The World of Tomorrow is Sadly Outdated

By Leanna Renee Hieber

New York City: The Year is 1889.
New York City: The Year is 2089.


In 1889 a group of bold pseudo-scientists discover the "temporal current" and begin to view the distant futures that await the Empire City. In the future, all life as we know it has crumbled, leaving New York City a ghost town with a populous scrabbling to survive underground.

In the past it's up to an unlikely group of Victorians to preserve something of their world to save their future generations. In the future it's up to an unlikely group of survivors to take a leap of faith; discovering what their ancestors left for them with no more guarantees than love and hope.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bryant Street Publishing
• Release date: Mar 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781094458274

Leanna Renee Hieber

Raised in rural Ohio and obsessed with the Victorian Era, Leanna’s life goal is to be a ”gateway drug to 19th century literature.” An actress, playwright and award winning author, she lives in New York City and is a devotee of ghost stories and Goth clubs. Visit www.leannareneeheiber.com

Book preview

1

NEW YORK CITY, BOROUGH OF MANHATTAN, 1889

S hall we? Evan Halford grabbed one brass wheel with both hands while his partner, Samuel, grabbed the other. Evan turned to his wife. My love, are you ready?

Grace lifted shaking, gloved hands to the copper diadem wreathing her braided hair and touched the metal tabs pressed to her temples, a conduit crown picking up her thoughts. She focused on a devastated future, on a specific scene that had never left her mind from the moment the vision first landed upon her third eye. She took a deep breath.

Yes, dear.

Together, her husband and their best friend turned the wheels to open the Receptor’s valves. It woke with a pumping hiss. Grace clamped her jaw shut as the gentle sting of low-voltage electricity thrummed against her skull.

Evan stepped back, grabbed his wife’s hand, and murmured a prayer. At his amen there came a tiny flicker of light.

Grace Halford stared at the Receptor’s vast screen and felt her breath constrict as if someone had drawn her corset strings too tight. The Receptor took up half the attic wall of their brownstone townhouse, surrounded by metal tubes that hissed like a nest of snakes: a glass-headed gorgon with a body of whirring belts, cogs, pistons and levers, with a braided set of wires that led to the crown on her head.

A point of light on the screen grew into a sepia square, expanding until the whole panel was a rectangle of amber. Text flashed before their eyes. It was tomorrow’s headline from the Eagle. The screen flickered. All three held their breath. The image stilled and remained.

They stared at tomorrow.

Evan slid his arms around Grace, careful not to disentangle her from the wires. They’d worked so hard for this moment and Grace wanted to feel joy. But she was, frankly, scared.

Oh, my darling Grace, with your mind as our key to the future, we did it! Evan gave her a smacking kiss before turning to Samuel, who stood tall and austere in his modest suit. Samuel Stein, by God, you genius you. Evan bounded over to him and clapped him on the back.

Samuel’s cheeks reddened. He nodded, peering closely at the screen to divert further attention.

Evan turned back to his wife with a sudden concern, gesturing at the wreathed copper. Are you all right? It’s nothing worse than a little sting?

It’s fine, she murmured.

We’ll find what you saw, Evan promised. We’ll figure out some way to help.

Grace blinked back sudden tears, thinking of the horrible, bloody image that had been the impetus for this entire experiment.

The information on the screen continued to hold Grace’s breath captive. In hoping to see tomorrow, she would rather have seen a better day. But she knew better than anyone that looking into the future meant you might not like what you saw.

But darling, Evan, please look… Grace asked. There will be a tornado in Brooklyn tomorrow.

Let a hurricane come! We located the current! Evan cried. There’s Tesla’s alternating, Edison’s direct, and yes, by God, there is our temporal current! He danced off to open champagne. The rolled cuffs of his dress shirt loosened as he flailed.

Grace pursed her lips. We should alert someone—

No force of ours could stop a tornado, Samuel murmured, glancing at Grace before looking away.

True, but—

Samuel’s raised hand stopped her. The pact, Grace. We cannot stop or alter time, only watch it, looking for your clue. That tornado will be no different than it was with your premonition of that fire. The same amount of people died. Even with warning.

Grace folded her arms, knowing he was right, knowing full well the hours they had labored over the moral quandary of undoing time, and the hard-fought decision to let it be as it would. And that hadn’t come without a test.

Grace had been gifted with premonitions of the future since she could remember, but more often than not her visions were entirely mundane: a late train, a blocked road. She – and those colleagues who had seen the evidence of her uncanny knowledge – trusted it. So much so that when she’d had a precognition of a local fire, she had warned the residents of the townhouse in question, who spent the next evening in an adjacent building. The fire erupted anyway, and by the time the fire department had the first building under control, the fire had already spread to other buildings. The death toll was the same. Different people, same amount of loss.

If the temporal current was a success, their trio had made a pact to remain innovators alone, not to see if the current could make them God or swap one set of fates for another. Besides, they were looking for something very specific. Shoulders tensed with worry, she felt the capped sleeves of her blouse near her ears. She didn’t want to regret their miracle the moment it lived. But it had been such an improbable dream until now.

The Receptor flickered again then guttered. The sting receded from Grace’s temples.

Samuel frowned. Moving to the behemoth, he tightened gaskets around the screen before dropping to his knees. His head disappeared behind the massive wiring that surreptitiously leeched off the new 14th Street electric lamps, drawing stolen current into their townhouse, up to their attic, to light the screen and extend up the tallest lightning rod in Manhattan. At least, that’s how Evan had explained the spire to neighbors staring horrified at their rooftop when he installed it: You must understand, my dear Grace has a simply absurd fear of lightning… Ironic considering this mystical advancement in science came from lightly electrocuting her.

Samuel put a vise on a fray of copper wire and pressed a sequence of valves like a trumpet. Puffs of steam jetted from the corner vents, tiny brass lids lifting and settling. The screen flickered back to life. The sting at her forehead prickled again. More headlines, amplifying whatever energy allowed her to glimpse the future and widening that flow beyond anything her mind alone could process or hold. She was now a medium of time itself. Grace squinted at the text, compelled to look even though she was torn between dread, fascination and a growing headache.

There’s a seal in the corner. New York Public Library. There will be a public library? How splendid! She leaned closer, her coiled muscles easing. "And a word I don’t recognize. Inter-net."

Inter-net! Evan said the foreign word with relish. I set the Temporal dial to pick up the earliest dates, closest to our time. It must be picking up our location too!

There was a loud pop, a flying cork, and Evan busied himself with delicate champagne flutes. He tried to pass the bubbling flutes to Samuel and Grace, who both sat rapt in future newspaper stories, time clicking forward day by day as the temporal current fed into the Receptor.

Come, Evan insisted. "There will be plenty of time to examine the history