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The finished version of this has already been posted on FA, but I’m still posting it in pieces here too.

“Yeah,” he said. “Your future selves figured it’d be best for me to meet you here. This is the first time, right?”

Ralph nodded.

“C’mon, get out of the car—I have a lot to tell you, now that you’re officially time travellers.”

Ralph’s old room in his parents’ house was barren now, save for the bed and a couple of chairs. This time of day, Ralph’s ma and the Chief would probably still be out on the town.

“Now, why aren’t we meeting ourselves?” I said.

“Information management. You wanted to give yourself a huge infodump, but you couldn’t figure out how much to tell. You kept putting it off because you always had more to tell, till a certain point you started thinking it might be too much to tell. So you asked me to do it; I don’t know enough to spoil you guys.”

“So what are you going to tell us?”

“Just a few things about the nature of time, where it differs from the movies. Also to give you some new movies, and some other things.”

“A better computer?”

“A couple, actually—one for each of you.” He reached into the satchel he had with him and pulled out a pair of small palm-sized tablets.

“What’s this?” I said, noticing the Apple logo on the back. “Did they start making Newtons again?”

“It’s a cell phone. We worked out that with a microphone the enhancer can handle speech as well. So you won’t have to mess with typing.”

“That’s a relief,” Ralph said.

“You can get Internet on them, too,” Steve said. “There’s all sorts of things; I’ll show you later.”

“Expensive?” I said.

“Nah, on me. I sell these things now. Some abilities, the enhancer can send them over the phone network. Magic on demand—there’s a huge market for it.”

“Anybody can buy one of these things?” Ralph said.

“Today they can. In the past it’ll be less functional. In the future it’ll be obsolete, like this old monster.” He picked up the laptop we’d brought with us and set it in his satchel.

“You’ve been to the future?” I said.

“No,” he said, “But I know the singularity is coming, and that makes everything obsolete.”

“The singularity?”

“The point beyond which our exponential progress makes it impossible to imagine what civilization will be like. More or less. You can read up on it, if you like,” he said, pointing to the phones. “About just about everything, really. Did they have Wikipedia in 2000?”

“What-apedia?”

“Massive encyclopedia, constantly updated by anyone who feels like it. Like the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide, but more volatile.”

“What, really?” I said. “And flying cars, too?”

“No… those became much more unlikely after 9/11.”

“What?”

He shook his head. “Look it up.”