Your Unfinished Future

Your walk is over. What follows is only what the rooms noticed.

You leave here leaving several things unfinished on purpose, with more room around you than the corridor promised, and carrying a day that was never yours to keep. You also go out quietly owing more than you agreed to spend, amended in a record you were never shown, and known by something that cannot quite place your name. And you walk on answered by a life you decided not to live and with a line still open behind you.

The Counterfactual Communications Boom keeps your line open. Somewhere a receiver is warm, and nobody in that kitchen has hung up.

The Civic Time Expansion Era expects you back. It is still holding a day with your name on it and no year to put it in.

The doors lock behind you. The exhibits continue without an audience, as they have for years.