feeling of being a stranger of time. It's the feeling that old people start to get a sense of in the decade or two before they die, I think, but not to a degree even near that which I felt, walking down a crowded street in Chicago 186 years after I was born there.

It's the feeling that everything is unfamiliar to you. You feel completely helpless and alone, not only because you don't know anyone or have any money, but because even the most insignificant things are puzzling to you. Even the slightest social interaction exposes a vast gap in your knowledge that astonishes the other person involved. For example, I didn't know how to control the wall functions at first, and people were appalled. In the future, even the simplest baby's toy uses technology you've never dreamed of.

This feeling possessed my body like an angry spirit when I stepped out onto the street with the Time Travelers.

The same buildings lined the street as did the night before, but against the clear blue sky behind them and lit by the powerful summer sun they were infinitely more vibrant. The 21st-century concept of a colorful building might seem garish to you, as it originally did to me, but when an entire city is composed of these festive structures the effect is beautiful.

I remember one skyscraper specifically, because it was right across the street from the hospital. It was the tallest of the buildings in that neighborhood by at least a dozen floors. It was rose-colored and for most of its length it was rectangular, but near the top it widened slightly, so that the floor area at the top of the building was greater than at the bottom.

Adding to the stimulation I received from these structures was the advertisements on them. I had watched the image on the wall in my hospital room for a long time – too long, actually – and I noticed the moving advertisement on the aluminum bus the night before. Until that moment, however, I had no idea what could be accomplished with unprojected videos playing on the wall.

Every square foot of the skyscrapers' glass exteriors was covered with moving advertisements. It was as if a thousand different movies were being projected on each building. The bottom ten floors of the rose-colored skyscraper across from me were occupied by an advertisement for Coca-Cola consisting of a bottle next to the classic logo, bubbles constantly fizzing up. Every minute or so foam would spray from the top of the bottle, and a different slogan would scroll by, such as "Thirst is to be quenched," and "Why be thirsty when you can have a Coke?"

On the next twenty floors or so was a movie of a child running across a field, laughing and kicking a soccer ball. Before long he fell and started crying. His knee was scraped and he held it as he rocked back and forth. His mother walked into the picture, applied some lotion to his knee and kissed it; he sniffled and smiled at her. "Ruticil: For Cuts and Bruises" rolled slowly across the screen, and the film repeated.

There were similar advertisements all the way up the building, becoming simpler and larger the closer to the roof they were.

I broke free from the band and walked across the parking lot and the street to get closer to these advertisements. A purple car stopped dutifully as I passed by.

"Wait, Professor, it's this way," Susan yelled at me, pointing further down the sidewalk. When she saw that I didn't respond she followed me and gestured for the others to join her. She and Jack half-jogged across the street to catch up with me while Dan went at his usual lumbering pace.

I ran up to the rose-colored skyscraper and touched my palm to the glass. A child and his mother turned their heads to watch me do this as they walked by. The child said something to his mother, who leaned down and answered him.

A woman's head appeared about a foot to the left of where I placed my palm, staring straight ahead, grinning like she was the happiest woman in the world. It was life-size and in such great detail I had to keep reminding myself that her head wasn't really floating there.

"Would you like to learn more about Coca-Cola products?" she asked merrily. A word bubble with these words popped up next to her head.

"Er, no thank you," I said.

"Would you like to receive Coca-Cola coupons and sample products in the mail?" she asked just as joyfully. Her teeth were so big and straight and white that she looked like a cartoon.

"Sign up now and you could win tickets to the Rock America concert!"

A life-size video of a man playing a wildly colored guitar and squealing into a microphone appeared beside her. Accompanying this was some of the most unpleasant noise I've ever heard. I later learned that this was coming from his guitar.

How they bastardized the guitar to make those horrible sounds is beyond my knowledge, and I like it there. Imagine a man ripping apart rusted metal, and screaming as it slices his hand and his own blood squirts onto his face. That is what rock and roll, the music of the future, sounds like.

Susan caught up to me and stood at my side, amused.

"Is this what you play?" I asked, lifting my hands off my ears so I could hear her response.

"Well, sort of, not quite like this. Much better."

She leaned her head to the wall and listened for a few seconds. "Actually, worse than this. I wonder who this is."

"How do these work?" I asked her. I swept my hand across all the advertisements.

She shrugged. "I don't know, some technology I don't understand. Something about biotechnology. Or maybe it's nanotechnology."

"It's fascinating," I said. She laughed.

The rock singer disappeared and his horrible music mercifully stopped. Now the wall showed an old black and white photograph of a beat-up house, and then an old photograph of a man with a thin mustache and his hair parted down the middle. It zoomed through a series of Coca-Cola logos, with the years of their use below them while an American flag waved in the background. Then it settled on an image of the old man in the red military uniform I recognized from the newspaper in the hospital, holding a bottle and smiling at the camera, with the new circular American flag at his side.

"Coca-Cola, then and now," said the text below this man.

"Would you like to learn more about our product?" the woman yelled again before resetting to the broad smile. Susan hit a button with an X that I didn't see before, below the woman, and the woman said "Thank you!" before her head shrank into nothing.

Jack jogged to us. He leaned on Susan's shoulder and panted exaggeratedly.

"What are you doing? Let's get some food," he said.

"I'm just admiring these advertisements," I said.

He stopped panting and joined us in watching the advertisement, which was repeating the historical video.

"Yeah, they're really amazing, our... advertisements," he said.