Having travelled forty years into the future from the year 1976 I am still winding my way through Yaletown. I have already seen the new public library (well, twenty-one years old by 2016, but time is relative, eh?) which resembles a brown mock-up of the ruins of the Roman Coliseum. I have never seen such amazing architecture in this city, especially new (relatively) architecture which has ordinarily never appealed to me. Wandering through the various six levels or so I notice computers, those strange typing machines with window screens everywhere, and people sitting in front of them doing...what? I stop to chat with one of the librarians and I ask her about the computers. I am careful not to mention that I am visiting from forty years in the past as I really don't want to attract the wrong kind of attention.
She says that a lot of them check email. They check what? I ask. Electronic mail, she says. What's that? I ask. She replies that they can type letters on the keyboard of the computer and send them electronically. Where do the letters go, I ask? Anywhere, she says. All over the world? Yes, all over the world. What do they have to pay for this service? It's free, advertisers foot the bill. And anyone can do this? Anyone. And the letters can go anywhere in the world? Europe, Africa, Japan? Mexico, Australia, the Philippines. It must take a couple of days for the letters to arrive. She looks at me as though I am truly daft and replies, that the emails, as she calls them, are received instantaneously. She proceeds to tell me about Skype, a kind of video phone service, and Facebook and Twitter and other things that she calls social media. Then, realizing that she is talking to someone very simple and unaware of things, she describes to me what she calls the internet and that it is like one vast encyclopedia of all the knowledge, information and entertainment in the world and that you can access all of it at the click of a button (I think she called it...a mouse?) I ask her about the little machines that everyone carries on the sidewalks, staring at them, hunched over, like addicts getting a fix, almost walking into streetlights and other pedestrians and almost getting run over by cars. They are phones, she tells me in a very patient voice, and little computers. And you can get the internet on them? Yes you can. And emails? Everything. On a tiny piece of plastic? She stares at me, exasperated. Where have you been the last forty years, she hisses.
I find myself in the West End, where there seem to be more towers than ever. On Davie Street I notice two men walking together holding hands. Then I notice two more. I did overhear someone say that gay marriage has been legal for more than ten years. I am reminded of the intolerant bigots in my church, forty years ago, or yesterday.
On the news there is war in the Middle East, as always, but it's worse and more brutal than ever with bombings and beheadings and Islamic fundamentalists not much different from their Christian counterparts, perhaps more violent, wreaking havoc throughout the civilized world. They want to return to the dark ages and drag the whole world there with them. I hear of refugees from Syria and Iraq, thousands, millions. I hear about a horrible billionaire with chronic bad hair who hates everyone running for the US presidency. I hear of China, no longer strictly communist but still authoritarian and now obscenely wealthy and buying up as much as the Western world as they can get their hands on. There is news about global warming, climate change and the possibility that humanity might not see much of the Twenty-First Century unless they stop using fossil fuels and stop eating red meat. Russia is still sabre-rattling but the Soviet Union no longer exists and its fall twenty-five years ago has provided the world with more than ten new countries. It is all too much to take in and I find my way to the small apartment where my future self is now living.
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