A Visitor to the Future - 50 - A Glimpse of the Past
We sat there for a time in silence, the mass of people walking around the streets below out of view and forgotten. Apart from the drone-craft that left the docks frequently, and the ships which lazily moved about the harbour, there was very little in the way of activity. In Anchor there were always airships, rockets, and of course the space elevator clamouring for your attention the moment that you looked out of the window or stepped out of the door of a building. In comparison, from our lofty vantage point IJmuiden seemed almost sleepy.
"I've been meaning to ask," I said, "Is there a particular reason that the people here don't use local flight drones, like those that take you between the platforms in Anchor?"
Robin smirked, "It is partially because of tradition. But IJmuiden actually has something a lot more fit for purpose - elevators. Each building has two sets of elevators. The first are the typical pedestrian elevators that we've been using. The second connects to the underground tunnels, which is where the Consortium's production facilities for IJmuiden are. If you want a new piece of furniture for your apartment, you have only to let the Consortium know and it'll send it up, no flying drones required."
"That makes a great deal of sense," said Tungsten, "I was wondering how drones accessed the various floors of the buildings."
"Oh yes, no building-based landing pads here, like in the more modern cities," added Robin, "As for raw materials, IJmuiden is relatively self-sufficient. Power is beamed here by the Consortium, of course, but almost all food here is grown locally. As for the rest, recycling ensures that only a small amount of raw materials are needed every day - there's a rocket that lands in the water a few times a week. I don't think one is due today."
"That's a bit of an odd choice," said Sarkona, "Growing your own food here, I mean. Apart from space vessels almost everywhere uses the space hydroponics facilities."
"That is tradition too - the original vertical living approach required the production of as much food locally as possible, to cut down on transportation costs and create demand for the hydroponics industry," said Robin, "Which was making significant developments but was still what we could call immature today."
"I just find it amazing," I said, "That even though IJmuiden is holding onto tradition, it is holding onto a tradition that was invented several hundred years after my time. I guess some part of me was hoping that things would be unchanged - that I'd see some more places that I recognised. I really shouldn't have let myself believe that."
"Oh!" said Sarkona, "Hold that thought. I made you a present." They took the small satchel they had taken from our drone-craft and placed it on the floor - pulling out what appeared to be a curved white visor-like shape with an accompanying strap of luxurious-looking fabric.
"Is that a virtual reality headset?" said Robin, "It looks like something from a museum!"
"Yes," said Sarkona, "Almost everyone uses neural links these days for virtual and augmented reality, but I realised that you might not want to have one installed. So I did some research and found out that these were quite popular before the technology was perfected. I made one or two adjustments for comfort. Here, try it on."
I placed the visor over my eyes and pulled the strap over my head. It seemed to tighten a little and then loosen, until the fit was perfectly comfortable. I was completely blindfolded by it - I couldn't see a thing.
"Alright," said Sarkona's voice to my left, "Now, please don't be alarmed - I'm told that the fidelity of these things is quite realistic."
Suddenly, I was floating in the sky, and couldn't help but jump a little. I'd been lucky enough to try out a VR headset a few months before I'd been frozen, and that had been an impressive experience. This one absolutely blew that one out of the park. The image in front of me was perfectly realistic, and I felt a slight touch of dizziness as my brain struggled to reconcile the feeling of the comfortable chair I was sitting in and the fact that I was two-hundred and fifty metres off a distant place below.
But it wasn't just any place. I stood up to have a better look, and wobbled slightly as I did so.
"Careful!" said Sarkona, reaching out an arm to support me.
There was no mistaking it. The shape, the roads, the buildings - it was a rough image I'd seen on Google Maps hundreds of times. It was IJmuiden - mostly as I remembered it.
"Our friend is looking down, Sarkona," came Tungsten's voice from where he sat, "Might I suggest calibrating the height?"
"Oh! That must have been quite a shock," said Sarkona, "Here, let me just- there we go."
There was a brief fade to black, and then suddenly I was stood on the ground - in the middle of a random street in IJmuiden, but much more familiar. Instead of towering skyscrapers and busy pedestrians, there was a sleepy street full of regular-looking two-storey houses, with picturesque little front gardens. I could see two people frozen in time, one mid-walk with shopping in paper bags, and one appearing to clean a ground floor window. They seemed perfectly realistic, if stationary.
"Now," said Sarkona, "This is a one-to-one map of IJmuiden to your current location, more or less minus a few hundred metres of course - thanks Tungsten. The closest street map version to your time that survived to today was from about 2046, so sorry if it's not quite as you remember it. The rest is all the software tidying up the images to make them fully three-dimensional. How does it look?"
Words escaped me, so I briefly pulled down the headset and gave Sarkona a quick hug of gratitude.
"I think that means it's good!" said Robin, laughing.
I moved away from the chairs into an open space and put the headset back on. The past returned to me, and I spent a few minutes carefully looking at the various familiar features - cars, lamp-posts, even wheelie bins. There was a nostalgic sense of relief to it all. Finally, I removed the headset.
"Sarkona," I said, "Thank you so much - I can't say what this means."
They smiled, "We don't have too much from your own time left, but I thought it'd be nice for you to be able to at least see something familiar, even if it's not quite from the decade you remember it. Even though a lot has changed here, I thought it'd be nice for you to remember that this still is your home, if you want it to be."
Robin stood and walked up to me. I saw his aged face inspecting my features, and thought that he was about to dispense a piece of elderly wisdom. Instead, he simply said, "May I have a turn?" and held out a hand for the headset, which I happily passed to him.