"If you're looking for a good time -- and I *think* you are -- I can get you where you need to go!"
The elderly man who had emerged from the shadows and suddenly engaged me in conversation on that street in Old Orleans had thrown me for a loop.
I was supposed to just be passing the time waiting for Mattie 3.0 to finish his shift at the sex-porium. I wasn't supposed to be making eye contact with anyone. And I sure as hell wasn't supposed to be making anyone suspicious about the fact that I didn't belong in 2084 -- that I had only arrived a few weeks prior via a portal that an app on my cell phone had created and that I was being spirited around by the Intransigents, who were busy planning the Fourth Uprising.
So I said nothing in reply -- except he did not respond in kind. Instead, he repeated the first words he had uttered to me.
"I can see it in your eyes that you know the difference between Old and New when it comes to the two competing towns of Orleans."
This time, he continued.
"I was there you know."
As impolite as it was for me to not engage, it would have been even more impolite for me to ask him his age. It didn't stop me, though, from trying to calculate it in my head. If it was currently 2084 -- and it was -- and if the fracking-induced New Madrid Quake that split America in two and flooded so much of flyover land when the Mississippi River became the Bay of Mississippi, including the original New Orleans, had happened in 2023 -- and it had -- then the geriatric gentleman had to be in his late sixties or early seventies.
"If you want to go, I can get you there. I know people. I was there just last week."
That's when it hit me. This was some kind of a test. It had to be. "Old" New Orleans had been under water for decades.
Was he with the PCB -- the Population Control Board -- that was always on the job trying to sniff out illegals? Or could he be another of the IntransiGents, and no one had provided me with the right response to identify myself as one of the revolutionaries?
I couldn't stay silent any longer -- I *had* to say something in reply.
And I'll share that with you on the last day of the month next since this window of time to communicate with you back in your day when the VitalNet updates is soon closing. Even now, I can't risk alerting the authorities to my presence, so I will remain Ilion -- the new name I've given myself in 2084 -- communicating with you via Troy-in-2018's social media, having been brought to the future by t1a7n72.lif, my stored EQ, IQ and SQ files from that era.
Until then, take care of each other ... and be wary of those in charge in your time for the havoc I now know they cause in your immediate future is soon upon you.
