Yesterday Can Only Get Better...

[Hu]

[Hu]

Shanghai, 2030

Shanghai never changes. Wherever it is 1930 or 2030, it is immutably Chinese. Its identity, its culture, and its disappointment transcend centuries. All the same, it is my home. The thought of leaving it scares me. Whenever I travel I inevitably spend most of the journey there, and back, pining for the restaurants I eat in and the people I see every day going about their lives.

“Hu? Are you alright?” asked the desk sergeant.

Hu blinked. Not for the first time today she had drifted off into a day dream mid-sentence. Rising at five in the morning did little to help her mood.

“I’m fine,” she replied abruptly. “It’s just, this is all a little frustrating.” Even though she knew Sergeant Honshu like a brother, and that he would never fall for it, she pouted like a schoolgirl.

“I appreciate that. Without a photograph, though, we cannot do anything.” He returned her pout with a concerned smile.

Three days prior, her supposed best friend and business partner decided to shoot her with a 9mm reconditioned pistol. In the criminal underworld, this was known as ‘cessation of trading’. In Hu’s world, it was called being a bastard.

“You know what John looks like, Honshu.” They had been friends for nearly a decade, according to the sergeant. They went way back, right before the mafia reformed and the city started to tumble into chaos. “You know him better than anyone.”

Honshu folded his arms across his chest and reasoned with doubt.

[Hu]

The police station south of Chengdu power station was one of the largest in the northern part of Shanghai. It served two major industrial districts and the first of the dockland residential areas. Crime rates were not as high as the outer suburbs or the shikumen heavy inner city ghettos, but they covered twice the area.

“I will have officers keep an eye out for any sign of him. Officially, though, you are on your own.”

That was as good as Hu was going to get, and she bowed knowing they would likely never find John. If it was easy as driving around a few blocks, she would have tracked him down herself. She bid Honshu good day and padded out of the bustling foyer.

“Aki. Aki, can you hear me?”

Static crackled in Hu’s ear. Her accomplice noisily finished his coffee and opened the comms.

“Yes, yes Hu, I’m here.”

“Good,” she said flatly.

She padded on and down the grand staircase that fronted most of the new and important buildings in the redevelopments of the city. Steel railings and glass panels plastered heavily over the historical city she once called home. It pandered to western ideals to draw in business, but there were inflections of tradition if you looked close enough.

“Did you connect to the Wi-Fi?” She tucked her hair behind her eyes to prevent it from falling in her eyes. She did not need to hide the earpiece from the police anymore.

“Do I ever fail?”

[Hu]

In the four months they had worked together, Lei Fey had been flawless in his work. He was one of the best computer experts in the city and one of the best surveillance experts in the ranks of the FBI. Though Hu would never admit it, she had known Lei’s great grandfather very well. Their friendship was another cruel coincidence of Hu’s time-travel.

“No, Lei. No you do not. ” She smiled and relaxed. “Access anything in the databanks you can find relating to mafia activity in Shanghai. Specifically,” she corrected herself, mind racing, thoughts erratic, “specifically anything in Chengdu in the last month.”

“How detailed?”

“Everything,” he said sternly. “I will go over it when I get back to my apartment.”

They developed an abrupt relationship quickly. Hu contacted Lei when she needed help. Lei never contacted Hu. It suited them both perfectly. Having experienced their arrangement for several cycles of 2030, Hu was adamant Lei harboured an attraction to her beyond the professional. She half wished she had more than three months left before New Year’s Eve and the inevitable backwards shift to 1930.

She took her mobile out of her coat pocket and dialled home to leave an answer message for herself. A reminder, which she had to do all too often these days, to check her cloud storage device when she got in.

“Oh, Hu! Remember to feed the cat.” She signed off, realising it was stupid to leave her name when she was calling herself.

[Hu]

Shanghai, 2130

“Do you think she knows?”

John watched his employer’s face for signs of doubt or traces of a lie. He had learned to look beyond the man’s words, read his body and his history instead of what was presented as ‘truth’.

“At present Hu Tian is still looking for you in Shanghai.”

Deckard was a European business man with exceptional talent for diplomacy and sleight of hand. These skills alone would have put him in a position of power within the Company. When you added money and connections unlike any other in the criminal underworld of mainland China, you became its Managing Director. He was loathsome.

“I meant does she know who I work for.” John knew Deckard knew something. Otherwise, why would he be being sent back to 2030? “It does not make any sense to swat a hornet’s nest if she is unaware.”

“True enough.” Deckard nodded.

The Director’s office was on the tallest floor of the Pang Yong Memorial Building. Built in 2055 to mark the twenty fifth anniversary of the Chengdu disaster, the Company used it to rally Shanghai’s citizens to its cause and its market share in global finance had trebled since. Deckard’s grandfather was the richest man in living history.

“I assume you are happy with the current chronological sequencing?” John glanced around the office, at the minimalist expression of wealth and architectural design, and then back at his employer. He made little attempt to hide his contempt.

“That will be all, Mr McEnroe.”

[Hu]

Shanghai, 2030

Hu stepped into her apartment three hours later. Rush hour traffic was bad in Shanghai, but on weekends it was intolerable. A thirty minute commute took most of your evening of you did not leave early enough to be called a square, or late enough to be called easy.

Coffee with friends was a rare treat all the same. She had few close acquaintances in modern Shanghai, and they were hard enough to pin own without constantly making minor alterations to their lives as a consequence of keeping the keystone events in place. Once, she had made Julia’s grades drop so bad she never went to musical school because she delayed the explosion in Chengdu by an hour.

“My kingdom for a normal life,” she grumbled to herself.

She closed her door and, after her recent experiences with lone gunman, triple locked the door and dead bolted it. With well-practiced movements she dropped her handbag at the foot of her coat stand, hung her coat on the coat stand, and piled her keys, purse, and phone into a carved wooden bowl she had stored in a band deposit box in 1930 – a little reminder of her mother.

“Anderson, mummy’s home!”

She slipped off her shoes and put her trademark cat slippers on. They had stopped meowing as she walked months ago. Her routine was so erratic she did not have time to waste buying new batteries, or, as she glanced at the kitchen, to do the house work. She sighed.

[Hu]

A ginger tom appeared from behind the breakfast bar. Less summoned, more inclined to flatter his ‘owner’, Anderson padded down the steps and across the wooden floorboards. Licking his lips as he walked, Hu ticked off ‘feed the cat’ from her mental checklist and skipped straight to ‘pick up and cuddle’.

“I hope you saved some for me,” she joked as she bent to scoop him up into her arms. A warm, welcome reunion snuggle brought her just enough peace and comfort to focus for a moment. She looked around the room, purring cat tucked under her chin. “Though perhaps I’ll go straight to desert.”

Hu advanced towards the kitchen and expertly produced a half open bottle of wine from the fridge. She poured herself a glass, left the bottle out on the counter, and made her way to her harbour view desk.

“Play answer machine messages,” she said loudly.

She sat at her chair whilst the console on the desk came to life. Voice activation software was a wonder of the modern age Hu would miss sorely if ever she found a way to once again call 1930 her ‘home’. She continued to stroke Anderson, who allowed her the luxury of patting him on the head every few strokes. A more expensive brand of tuna did wonders.

“Message received yesterday, 19:32pm.” Hu cast her mind back to where she had been. A ball. Docklands. Tedious. She listened intently. “Hi Hu, its Dr Menderton. We need to talk. Call me.”

[Hu]

Dr Menderton was the only person besides John that knew about Hu’s unusual gift. After what seemed like decades of isolation, she had decided that a confident, someone in whom she could trust and turn to for support was the only way to make the endless aeons of tedium seem bearable. Dr Menderton’s position as lead quantum physicist at the university was entirely a perk.

“End of messages,” stated the machine. It beeped, then fell silent.

Hu continued to stroke Anderson for a few minutes, silently contemplating what her friend could want. She knew she worked late, working on the hadron project to deliver clean and efficient energy to Neo Shanghai. Or at least, her work would lead to that.

“Oh fuck,” she spat. Anderson hissed as he was unceremoniously cast aside and nearly run over by the castors of the desk chair. Hu crashed against the desk, tapped on the keyboard, and began to breathe heavily as the desktop screen slowly rose out of the desk.

“How did I not see this before?”

She hurried through the boot up protocol and opened the internet browser. In a few clicks she was reading through the recent news reports about the progress of the hadron project and the revitalisation of the docklands around Chengdu power station. In three months from now, the power station would explode, taking most of Chengdu with it.

“No…,” she whispered. Her eyes widened.

She suspected that the event she was trying to stop wasn’t the explosion.

[Hu]

Shanghai, 2130

John McEnroe stepped out into the mid-morning sunshine. The rainy season had only ended a week ago, two weeks later than normal, yet already he wished the heat would go to hell. The city, already rife with pollution and dead rats now smelt so bad its citizens were reluctant to venture outdoors. He put a rebreather over his mouth, to clean the air, and made his way down the grandiose steps that fronted the Yakushima Corporation’s headquarters.

His employer was never entirely forthright with him. All in all, John could understand why, but he wished he wasn’t being lead through hoops. He was as much a part of the plan to alter the temporal chronology of Neo Shanghai as anyone. In fact, he felt like he was the most important piece of the puzzle.

“Call a Taxi from the canal, Ata,” he mumbled. His personal assistant, ever listening in through a comms device hooked over John’s ear made the arrangements.

His boots slapped against the still damp flagstones of the courtyard ahead. It lead to the canal, more a stream of air between the top of two intolerably high buildings than a waterway, and wove in between the corporate employees and beggars. For all Shanghai’s beauty ahead, a horizon of towers and slum pits built into their foundations, some things never changed even after a century.

“Where would you like to go, Mr McEnroe?” Ata enquired.

John stopped at the pick-up point and looked cautiously over the edge.

[Hu]

Below, the building turned into a hundred levels of apartment buildings. Cars crossed in hectic streams between buildings. People below cooked whilst looking out at a road, their lives ignored by the corporate employees that used the canal taxis to travel to and from board rooms. The Yakushima building was central to the Dragon Slums, one of the five regions in Shanghai that people did everything they could to leave.

“I want to go to the Hadron Collider,” John replied. If Hu was going to be anywhere when he returned to 2030, it would be near Dr Menderton’s research. “I think our employer is still underestimating Hu.”

“Yes sir,” Ata confirmed, before cutting the line.

The Hadron Collider once stood in Chengdu. After the explosion, the city’s landscape shifted. The centre of commerce moved from the business district of Old Shanghai to the south fringes. There, the corporations build their new homes atop the apart blocks that once houses the millions of corporate workers and service staff. Yakushima’s takeover of Chinese banking in 2056 was the final nail in the old ways.

John was not sure where Japan ended, and Shanghai began. All over the world, the borders between countries had eroded, and governments were all but powerless to stop services from being privatised aggressively in the aftermath of the global collapse of 2104. John frowned.

“Is there any wonder the Organisation blows it sky high?”

The sun drifted behind a cloud, revealing Shanghai’s true colours. Grey, lifeless, and empty.