Art Pact 132

Let's just say my first day on the job didn't go particularly well. For starters I was late - it turns out that only one train in every three actually stops at the bump station, so the train I'd intended to catch just went straight on through the blacked-out area. I had to get off at the next stop and wait for a train that was going back and would stop. As it turned out, that wasn't too long - if it had been more than ten minutes I might have just given the whole thing up as a bad lot and gone home to the tender ministrations of bed and tea. That might have been preferable. At any rate, I got off the train with perhaps five minutes to spare. If I'd ever been allowed off at the bump station before I would certainly have made it to the shop on time, but naturally the whole thing was a complete shock to me.

I was expecting some kind of doorway or gate or tunnel or something, but what I hadn't realised was that when the train goes into the tunnel to the north of the bump station (or the south, if you're coming the way I was supposed to have come from) you're already in the past. The whole train goes through the little bump, and even if you don't have a permit to disembark you've still gone back to your ancestors time, back to the good old thirties. You can smell it the minute the outer doors open, the strong scent of carbon in the air, the raw fuzz of low-level ozone in your nostrils. Anyway, that's where my troubles really began. Some blue was outside the door, stopping everyone who came out and demanding papers, and when I got to the front of the queue he must have recognised that this was only my first time through the bump.

"New, are we?" he asked. I had not idea what I was supposed to say to that - I didn't know whether he was new himself, so I could hardly answer. I suppose I should have paid more attention to the orientation pamphlets, but I just stood there like a robot flapping my jaw without a sound until finally he pointed to the papers I had in my hand and then to the reader. I dropped them on and felt the weird tingle in my magnasense where the old-fashioned near-field reader queried it.

"Ms. Danderly?"

"Yes? I mean: yes, that's me." I told him.

Apparently the first time you come in there's some sort of extended protocol - I sort of assumed all of this was covered by the permit agency at our end, but apparently the oldies want to stamp their authority on the whole deal too. I had to answer about a thousand questions about every aspect of my health and religious preferences (which I attempted to report as good and none respectively, as the orders I'd received suggested).

Once I'd got out of the interrogation room there was the next hurdle - I had a little map, obviously, they gave me that at the employment agency, but I didn't bank on how confusing the past is. You can find out exactly where you are with their weird satellite navigation thing, but even when you know exactly where you are and you can see where you're going to it you still can't work out how to get there. I could literally have thrown a stone and smashed a window of the shop, but in between me and it there was a road three lanes on each side. I started climbing over the barrier on the near side of the road, hoping that I might be able to wait for a gap and somehow dash across to the middle then repeat the performance, but I was only halfway across when a couple of teenage oldies grabbed me by the arms, pulling me back to safety.

"Are you crazy?" the one on my left side yelled at me. "You could have been flattened!"

They dragged me back and started giving me a lecture about how things might look bad but it wasn't worth it. I had no idea what they were talking about, but it certainly seemed to be getting them all warmed up. Then I understood, and by an amazing coincidence at the same time they must have spotted something about me that clued them in, because the one on my right suddenly pulled away from me, hitting her friend on the shoulder.

"Oh god, forget it - look, she's a fuzzy."

"Really?" the other one replied, but then she stepped back a bit and spotted whatever it was about me that marked me out as a piece of the future. The two of them headed off, although they at least helped me in one way - I saw that they were heading down into an underpass, and when I'd dusted myself off and made myself presentable again I followed them. The underpass was a footway below the busy road. I sprinted down it, and up the ramp on the other side I found myself a mere hundred meters away from the shop, and a mere half an hour late (which is to say, five minutes after the shop opened). My contact was on the door, arms crossed and tapping his feet.

He gave me a bit of a barracking for my time-keeping, but I managed to fast-talk him with the tale of the interrogation. He seemed to buy it, so after only a relatively mild tongue-lashing he sent me inside to get my uniform. That was the next thing that I hadn't expected about the past - the crazy clothes. I'd worn the most neutral suit and trousers I could, which had not seemed to raise any eyebrows, but that wasn't what I was working in. Everyone in the store, and I mean everyone, were dressed as bears. You ever seen a picture of a bear? These costumes were worse.