Before the world ends, Miri’s family saves up enough money to escape to 2004.

2004: a safe haven. The year lilts off the tongue, like a promise.

Miri and Lise spend their last evening together in their favorite spot, sitting on the top of the holotower at the edge of town, where they can see all the abandoned buildings spread fallow in front of them. The imminent blinking out of civilization.

They’re eleven years old now. Their bodies are just beginning to change, getting stretched thin, like putty. Lise’s is changing faster than Miri’s, which makes sense, because Lise has always been the braver of the two of them, the first to charge headlong into something new. Lise has bird-thin legs, pimples on her chin, a training bra she showed Miri in secret at recess. Now Lise will never be able to see Miri catch up.

“I don’t think I’ll like living in 1958,” says Lise. Her words congeal around the gum in her mouth, which she always consumes two sticks at a time so she can blow a bigger bubble.

“At least you can go to Beatles concerts,” Miri points out.

“That’s supposed to make me feel better? I’m not even a Beatles fan.”

“You probably will be, after you take the memory mods.”

Lise pantomimes sticking her fingers down her throat.

Miri begged her parents to move to 1958 with Lise, but the temporal relocation protocols won’t allow it, because moving two families to the same destination would increase the risk of discovery. All the refugees escaping the end of the world need to be scattered throughout the past, and Lise’s family—relatively white-passing, relatively straight-passing—is better-suited for the 1950s than Miri’s.

Miri picks at the side of her thumb. A nervous habit she’s had since she was a kid.

Lise puts her hand over Miri’s. “If you keep doing that, you’ll get a hangnail. Here, let me help.”

Carefully, gently, Lise peels the strip of skin off the side of Miri’s thumb.

It stings. Blood wells up in the cut. Miri puts her thumb to her mouth and sucks it clean.

Lise says, “Are you scared?”

Miri isn’t sure how to answer that. Scared seems like the wrong word. Fear requires uncertainty: not knowing when a monster will jump out onscreen, or wondering how much a medical procedure will hurt. Traveling to the past will bring more certainty, not less. What she really feels is a sense of loss so strange and all-consuming that she doesn’t know how to put it into words.

But explaining that feels harder than just saying she’s scared, so she says, “Yeah, a little.”

“Me too,” says Lise. She’s silent for a moment. Her chin takes on a stubborn tilt, the way it does when she’s on the cusp of declaring some big harebrained idea.

Miri waits.

“Okay, hear me out,” says Lise. “What if we don’t take the memory mods tomorrow?”

“We can’t. They watch everyone take it.”

“They don’t check as carefully with kids. Put the pill under your tongue. Like this.” Lise sticks out her tongue and shows her, tucking her wad of gum into the wet space behind her bottom teeth. “That way, we can remember where we really come from, and then we can find each other.”

“But then how will we know how to live in our new eras? How will we pretend right, if we don’t have our new memories?”

“We can research it ourselves,” Lise says impatiently. “The holos have so much stuff about what life was like back then.”

“Still,” Miri says doubtfully. “It’s against the rules.” The whole point, for time travel refugees, is to assimilate. To forget where they came from and live the rest of their lives in peace.

“So? If we don’t take the memory mods, I can look for you, and you can look for me. We’ll be in this together.”

“But you’ll have to wait so long for me to even get there.” The distance between them, from 1958 to 2004, means the rest of their lives will take place almost fifty years apart. If Miri ever sees Lise again, they’ll be different ages, from different generations.

“I’ll wait for you,” Lise says.

Against her better judgment, Miri says, “Promise?”

“Promise.”

They shake on it. Miri’s bleeding thumb leaves a streak against Lise’s palm. Lise blows a gum bubble, her biggest yet, and Miri is comforted by the familiar rhythm of it. The slow expansion, the sudden pop.

The next day, when she’s buckled into the machine with her parents, Miri slips the pill under her tongue, just the way Lise showed her. She spits it out into her palm and holds onto it, tight, as the machine whirs her away into the dark.

2004 turns out to be a strange and foreign place. Miri and her parents live in a two-story house in a small town called Moreno, in Southern California. It’s a suburb full of palm trees and strip malls. Neighborhoods brimming with big houses and rich teenagers. The sky here is a bright, bewildering blue. Her eyes hurt when she looks up.

The past, as it turns out, is full of more sensory overload than her own time. There are cars everywhere, and no neural odor-cancellation to drown out the stink from their blasts of exhaust.

The memory mod pill is still clenched in her palm when Miri arrives. She thinks about throwing it away, but it’s the last thing she has left that proves that her whole life up until now was real. There’s no other evidence that she’s a refugee from the future, except in her own head.

In the end, she hides the pill away in a drawer in her new bedroom in Moreno, which her parents have furnished with a pink-painted desk for her to use. The pill isn’t something she’ll ever need. It’s just a memento. A souvenir.

The temporal relocation committee has already taken all the necessary measures to set up for their life here: fake birth certificates, reference letters, vaccination records. Baba has a job in a small tech startup that will be huge in another decade or two, and Mama will be doing admin work at the local library.

Her first Monday in 2004, Miri takes the school bus to her new middle school, which is full of blond girls who chatter about things she doesn’t understand. Maybe the memory mod pill would’ve allowed Miri to understand them better, but she suspects even that wouldn’t have helped. Her difference from them feels more innate than that, like a trait of her own rather than a symptom of where she comes from. Even back in the future, she and Lise never quite fit in with the popular kids.

The whole morning, all the blond girls are talking about something Miri doesn’t understand. It takes her until the start of the lunch break to realize they’re obsessed with some new MTV music video. Miri can’t imagine devoting so much attention to something that will ultimately matter so little. By the time she’s born, no one will remember cable TV, let alone the programs that were played on it.

Looking at the contents of her cafeteria tray makes Miri feel queasy. Today’s school lunch is a foil-wrapped hamburger, a packet of soggy fries, and water in a Styrofoam cup with a plastic straw. Everyone here uses and discards single-use items, day after day, without a second thought.

She tries to find a place to sit, but she can’t figure out the social dynamics here. Anthropologists from her own time might have been fascinated by the chance to study this. But time travel technology is too dangerous to be anything but a one-way trip.

“Where are you from?” asks a girl with highlights in her hair, which make her blond hair look even blonder.

“I’m from a small town in northern Canada,” Miri says. The cover story is close enough to Moreno to explain her perfect English, but far enough to explain her cultural differences.

The girl gives her a skeptical look. “Right, but like, where are you actually from?”

For a second Miri thinks she’s blown her cover, before she remembers this question comes with the territory. Here, she looks different from most of the other kids in her class, and that means something to them, something that people from her heritage-blurred era can only understand in theory. She can feel the words they’re trying to assign to her crowding in around her like a factory-cut mold, squeezing her into a specific shape: an ethnic label, a gender label, eventually a sexual orientation label. All more restrictive words than it will be in her own era, though of course, her era will have bigger problems to deal with.

I’m an immigrant from the future, she thinks. I already know how the world will end. I don’t belong here.

The other kids seem to sense that there’s something off about her, some secret she will never tell them.

She doesn’t care that the kids here don’t want her. She doesn’t want them, either. None of them are Lise. None of them have any idea what’s in store for the world.

The next day, during lunch, she skips the cafeteria entirely and goes to the library instead.

She breathes in the scent of ink on paper. She picks up books and flips through them without even digesting the words, just to marvel at how tactile the act of reading can be.

She types Lise’s name into the slow, clunky search engine that’s available on the school computers. She calculates Lise’s birth year. If Lise ended up being eleven in 1958, she would have been born in 1947. She types that in too, and then, nervously, clicks Enter.

Nothing comes up. There are Lises, and there are Halcotts, but none of them are her Lise, the one who’s out there waiting for her.

She tries every iteration of Lise’s name. Elizabeth Arina Halcott. Lise Ari Halcott. She tries Lise’s mom and dad, and even Lise’s grandparents, though they probably didn’t plan that far ahead when they moved back in time. Still nothing. Maybe most people who lived back then aren’t on the internet now.

Miri stares at the computer screen, bewildered, trying to quash the dread curling in the pit of her stomach.

It’ll have to be the other way around, then. She’ll wait for Lise to find her. Any day now, she could show up at the classroom door and there’d be an announcement over the loudspeaker, and then away Miri could go back to her best friend, the person she belongs with. Sure, it’ll be strange to be different ages, but that’s nothing they can’t surmount.

Lise will find her. She promised.

Normal people watch the news. Baba does every night. He’s cheerful. His mind has adapted to the hole in its past so quickly it makes Miri a little sad.

Miri has no interest in watching the world unfold. It’s a book for which she’s already skimmed the last page. She already knows what’s going to happen to humanity, and it’s nothing pretty.

Instead, she spends her free time poring over history books about the 1950s to see what Lise’s life would have been like at age eleven. When she closes her eyes, she sees poodle skirts and pastel suburbs. She doodles them in her notebooks in class. Draws Lise’s face, so she won’t forget it. Every iteration of her drawing is slightly wrong—in one Lise’s eyes are too close together, in another her mouth is tilted the wrong way—but Miri doesn’t have any photos for reference, so this is the closest she can get.

She posts the drawings online, on all the early internet forums for people who like to draw, hoping Lise will find them. A bright, desperate advertisement that no one else will ever understand.

At the parent-teacher conference at the end of the year, her teacher mentions the doodles to Miri’s parents. “She’s smart, but she has an overactive imagination,” the teacher writes in her report card. “She spends too much time alone in class. I worry that she’s not adjusting socially.”

Afterwards, Mama and Baba give Miri worried looks the whole car ride home.

“There was that nice girl at school you did that art project with,” Mama says, her hands tight on the steering wheel. “Remember her? You said she likes to paint, too. Do you want to invite her over for a playdate?”

Miri slumps down in her seat. “She’s boring. All the girls are. All they care about is MTV and celebrities and stuff.”

“Someone else, then,” says Baba. “I know the move has been hard on you, but we’re not going back to Canada. You have to try to fit in.”

Miri searches her parents’ faces. They really remember nothing. They’re truly happy here, in 2005, in a place where the people are boring and the world is materialistic and they don’t even have AI assistants yet. It’s so frustrating to see them trying to help her, when they’ve chosen to forget all the things that are important.

“Try, for what? None of this matters anyway,” says Miri. “Do you ever wonder what the world will be like in a hundred years? If any of this will be worth it then?”

She can tell she’s said the wrong thing. Silence in the car, now, sharp enough to cut.

Miri looks up into the rearview mirror and realizes, to her horror, that Mama’s crying.

She feels a splinter of guilt, deep in her back of her throat.

She didn’t really mean it, that nothing matters. Her parents matter. Lise matters. But months have passed, and Lise hasn’t made any attempt to find her.

And maybe she never will. Anything could have happened in the past five decades. Lise could’ve gotten married and changed her last name. She could’ve gotten hurt in an accident. Miri’s checked the obituaries, but there weren’t any that she could find.

Or maybe Lise has betrayed her. Maybe she actually took the memory mod pill, even though they both promised they wouldn’t, and now the name Miri means nothing to her. Maybe the pill gave her artificial memories of a new best friend from whatever place her family thinks they emigrated from. A false Miri, braver and funner and more carefree than the real.

She thinks about her own memory mod pill, which she is now keeping safe in a small lockbox Mama and Baba gave her for her birthday, the kind where kids here keep all their precious keepsakes: postcards and ticket stubs and rare coins. Maybe she should take the pill. Maybe it’s not worth waiting for Lise anymore.

But she can’t quite bring herself to do it. Just a little longer, she tells herself. She’ll try to know the truth and also fit in. Like being her own false Miri.

For Mama’s sake, she tries.

She feeds her Tamagotchi and watches it grow.

She sings along to Justin Timberlake and Rihanna and Maroon 5.

She goes to the Moreno shopping mall with her classmates and tries on the trendy outfits they pick out for her, no matter how strange they look: cropped hoodies and striped tees and studded belts.

And after a year or two, it’s not so hard, pretending. It’s shocking how easy it comes to her. Before she knows it, she’s started to dream in the language of her new home. She grows up, against her best intentions, in angry fits and spurts.

There are days when everything that happened before they moved feels like a dream. It exists nowhere except in her head, and that’s far from a stable place. Maybe her teachers were right, and she does just have a hyperactive imagination. Maybe she’s just a girl from Canada, trying to justify her sense of futility. Trying to make herself special.

For her ninth-grade homecoming dance, she straightens her hair with a flatiron. She puts butterfly clips in her hair, pink and purple and gold.

Lise would like this. Lise always liked butterflies, even though most of them had gone extinct by the time she was born. Miri remembers one Halloween when they got dressed up in matching butterfly wings and climbed up to the top of the holotower, on the side that faced the river. Up there, moon-drenched, it felt like they were the only two people in the world. Lise leapt off first into the water, to prove to Miri that it was safe. When she climbed back up, wings waterlogged, hair slicked to her face and neck, Miri asked Lise to push her, to give her that extra boost of bravery. “Fly,” whispered Lise, and Miri flew.

College is a fresh start in a new state.

Her first night there, she knows no one. Music throbs from the open windows. Laughter fountains up from the courtyard below. Someone shouts something, maybe a name.

She’s taken to wearing the memory mod pill in a locket around her neck. It’s still her only proof that she’s really from the future, that she didn’t just dream up the whole thing. If not for the locket, she could go days at a time without even thinking about it.

She works on her sketches. The freshman year art intensives are competitive to get into, but she wants to apply, even though Mama’s threatened to stop sending her financial support if Miri chooses to major in art.

One of her roommates opens the door without knocking, snapping her out of her sketching. “Are you coming to the party tonight?”

She frowns. “What party?”

“A bunch of the other freshmen are going. To mingle and mix. It’ll be fun.”

There’s almost nothing that sounds less appealing to Miri than mingling and mixing, which makes it sound like she’s an ingredient in some kind of fruit punch. Still, Miri dresses up, blending in the way she learned how to in middle school—all of them matching in backless tops and strappy heels, glittery eyeshadow finger-painted across their lids.

In the glimpses of their reflections she catches in the dormitory windows, she looks indistinguishable from the pack. By the time they arrive at the party, she feels almost like one of them. Someone puts a shot glass in her hand, and she downs it, time-drunk, buoyed by approving cheers.

Sometimes Miri hates how adaptable she is. Wishes, more than anything, that she could preserve herself the way she was the day she and Lise made their promises, angry and loyal and remembering.

But on the dance floor full of other freshmen, all of them crescendoing toward their own bright personal futures, she closes her eyes, and pretends she belongs here. And for a moment, she believes it.

Her senior spring, a girl with red hair and pretty eyes hands her a pamphlet.

Miri doesn’t want the pamphlet. She’s applied to seventeen post-grad jobs and only heard back from four, even though she majored in the more practical field of product design rather than fine art. Still, she’s been jumping to reach the first rung of the corporate ladder, like a toddler trying to learn gymnastics, and this has consumed so much of her energy lately that it’s been hard to pay attention to anything else.

“What’s this for?” she says, more curtly than she normally would.

“We’re organizing a protest for climate action,” says the girl. “Next Sunday, on the green. Will you join us?”

Miri thinks of the trash heaps that fill the oceans in her world, the fields where nothing grows anymore. All the animals that will have become endpoints on their evolutionary trees: giant pandas and tufted songbirds and soft-shelled clams. Within two hundred years, the fight will have failed. No one will remember this red-haired girl and her disposable pamphlets.

“There’s no use,” Miri says. “There’s nothing we can do to change where the world’s going.”

“Even just showing up makes a difference,” the girl says.

“Have you seen the world lately?” says Miri. “Where are you getting your sense of optimism?”

The girl flashes her a disarming smile. “Maybe from the same bargain sale where you get your sense of impending doom.”

That surprises Miri into a laugh.

“Lots of people care about this,” says the girl. “Come with us, you’ll see.”

On Sunday, Miri finds herself at the protest, holding a freshly painted posterboard sign while the girl yells into a loudspeaker.

This girl, as it turns out, cares about so many things. She cares about social justice and climate justice, women’s rights and trans rights, migrant rights and prison abolition. Hope blazes from her like a tiny sun in her chest. It’s bewildering and infuriating in equal measures.

Miri accidentally forgets her scarf at the protest, and the girl grabs it for her and delivers it to her the next week. In thanks, Miri takes her out for dinner. Once, and then twice, and then eventually just as a matter of course. Something in Miri’s stomach curls in delight every time they meet.

The girl is a person Miri would sketch in curves: the curve of her smile, her stomach, the wave of her thick brown hair.

The girl eats her bubble gum one nibble at a time, instead of popping two sticks into her mouth at once. Like she wants to keep it for as long as she can, savor it.

The girl is nothing like Lise.

At the third protest they go to together, Miri kisses her. Softly at first, then desperately. Like nothing else matters.

They decide to move in together during an election year. A trajectory-changing one. Miri remembers this one from the history books. She already knows how this will end.

She votes anyway. Makes art anyway. Goes on apartment tours anyway, classic brownstones on tree-lined streets, industrial lofts converted into one-bedrooms. Signs petitions to fight the increasing raids that are targeting people whose migrations were far more dangerous than her own.

The world is changing now in all the ways she’s always known would start to happen. A world that’s on fire and drowning, at the same time. A world of extremes. Every year, more wildfires, more floods. More island nations sinking. More food riots. More desperate refugees and senseless deportations.

Such a fragile world. After this: the growing waves of climate refugees trying to escape equatorial countries. The food shortages. The supply chain failures. All the things she knew as a child.

And everything that will happen has already happened. It doesn’t matter what two young women in New York choose to do.

But maybe it’s the trying that matters, even when part of her already knows how it’s going to end.

They spend Christmas with her partner’s family upstate, waiting for their new mortgage to get approved, and at the end of their trip, when they’re about to board their train back to New York, Miri’s mind is so full of plans and hopes that it takes her a second to realize that an old woman standing on the train station platform is staring at her.

Miri smiles politely, the way she does at strangers who are lost or confused. The woman is short, slightly stooped over. She has hooded grey eyes, wrinkle-lined. A wedding band on her left hand, which is clutching a black roller bag.

The woman’s mouth quirks into a wry smile, and then it clicks, and Miri stops walking. She recognizes her like a face from a dream. Her chin has that stubborn tilt she had when they stood on that holotower edge as children, daring each other to jump first.

Her partner is already on the train with their bags. “Miri?” she says.

The conductor shouts for everyone to get on.

“Miri, hurry.”

Miri holds Lise’s gaze. There are so many things she’s wanted to ask her. Why didn’t you look for me? Or, Why did you ask me to make that promise? Or just, How have you been? Things she’s been wondering for as long as she can remember.

Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore, where they’re from, or where their world is headed. Only that they’re here, now.

Miri follows her partner onto the train. The doors shut behind her, and the floor jolts and rumbles as she takes her seat.

Her partner looks at her, then out the window at Lise, who is already receding into the distance. “Did you know her?”

Miri shakes her head. “No. She just looked familiar, that’s all.”

“Let’s go home,” says Rebecca, and Miri takes her hand.

 

(Editors’ Note: “Immigrant Girl from the End of the World” is read by Erika Ensign on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 70B.)

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