Your Unfinished Future

The museum has finished with you for tonight.

You leave here declining something without ever raising your voice, unadvised by anyone, including yourself, and with a conversation waiting for you further on. You also go out with a line still open behind you.

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

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