The Man Who Saved the World - by Christian Bone
The woman from the future was in the queue at Macdonald’s.
I was behind the till, serving the endless stream of people that converges on the place at lunchtime, like vultures to a dead carcass in the desert. She was just another in a very long line, at first.
‘I’m from the future,’ she said.
‘Did you want fries with that?’ I paused and looked up.
There was something different about her. It wasn’t her clothes, just a Greenpeace T-shirt and jeans, but her hair; light blond with blue and green highlights. While that wasn’t odd in itself, the colours seemed to drift through her hair at will, like a lava lamp.
‘Did you hear me? I said I’ve travelled back in time,’ she continued.
‘Do you actually want to order anything?’ I said. ‘If not, you’ll have to move along.’
She scrunched her face. ‘It’s a matter of life or death. Not just on a personal level but for the entire planet. This is the most important conversation you’ll ever have.’
I said nothing.
She sighed. ‘Fine, I’ll have a burger.’
***
I slapped the hastily-made burger on her table in the corner of the restaurant. She indicated the seat opposite. I checked that my bosses weren’t watching and sat down.
She unwrapped the burger with the nails of her thumb and forefinger until it rolled onto the table. ‘You people are strange. ‘Hey, I’m from the 21st century and I love eating gristle.’’
‘Then why did you buy it?’ I asked.
‘It was the only way you would listen.’
‘If this is some weird routine to promote vegetarianism, I have tried I just love bacon-’
‘It’s not,’ she said, dissecting the burger with a plastic spoon. ‘It’s about the future.’
‘Well, you are a time traveller.’ I decided to humour her until the reason behind this strange prank was revealed. ‘Though you don’t look much like Arnie.’
The Woman frowned. ‘I have no idea what that means but it sounded like mockery. And I didn’t come all this way to be laughed at.’
She leant over the table, inches from my face. Her skin was olive and her eyes were whirlpools of brown. She smiled sweetly and took my hand in both of hers.
Then she head-butted me.
It was this morning. A dreary, Monday morning and I was on my way to work. Ears plugged with headphones, ignoring the gazes and calls of tramps and Big Issue sellers as I went through the city. Maybe tomorrow, I thought. I say that every day.
I headed towards work, preparing myself for another day of flipping burgers and trying to find the energy to raise a smile. Today might be the day, though. The day when something happens.
‘What the hell was that?’ I shouted, clutching my head and backing away. Everyone must have heard but no one reacted. They were ignoring it, as people do in the face of something out of the ordinary.
‘Proof.’ My attacker was apparently unfazed.
‘Of what? That you’re a lunatic?’
She sat calm, flicking back her highlights. ‘That I can travel in time.’
I massaged my temples. That vision, it had all been so real. ‘Maybe I’m the lunatic.’
The Woman looked at me like I was a particularly sweet if pathetic dog. ‘It’s not your fault. Everyone from this time is.’
My head was pounding harder than a pneumatic drill but somehow it also felt clearer. That hadn’t just been a vision, or a memory. For that moment, I really was back in time.
I guess I believed her.
‘So… what’s it like in the future?’
She waved a hand. ‘You should be more interested in the present.’
‘I know about the present, though. We - I - am living in it.’
‘But you don’t like it.’
I shrugged. ‘What can you do?’
‘You used to think differently,’ she said, her eyes fixed on mine. ‘You thought you could save the world.’
‘How did…?’ I began and then shook my head. ‘Everyone does. Then you realise you’re just one of billions. That you’re no one.’
‘And you were right.’
‘Thanks.’
‘I meant before.’ She placed a scrap of lettuce in her mouth. ‘I am from the future. And you are the Man Who Saves the World.’
My mouth fell open, before I pulled myself together. I had a thousand questions but didn’t know which to ask first. ‘From what?’
‘Itself, of course,’ she said, pulling a face as she chewed. ‘What else?’
‘But why…?’
‘’…Did I travel to this time?’’ She wiped her tongue with a napkin. ‘Because this is the turning point. Or it could be.’
‘Why? What happens?’
‘The story enters into legend,’ she said, looking up, not at me but at the rest of the restaurant. ‘The parents of the future tell their children fairy tales about this time. The kids love them, they’re so scary.’
‘What do they say?’
‘That, once upon a time, everyone lived in boxes and towers, packed together, like sheep in a pen. Or at least, the rich did. They sucked the Earth dry and pumped out poison to choke her. They were greedy and self-centred.’
I sat listening, transfixed, lost in her words and the swirling blue and green in her hair, like a screensaver. I realised that she didn’t smell of perfume but somewhat Earthy instead. It was odd but not unpleasant.
‘Several times the Earth warned her children to stop. She told them that if they continued like this she could not carry them on her back much longer. Some heard and tried to act but many stuck their fingers in their ears. Others were simply too absorbed in their little box-worlds to notice. For those who listened, they realised this was the final warning.’
‘Did it turn out OK?’
She held up her hand. ‘I’ll give you two guesses.’
‘It did?’
‘Guess again.’
The world changed around me then, metaphorically this time. The smell of the fast food, the glare of the garishly-coloured walls, even the distant drone of the vehicles grinding past outside… suddenly it all made me feel uncomfortable.
‘They’re right, or will be right. Whatever,’ I said, looking at my hands. ‘We’ve known about global warming and stuff for ages. Yet nothing-’
The Woman then did something unexpected. She laughed. A short, hearty laugh before her face fell again. ‘They say that, too. When you tried to make things better you always looked at the small problems rather than the bigger picture.’
I sat up. ‘Smaller problems?’
‘’Global warming and stuff’ is not the cause, just the side effect. The problem runs far deeper.’
I thought hard and wondered what I had been missing. What else should we be worried about? Surely the zombie apocalypse didn’t really happen?
‘It’s to do with how you see the world. If the human race acted differently then the problems with climate and resources would go in a heartbeat. If you lot would only look up from your screens now and then, you might just see where you’re heading.’
She fell silent and neither of us said anything for several minutes, a sea of a thousand thoughts swirling around my mind.
I looked again at my surroundings. As well as the food, the colours and the cars, I now saw the people. Shovelling fries or pinned to their phones, texting and playing Angry Birds, blind to the world around them.
‘And that’s where you come in, of course.’ She turned to me, her eyes full of conviction. The green and blue hues had drifted into her fringe. ‘You have to wake the world up. That’s how you save it.’
I scoffed. ‘But how?’
‘You’ll see. ‘Cause I’m about to show you the future,’ she said, with a breeziness at odds with the conversation. ‘Then you decide what happens next. Save the world, or continue being a slave to it.’
She stood up and left the table with the mutilated burger. I hopped up after her.
‘You’re not going to head-butt me again, are you?’
‘Only if you really irritate me,’ she said as we approached the revolving door. ‘This sort of travel requires something a bit more technical.’
She held out a near-bronze hand. It was a moment before I took it. I couldn’t shift the feeling that I was shaking hands with a shark. If they had hands.
‘So… back to the future,’ I said. ‘Do you still watch that in the-’
My stomach lurched into my throat, as it felt like my insides were being scrambled. As we passed through the door it span at the speed of a race car, taking us with it. Somehow we weren’t flung out or pulverised by the door’s blades.
After what must have been a handful of moments, but felt like an hour, the revolving door swung still and I walked out into the world of the future.
We stood on a sloping rooftop, St Paul’s going by the view, high above the city. Or at least it would have been if not for the water mere feet below.
Neither new nor gleaming, the tips of the towers of London had crusted over with verdigris, looking like enormous buoys as they jutted out from the bloated sea. Apart from the view, and more than the stifling humidity, what hit me most was the silence. This was London but without people, without traffic, without any life at all. Not even birdsong. Just the gentle sound of the waves, caressing the structures it had claimed.
The Woman stood patiently beside me. The sea wind had blown her highlights to the ends of her hair.
‘How did that fairy tale end?’
‘They say that the Earth wept. She wept so hard the sea burst its banks. In other parts of the world, without the Earth’s protection, the Sun got its revenge for the polluting of the sky and turned the land into desert.’
‘And what really happened?’
She shrugged. ‘Society didn’t change until it had no choice. Until it simply ceased to be. In the end, that was the human race. A race towards the end of all things.’
The Woman looked up as the gunmetal grey clouds parted and a shiver of dim sunlight broke through. It was so perfectly timed, it was as if she had made it happen.
‘You’re not just any old woman from the future, are you?’ I asked.
‘Ah, the penny drops. I knew this Greenpeace T-shirt was a bit much.’ She smiled at me, a strange sight when sitting atop the flooded relics of society.
‘Then who, or what, are you?’
‘I am the All-mother, the Green Woman,’ she said. ‘I am the Earth and you are my children.’ She moved to the very edge of the roof, watching over the increasingly moody sea.
‘When you were still swimming in the primordial soup I nudged you over to the shallow end and out onto the land. When you were learning to walk, I wiped out the dinosaurs to clear the path for you. I kept you safe during the ages Stone to Iron. I taught you how to talk to girls and was there when you had the chickenpox. Yet, after all that, you repaid me by ravaging my lands, sucking me dry and ignoring my pleas for help.’
‘Kids, eh?’ I said, hoping I sounded stronger than I felt. I wiped my eyes and joined her on the edge. ‘You said I would save the world but look!’
I pointed out to the colourless sun beginning to set on the horizon. ‘How can I save all this? I’m just one person. I’m no one.’
‘I never said you had to do it alone. And I’m not talking about the ‘rescuing some nuns from a burning building’ kind of save. If you live a life you would be proud of and act like the person you would like to be, then you would’ve done your bit. If everyone did that, then the world really would be saved.’
She put a hand on my back and guided me towards the façade of the fast food place, incongruous atop of the turquoise tip of St Paul’s. The bright yellow ‘M’ was as out of place in this desolate world as an iPhone in the Middle Ages.
I started to enter as she waved at me. ‘Tell your brothers and sisters Mum says hi.’
I stepped inside the revolving door.
***
When the revolving doors spat me out, I was outside again but in the right time and place. On a dingy, grey street on a wet weekday afternoon. People walked blind, glued to their phones, while cars and lorries roared past. There wasn’t a sign of nature in sight. But at least it was all still here.
Without another look, I walked away from the outlet, taking off my bright red cap and lobbing it in a nearby bin. I passed the tramp I had seen earlier and gave him a note. I would have bought a Big Issue too but the man wasn’t there. I’ll get him tomorrow.
Because tomorrow looked different now. I was going to do my bit to change the future. I was going to save the world.
Back to blog