In the future, everyone gets to be old. But Ben Leong was stuck in the past. This is not a figure of speech; Ben Leong was from a time with flying cars and space travel and robot secretaries. A time when all his friends aren’t dying. Ronald Reagan was not one of Ben Leong’s friends, so Ronald Reagan got to be old. Whenever that motherfucker’s jowly face came on the six o’clock news, Ben Leong pressed his own against the TV. Where I’m from, he’d say, breath fogging up the screen, you’re worm food.

Ben Leong couldn’t build a time machine, so he went to protests instead. He painted SILENCE IS DEATH on foam core, died in front of the New York Stock Exchange, got beat up by jockish police. And afterward, he’d jerk off and fantasize about getting fucked by those same pigs that beat him, all of them writhing naked together on the cool white shores of the moon.

Because Ben Leong was tired. He was tired of antiretrovirals, protease inhibitors, and whatever the fuck AZT stood for. In the future, you can use a shrink ray to turn yourself microscopic and kill viruses with jiu-jitsu. He was tired of the old white dudes in robes who pretended that they knew God, and even more tired of the other old white dudes in suits who believed them. In the future, you can launch a rocket into space and talk to God in person. Don’t believe the yuppies, She says. I don’t want nobody to die. Most of all, he was tired of the bums who lived on his street, who’d yell at him to go back to where he came from—as if he wasn’t already trying.

Sometimes, if he got high enough, Ben Leong could stare at his hands and see right through them. He’d dig out old polaroids of himself—at the beach, bright and tan; foggy-eyed at Uncle Charlie’s or The Monster; in the black suit he wore every other weekend, at least—and notice the outline of his body fading into the background. But then he’d remind himself that he wasn’t dying. He simply didn’t yet exist.

One day, Ben Leong decided to go home. He couldn’t wait any longer, so he walked the entire twenty-five blocks from his apartment to Midtown, ending up on the roof of the World Trade Center. It was a hundred floors up, where massive clouds zoomed through the sky like dragons—but he could see past them, past the tattered ozone and Earth’s oppressive gravitational pull, to a wormhole that could lead him back to his own time. Or at least somewhere else. He shut his eyes and stepped one foot off the ledge, the other bracing to launch himself into space.

But then he remembered he had no jet pack, that they hadn’t been invented yet, and that science was never on his side.

The elevator car Ben Leong rode down stopped every few floors, but it stank of his piss, so nobody else got in. As he stepped outside, he remembered it was Friday night. Tired of the same Greenwich bars he’d always go to, he headed for Mount Sinai instead. Disco played in his head as he strolled into the hospital’s critical care unit, and he peeked through doorways in search of a dance partner. But upon seeing a familiar face—a stranger from the gym who, he just then realized, hadn’t been in months—he got shy and fled into the nearest stairwell.

After climbing a few flights, Ben Leong found himself in the maternity ward. There, behind an enormous glass wall, were rows of babies asleep in plastic boxes. One of them, swathed in blue and haloed with fuzzy black hair, opened its eyes to stare straight at him.

And Ben Leong was jolted into sudden awareness. This baby, he realized, was him. The Ben Leong who was born when he should have been, who would get to exist in the correct time. His own life flashed before his eyes: a wedding on Mars and adopted cyborg children, every new wrinkle on his face arrogantly zapped off by laser rays before transitioning, at the age of one hundred, into a talking brain in a jar.

In the future, you can plug yourself into human singularity and experience every version of yourself that has ever and will ever exist. But don’t, under any circumstances, try to change anything.

Just then, the baby reached out its hand and grabbed at the air toward him. And Ben Leong waved back. He was surprised by how calm he felt—the anger he injected himself with every day, as if it were a cure, had lifted, and the sensation was like his sinuses were finally clear after a long cold. Ben Leong could smell again: harsh, sterilizing lavender and fresh saliva. He was happy to see himself.