The Infinite

by Patience Agbabi

  But when I get into bed and close my eyes I don’t sleep, I worry.

  I worry Mrs C Eckler was so offended I ran away from her she’ll stop being nice to me in school and won’t be my favourite teacher any more.

  I worry someone will find out about the illegal leap and arrest me and send me to a Young Offenders Unit, which is prison for teens, though I’m not 3-leap yet.

  But most of all I worry about the bad thing that happened at school.

  I open my eyes wide to make the bad thoughts go away but it doesn’t make any difference. My mind plays back today like a film on a loop. Each time I see it, it’s exactly the same as the first time. Every sight, every sound, every smell. It’s bad because, even though I now know it’s going to happen, I don’t know what it means.

  Today I got a text from the future!

  Chapter 02:00

  THE PREDICTIVE

  My school is called Intercalary International because it’s a boarding school for Leaplings who have The Gift. It only has two classes with a four-year gap in between and goes up to Fourteenth Year. It looks like a country mansion and you have to go up a drive with lots of tall trees to get to it. There’s no sign outside apart from ‘Private’ because it’s top secret. Locals think an eccentric billionaire lives there. It’s the only one in the world and some of the pupils come from places like India and Brazil.

  I’m a day pupil because I live close by. Very occasionally, an Annual will attend as a day pupil if they’re the right age and can’t fit into another local school, like Pete LMS. His real name is Peter Wolf and he’s a bully. He goes to athletics club, but Mr Branch never picks him for the team. He went to my primary school. In Second Year, he was addicted to the computer, wanted everyone to ‘Like My Status’ on Facebook = HIS status, not mine. I never go on Facebook because of trolls. I nicknamed him Pete LMS and the name stuck. EVERYONE calls him Pete LMS. He’s still addicted to social media. I never call him Pete LMS to his face. I wouldn’t want to get close to his face anyway.

  His breath smells of raw meat.

  Yesterday we had double PPF before lunch. Leaplings don’t do history, we do PPF, which stands for Past, Present and Future. We take PPF in Block T, away from the main school building and built in the shape of a capital ‘T’. The further up the school you go, the more lessons you have in Block T. We don’t mix with the Eleventh Years until after the first Leap trip. PPF’s my favourite subject. I got a Level 4, which is exceptional for a Seventh Year.

  Yesterday was important in the PPF curriculum. Our teacher, Mrs C Eckler, gave us final information about the Leap 2048 trip to the Time Squad Centre. The Time Squad is like the Crime Squad, but it solves crimes committed across YEARS rather than countries, like if you kill someone in 2020 and hide the body in 1960. It only has four members of staff and is also top secret.

  In Seventh Year you go to the future because it doesn’t matter if you get things wrong. You have to be more experienced before you leap to the past. You do that in Eleventh Year. If you accidentally change something in the past, you rupture the space–time continuum. It’s a VERY BIG DEAL. But some people say you can’t change the past because what happened, happened. I prefer the past: you know what’s going to happen. I’d rather go back to 1968. The future is totally unpredictable.

  We were given the timetable for the Leap 2048 trip last week, but Mrs C Eckler said it might change because of the weather. In 2048 it rains so much due to global warming they’ve invented new words for it, like drazzle and catdogs. I was surprised they hadn’t improved weather forecasts by then so people could plan things. I like plans. They help make things more predictable so I feel safe. When plans change, everything becomes unpredictable.

  Then, Mrs C Eckler introduced us to the Meat Ration menu.

  ‘Can anyone tell me why meat is rationed in the future? Yes, Elle.’

  ‘Meat is rationed in the future because too many people want to eat it for dinner and they ran out of land to breed enough animals to be made into meat.’

  After that, lots of the meat became GM, which means genetically modified. I learnt that in science. Even now, scientists can change genes to make animals grow faster or lose their horns. In the future, people became scared it would make THEM grow faster or, worse still, GROW horns, so some stopped eating meat. But millions still wanted to eat meat that wasn’t GM. So it had to be rationed.

  The Time Squad have a no meat policy to be eco-friendly. On the lunch menu, there were things like minute steaks made of beans. Mrs C Eckler asked me to read the menu out loud because I have a clear voice. I pronounced minute steaks miNUTE by mistake. Mrs C Eckler corrected me and said it was MInute, as in of an hour. I felt humiliated but Mrs C Eckler said she’d made the same mistake herself which made me feel so much better.

  Yesterday, Mrs C Eckler gave us a quiz about 2048 to see if we’d been listening in class. It had questions about eco-robots who collect rubbish. I liked it because it was multiple choice, which means they give you some silly answers, some not-so-silly, and the correct one, and you have to choose. I like reading the silly answers best because they’re like jokes. The best ones were:

  Question 2: Why must we keep the Time Squad trip a secret?

  Answer B said: To stop the wristwatch becoming extinct.

  The correct answer was C: Because we all swore the Oath of Secrecy to protect The Gift and everything connected with it.

  Question 6: Why is the population smaller than in 2020?

  Answer E said: Everyone went to live on the moon!

  The correct answer was A: The global one-child-per-family policy.

  There was one I had to guess.

  Question 7: What was significant about the year 2000?

  I put A: The Time Squad was formed.

  But I thought it might have been C: There was an upsurge of eco-crimes.

  I couldn’t remember if the upsurge BEGAN in 2000 or just after.

  After that, she showed a video about the Time Squad Centre.

  First ‘2020’ came onto the screen followed by a picture of the globe with green for land and blue for water. Then ‘2048’, and there was more blue on the globe. The camera zoomed into the green really quickly, so it was like the view from a plane. Rain seemed to be dripping down the camera lens.

  The camera zoomed in again on an aerial view of a glass building surrounded by lots of fields and trees green as a tropical rainforest, a play park with everything made of wood and a group of yellow dome-shaped buildings that looked like upside-down baskets. It was still raining.

  Big letters on the screen said ‘FIGHT CRIME ACROSS TIME’. That’s the Time Squad motto. A voice said, ‘Welcome to Time Squad Centre, 2048,’ and the camera zoomed in on an old white woman. Her face was like earth when it hasn’t rained for months, her hair was a white electric shock and she had cat’s eyes. She looked 200 years old. A caption said ‘MILLENNIA, Centre Director’ and she said, ‘I run the Centre.’ I smiled when she used the word ‘run’, imagining her sprinting down the track in the 100 metres, doing a dip finish.

  Then the camera zoomed in on the grass and trees and showed a bald man chopping wood who looked about 40. Lots of letters were flying around like insects, which made me feel dizzy until they settled into words, a caption, which said ‘LE TEMPS, Eco-landscaper’ and Le Temps was a talking head. He said, ‘I plan the land,’ and I was surprised because I expected him to have a French accent but he just sounded posh. I know le temps means weather in French so maybe he was in charge of the weather as well. He wasn’t doing a very good job!

  Then the camera went into the building and zoomed in on a café sign, with green tendrilly writing on a white background that read ‘The Beanstalk’, then into a large white room with a brown floor with a giant beanstalk in the middle that went right up into the ceiling, and it focused on a fat woman who was older than Le Temps but younger than Millennia and looked Indian. She was kneading a big lump of white dough like it was a punchbag. Her long black hair had silve
r streaks and it was wound up into a knot on top of her head and she had her nose pierced with a sparkly blue stone. The caption said ‘SEASON, Cook’ and she became a talking head. She said, ‘I make the food.’

  Then the camera went along a corridor and up a spiral staircase to a door that said ‘The Igloo’ and went inside. The room was round, with large white bricks and a dome ceiling. Then a teenage boy appeared out of nowhere, disappeared, appeared again in another part of the room, and I recognised him because he came to our school last year at the beginning of Seventh Year. He looked exactly the same: a skinny black boy with hair like antennae and white clothes with graffiti on them. A caption came up saying ‘MC2, Energiser’. I assumed he charged us up like batteries. The camera zoomed in on his face and he blinked several times before he said, ‘I move through time and space,’ and Big Ben pumped his arm in the air. That was the end of the video.

  Mrs C Eckler turned off the equipment and smiled.

  ‘Any questions? Yes, Ben.’

  ‘In 2048, are we 40 years old?’

  ‘No, Ben. When we leap, we’ll all stay the same age as now. But you’ve raised a very important issue.’ She cleared her throat, so I knew she was going to say something important. ‘Very rarely, when people leap they meet their future self. Your FUTURE self would be 40.’

  I raised my hand. ‘Is it dangerous?’

  ‘No, Elle. But you mustn’t approach your future self. Let them approach you. They will know exactly what to do.’

  I still wasn’t sure Big Ben’s future self would be less likely to go from 0 to 10 than him. I had lots more questions, like how MC2 was going to charge us up like batteries, but they stayed in my head, which was resting on the desk straight after the video. I’d already started replaying it back in my mind, especially Season kneading a big lump of white dough. I knew we had breadmaking in the timetable and wondered if we were going to make WHITE bread. I hoped so because I only eat white food. If the food has a colour, or worse still lots of different colours on the same plate, the smell and flavour mixed with the SIGHT of it is too much and I get sensory overload and have to have time-out. I don’t want to eat with my eyes closed.

  I was still thinking that when I realised Mrs C Eckler was talking to me.

  ‘Elle, be ready for me to collect you at 5:45 a.m. this Saturday. Text me if you’re feeling delicate.’

  I looked up at her. ‘Why will I feel delicate?’

  ‘Sometimes we have an Oops, remember. Things happen that we don’t expect. If you’re feeling a BIT delicate, you can still come on the trip. But we must plan for Oops.’

  Oops is the bane of my life. Oops makes my heart beat fast and hard like I just ran the 100 metres but instead of feeling happy I feel scared. If there was a person called Oops, they’d be my mortal enemy. Worse than Pete LMS. Mortal enemy means you fight to the death.

  After lunch was double geography. We’ve been doing projects on climate change and what we can do to stop it. We had to interview grown-ups about food, fossil fuels or plastic bags. I interviewed Grandma about food. I don’t want the climate to change because I find it difficult when it goes from spring to summer and autumn to winter. The government make the clocks go forwards or backwards, it’s either too dark or too light and messes with my sleep. It takes me weeks to recover. But the worst thing is when weather changes dramatically from one day to the next. I have to check the forecast a lot because the prediction can change every hour, especially when it’s windy. The wind makes the weather move around like a poltergeist.

  Projects mean working in pairs and I was with Big Ben. He wanted to do CO2 emissions from cars. He plans to invent the first eco-friendly supercar. But I wanted to do the meat and dairy industry because I read online that the rainforest is being destroyed so they can grow cows to make into burgers. When the cows poo they mess up the gases in the air, so the air gets warmer and melts icebergs in the North Pole and sea levels rise.

  Grandma told me when she was a girl she only ate meat once a year at Christmas, when they killed a goat and roasted it for the whole village. The rest of the time they ate fish from the river like tilapia. I was happy when she told me that because I like fish even more than meat. But when I read about us fishing too many fish until there will be none left I was sad.

  I wanted to celebrate vegetables. I brought a yam into school as an example of a vegetable. Big Ben had to go with my idea because he has difficulty reading and talking in class unless it’s maths or PPF. Anyway, he wasn’t at school yesterday because of Anger Management so I had to present on my own.

  I got to geography last because I always try to avoid the rush between lessons. As soon as I walked through the door I heard, ‘Where’s your Leaper boyfriend?’ It was Pete LMS. He always says this when Big Ben isn’t at school. Some of the class laughed, but Jake smiled at me and Maria said:

  ‘Shut up! You’re not funny.’

  I like Jake and Maria, they often stick up for me. Jake’s very good at PPF, even though he shouts out in class, and Maria does the high jump at athletics club. She’s so good she represented Brazil.

  I sat down at the back of the class and refreshed my mobile for the speech. I knew it off by heart but liked reading it over and over again. It distracted me from the talking that goes on during lessons when the teacher is speaking. The class is extra noisy for Mr Carter who speaks extra loudly in a slow, croaky voice, even though the geography class is small, only 15 children.

  Suddenly, it was my turn to present. I took the yam out of my bag and I could hear someone laughing but I didn’t know why. I stood up, scrolled down my mobile for the prompt list and took a deep breath like I was going to push out of the blocks for the 100 metres.

  ‘Toomanycowsintheworldeatpeople.’

  The whole class laughed so loud I couldn’t rearrange my thoughts properly. That wasn’t what I wanted to say but we were advised to deliver from prompts rather than read the full speech from the page. Mr Carter said we could use our mobile phones and make a list of words so we knew what to focus on for each section. My list said:

  COWS

  DAIRY

  FISH

  VEGETABLES

  Looking at the word COWS had made me say cows first, when I should have said people. I’d memorised my speech word for word; I could see it in my mind, but my mouth mixed everything up and it came out like a long sentence in German that’s all one word. I love German but not when I want to speak English. Mr Carter cleared his throat like he was starting a car on a cold day. He does everything in slow motion because he’s older than Grandma. But before he could say anything at all, Pete LMS said, in my voice: ‘MAD cows.’

  Everyone laughed except Maria, who shouted across the room: ‘Just cos you’re Pete LMS doesn’t mean we like you.’

  Maria has hated Pete LMS since he wasn’t picked for the athletics team and said high jump was only for freaks. Pete LMS makes fun of people who are different, especially if they’re good at something. He calls Ben a Leaper after Big Ben let slip he was born on the 29th of February. Pete LMS doesn’t know everyone in this school is a Leapling with The Gift. When we do PPF, he does history on his own.

  I went from 0 to 10 in 0.5 seconds. I felt tears coming into my eyes and my face going red, even though I’m black and it doesn’t show. But I had to do my speech. If I didn’t do my speech, I’d get into trouble.

  I stared down at my phone, the word COWS, and began again.

  ‘Too many people in the world eat cows. They are addicted to burgers.’

  ‘Ever seen a cow eat a burger?’ shouted Pete LMS and banged his fist on the table. Everyone was laughing now, even Jake and Maria. But that wasn’t what I meant. I meant PEOPLE are addicted to burgers.

  I tried to continue my speech but every time I started a sentence Pete LMS would say the opposite and roll his eyes clockwise while Mr Carter looked out of the window because he’s 103. Pete LMS gave me a hard time because his dad’s a millionaire factory farmer who specialises in cattle, s
o if no one bought meat his whole family would starve. Actually, they wouldn’t starve; they could eat the meat other people didn’t buy. They’d be eating forever!

  When I got to the FISH section, I looked down so I’d say the right words in the right order and noticed my screen was flashing. I had a text. In capital letters, it said:

  SOS L

  Sent Tue 3 Mar 2048. 23:00.

  2048! It must be a mistake. I didn’t recognise the number and I had lots of thoughts in my head at the same time. I closed my eyes and opened them again because the thoughts were coming too fast, one on top of the other, and maybe if I closed my eyes and opened them everything would be normal and I could carry on doing my speech. But when I opened my eyes, the thoughts kept coming like this:

  SOS L

  Who sent it? Why did they text ME?

  SOS means someone’s in trouble.

  Howdidtheygetmynumber?

  This isn’t supposed to happen.

  What does L mean? Is it a person who ends their texts with the initial L?

  L means 50 in Roman numerals.

  Is it someone pretending to be L to humiliate me? Like Pete LMS. Does he sign texts as L? But he’s not a Leapling, how could he send a text from the future?

  SOS means someone’s in trouble!

  It was sent in 2048 so it hasn’t happened yet.

  If you get a text about something that’s GOING to happen, it’s a Predictive.

  SOS L is a Predictive!

  Sent Tuesday the 3rd of March 2048, 11 o’clock at night.

  2048 is the year of the school trip.

  Maybe I can stop the bad thing that’s going to happen.

  I thought all this in ten seconds till I realised someone was nudging my hand. Suddenly, Pete LMS had my phone! He smiled like it was his birthday and this was the present he’d wanted for ages.

  ‘SOS L,’ he said, in my voice, to the whole class. Then, in his voice, ‘A message from your Leaper boyfriend.’

  I had a shooting pain in my head but I rushed across the room to get it back. I lunged towards Pete LMS and he laughed in my face. He was holding the phone too tight for me to grab it. Of course Mr Carter was a minute behind. Before he could say anything, Pete LMS said: ‘Is The Palindrome about to cry? Boohoo!’