Oh Hello Again

[iamnotpolaris]

This isn't Emily's dorm room.
This is Milliways! Awesome.
"Hi, Bar," she says cheerfully. "Looks like I'm the first one in at the moment, huh?" she says, looking around at the otherwise-empty room.

Comments

[iamnotpolaris]

"Nice to meet you too! I don't meet many people from that far in the future around here, mostly it's the early twenty-first century."

[middlingalong]

"Well, Barrayar is less futuristic than most of the galaxy, we were cut off by a collapsed wormhole for a few centuries and have in living memory gone from inventing gunpowder to acquiring a space fleet."

[iamnotpolaris]

"Wow, that sucks. My world has rapidly increased in technological level lately, but that's because you can buy advanced stuff from the bar and take it home so your father's science friend can reverse-engineer it."

[middlingalong]

"Sounds like a nice gig. Anything I should be bringing home to 2999 to freak out ImpSec and excite scientists all over the imperium?"

[iamnotpolaris]

"I wouldn't know. I've been sticking to stuff closer to my own year, and after the twenty-first century there seem to be all kinds of technological trees. You could ask Bar, she communicates with napkins."

[middlingalong]

"But I have no napkins who can communicate with her."

Har har.

"Ah, I see. Any suggestions?"

Most of the things that would make any sense relative to your technological background and represent meaningful improvements would be too large, alive, or weaponized for me to sell. Finding other interesting options might be possible but would likely be time-consuming.

"Thank you anyway."

[iamnotpolaris]

"I mostly brought home medical technology. It's excellent, Papa can walk again."

[middlingalong]

"That's great! Modern medicine. Heh, Bar, can you come up with an anaesthetic that m'cousin won't complain about?"

Not without knowing more about his medical properties.

"The one day I don't bring his entire medical file with me to the grocery store," says Ivan, snapping his fingers.

[iamnotpolaris]

"Oh, what's wrong with your cousin?"

[middlingalong]

"His parents were poisoned while his mother was pregnant with him. Very brittle bones. He's getting them replaced in batches, but he has bizarre allergies so this is more complicated than it should be."

[iamnotpolaris]

"Oh gosh, that's awful. Good thing you've got the technology to replace them, we still can't quite do that."

[middlingalong]

"It's a miserable enough process that he might wish he had an excuse to skip it, goodness knows he puts it off long enough, but yes."

[iamnotpolaris]

"So were you really going to a grocery store or was that just part of the line?"

[middlingalong]

"Oh, I was going to the grocery store. Out of groats and cheese and wine and -" He pulls a long skinny object with glass ends out of his pocket, wiggles it, looks at the resulting floating words, and finishes, "Bacon."

[iamnotpolaris]

"Bar sells things other than drinks. Bar sells things you can't normally get, this drink is made of a fruit that doesn't exist in my universe," she raises her glass and takes a sip, smiling at him over the rim.

[middlingalong]

"Huh, cool." He sits next to her at the bar. "I hear you're good at drink recommendations?"

He gets a pink thing with a little umbrella in it. Try this.

He sips. "Ooh."

[iamnotpolaris]

"What's that?"

[middlingalong]

"No idea!"

Mink Pixer, says Bar.

"That is a terrible portmanteau which should be ashamed of itself," says Ivan, and he takes another sip. "So apart from importing medical technology what do you do with yourself all day back in the nineteen hundreds?"

[iamnotpolaris]

"Oh, I'm a senior in college right now. Pre-med. And you?"

[middlingalong]

"Imperial Service. Lieutenant, Ops. I'm in the last couple months of an assignment to the embassy on Earth, actually. It's in London, I think London is old enough that you have it already."

[iamnotpolaris]

"...Yes, we have London. London is already old when I'm from."

[middlingalong]

"It's a nice city! Have you been?"

[iamnotpolaris]

"Yeah, my father got his doctorate at Oxford and they asked him to talk about a thing sometimes and I usually get to come along."

[middlingalong]

"Oxford! Still exists," says Ivan, holding up one index finger authoritatively. "M'cousin's wife kept going there for lectures on things I can't pronounce. She was on the planet for unrelated reasons, gone now."

[iamnotpolaris]

"That's great. It's a great place. Very beautiful. What kind of lectures?"