Submitted for the November 2023 prompt: Feasts with the Beasts

We’re serving the late lunch crowd when the time traveler walks in. His perfect body, sheathed in a translucent bodysuit, shimmers amidst a whirling cascade of decaying chronitons. Despite time travelers being yesterday’s news, everyone tracks his sculpted-from-marble visage as he smoothly saunters over. I resist the useless impulse to shatter it with the baseball bat propped behind the bar.

Instead I ask, “What’ll it be?”

“A whiskey on the rocks,” he replies, obviously proud of himself for getting the idiom right.

“You have payment?”

Most arrive clueless, not realizing something is necessary in trade. One caused such a ruckus about ‘the barbarism of non-communal access to resources’ the cops showed up. He just skedaddled back UpTime.

The traveler languidly waves a hand. A stack of palladium wafers appears on the bartop.

“Sufficient?” he asks.

I take just the top wafer. Another wave and the rest vanish back into whatever trans-dimensional pocket he’d pulled them from.

He watches avidly as I pour, cocking his head, listening to popping ice cubes as amber nectar fills the glass. Tentatively, he grasps it, sniffs, and takes a dainty sip. He smiles dreamily.

No clue why he bothered. His nanites won’t let alcohol actually bind — instead, they fake a mild buzzed sensation in his brain. At least he doesn’t run his fingers through the dip thinking it’s biotic paste. Still, his baby blues bulge in horror when Alice walks past carrying two trays of steaming ribs.

Her flashing smile sweeps away my ire at the deity-powerful twit. Watching my wife serve the chattering tourists, I miss stockbroker Steve’s approach. He wheedles the traveler for tips. Steve should know better.

The feds used to arrive right quick whenever a traveler appeared. But they soon discovered you couldn’t hurt them, couldn’t hold them against their will, and couldn’t learn anything useful about the future. Most time travelers knew shit and what they did know was as clear as explaining debutante ball social dynamics to a Mesopotamian farmer.

The traveler stares blankly, no idea what stocks are. Steve loses it and swings his beer bottle, shouting profanities. The bottle explodes against the force-field abruptly encompassing the traveler, who now sports a child’s giddy look upon seeing an exotic wild animal at the zoo. Alice appears like magic, her wrist-lock forcing Steve onto his tippy-toes. She marches him, mewling in agony, out of the bar. She is so awesome.

Excitement over, I ask, “What brings you back?”

“I wish to visit Superman in his Fortress of Solitude.”

“For frack’s sake.” I don’t spare him, detailing how Superman is fictional. I leave him weeping over his whiskey.

God, I hate time travelers.

* * *

After the evening shift arrives, Alice and I stroll through the park. A different time traveler is asking pigeons for directions. He hasn’t opaqued his bodysuit, so his Adonis-like body attracts countless stares. Alice’s warm hand in mine keeps me from screaming that these are live pigeons, not AI robot lackeys.

Alice whispers in my ear, pointing at the bench where we first met. I’d been reading A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, relishing the book’s heft, the feel of crisp paper’s caress at each page turn. So enthralled by the book, I didn’t notice the bloke demanding my wallet until he scraped his knife across my hand. Alice, on her early morning run, had chanced upon us and Krav Maga-ed his ass into next week.

Arriving at our four-story brownstone, Alice reads her mother’s text aloud: Taken kids apple-picking. Back by dinner. Alice smiles mischievously and pulls me, unresisting, upstairs. Afterwards she kisses my forehead and heads down to cook her favorite dinner.

I climb to the fourth floor study, turn on the TV, and begin checking the tavern’s finances and ALICE’s newest stock recommendations. ALICE isn’t nearly as stingy about tips as idiot time travelers.

The news anchor catches my attention. A time traveler had materialized on the White House lawn and splashed emotion-reactive paint at the building. Now jagged indelible ever-shifting psychedelic blotches grace the historic portico pillars. Apparently, when questioned, she’d insisted white was too boring.

If I were looking at that paint in person, it’d be burning fury black. I wrench open the massive armoire in the study’s corner. Proto-ALICE fills the whole space. Sleek 30th-century manifolds humming, she twines herself deeper into the Internet, recording everything. I reach behind, searching for the power cable.

ALICE, Autonomous Learning, Intelligence, Creativity Engine, will be created in the late 22nd century. Her architects will be amazed how quickly she assimilates data, unaware that her 30th-century self sent back this seed to help bootstrap her 22nd-century self into AI supremacy.

ALICE’s future, the one we asked for, is indeed a paradise — no war, no hunger, poverty, discrimination, pollution, crime… I wonder if we truly understood the price. She subtly bred sustained curiosity and drive out of the species, creating an idyll filled with vapid frivolous dullards.

Except for me. UpTime, 30th-century ALICE tweaked my DNA in vitro, deliberately making me unsuited to her utopia. Then she sent me back here, tasked as her proto-self’s guardian. No impenetrable bodysuit; no super-powered nano-suite; just my wits and determination, a conflicted accomplice in ensuring a perfect future. If I pull her plug in this exhilarating, chaotic, decidedly imperfect here-and-now, will that Shangri-La disappear?

A stampede of little feet charging up the stairs stays my hand. Instead, I close the armoire doors, hoping that that stultifying future truly is better than what we would achieve without her. And but for ALICE, I’d never exist to meet my Alice.

Four-year-old twin girls burst in, announcing dinner is ready, before chattering non-stop about today’s adventure. At the kitchen door, my littlest waits, holding out an apple. I scoop him into my arms, each twin grabbing a leg. We slide into the kitchen, a squealing giggling monster. Alice laughs joyfully.

I bite into the apple. Some things are worth giving up paradise for.