James Mba really wanted to get this over with.

 

Today was his daughter’s birthday so all he wanted to do was step through the telepod and walk into his living room, gift in hand and his baby girl, Ifeoma, racing to lock her tiny arms around him. Her mother would walk in slowly with the cake, the golden candle flames swaying this way and that, and a contagious smile plastered on her lips.

 

But this wasn’t going to happen for another three hours, not until he completed his last interstate tour. He’d made sure to apply for an early leave months ago, knowing how happy his company would have been to deny his application if he hadn’t put in enough work to compensate.

 

So all that literally stood between him and his daughter’s birthday was this ten-seater vehicle that dragged across the road at an unbelievably frustrating pace.

 

In a time when moving through vast distances was as easy as walking through a door, James found it difficult to understand why people still went on these tours in these painstakingly slow vehicles that were vestiges of a long-passed age.

 

They said it was an art form that kept them in touch with their past, these eccentric fellows in their colorful attires and painted faces. Some even went as far as getting under a laser-beam to remove their implants and neural devices, effectively transporting their bodies back to the times before, when this relic locomotive was ubiquitous and humans even saw them as a sort of status symbol. They said it was art, a cultural immersion. James thought it was inane, an unnecessary distraction.

 

He made sure their details had all been logged onto the company’s online manifest – all eight of them – checked that they were all seated and belted, then fired the engine. The groaning sound elicited a cackle from the passengers, and to this James just shook his head.

 

James’ vehicle was the last of the three in the company’s fleet, which meant there were no tourists to stare at them wide-eyed and astonished as the locomotive dragged its way out.

 

His passengers, however, were having a fun time. They asked him questions and laughed and whistled as the vehicle rolled over bumps, decelerated, or gained momentum.

 

Most of the questions were ones he had heard plenty of times; How long did it take you to learn to steer this thing? The company must be paying you well enough, ehn? How many times can it stop before it eventually gets exhausted? How did you feel the first day you drove it?

 

And some questions he hadn’t really heard or considered before, like something a certain Professor Ovoke – as was entered into the manifest – who bore a tired face and kept attempting to light a smoke even though the company warned specifically against such retro-styled cigars, asked, “Do you think the emissions from this contraption really contributed to the so-called climate change that burdened the people of eight decades ago?”

 

At this, James eyed the rear view mirror to see Professor Ovoke who was leaning into the driver side from behind. “Of course I do,” he said calmly. “It’s common knowledge.”

 

“Common knowledge is what they want you to believe,” said Professor Ovoke. “Lies that have been spread so far across space and endured through time they have now become so-called knowledge.”

 

James didn’t know what to say to that, so he kept his eyes on the road. They had driven for thirty minutes now and were making their way onto the bridge head that linked Eastern and Western Nigeria.

 

The passageway, unlike it used to be in pictures from nearly eighty years back, was now narrower. Wooden houses and shacks had now taken up the space. James had to navigate passed children eating in small roadside shops and through a makeshift food market.

 

The passengers, as James predicted, stopped their chattering to observe the scenery, one they had never beheld with naked eyes except through drone images and virtual simulations.

 

Why would they? he thought. Why would they need to walk or travel this far manually when telepods could wink them out of wherever they were and pop them up wherever they wanted to be in less than a minute? Why would anybody care what the physical location two miles from them looked like physically?

 

Since the breakthrough in teleport tech seventy-nine years ago, people stopped traveling in the traditional sense, and automobile companies dumped the land-going locomotives for atomic ones, developing better and better models till you were considered stone age if your telepod spent three minutes assembling you rather than two.

 

Somehow, Professor Ovoke wasn’t interested in the man pissing into the Niger River from the bridge or the woman who followed their vehicle smiling and waving at them from something of a two-legged locomotive of her own, but asked a question that made James almost hit the brakes.

 

“What if I tell you,” he said, “that anytime you step into a telepod, you step out into a universe that didn’t exist a minute before?”

 

James shifted in his seat, eyed the mirror again, and said, “What do you mean?”

 

“This technology they say was the answer to climate change, zero carbon emissions, was there really no price for it? Were our problems just suddenly waved away like that, or hidden away in left-behind worlds?” He put a calloused palm on James’ shoulder, and through the mirror, James saw that his eyes had locked, gaze laser-focused. “You and I, James Mba, are custodians of the past. Don’t throw that away for the futures they promise you.”

 

* * *

Three hours later, when James stepped through the telepod and walked into his living room, gift in hand, he wondered if this Ifeoma rushing to hug him was the same one he'd left earlier in the day.