"It's like witness protection," Wilson had helpfully analogized, "but for time travelers. And you're a witness to the future." I was a college student before I went back, and there aren't many jobs that require you to know that a natural number n > 1 is a prime number if and only if the product of all the positive integers less than n is one less than a multiple of n.

So that was how I ended up washing dishes at Yoshinoya. The most I could do to sate my eye for beauty was seeing the mountain of soap bubbles float lusciously atop the pans before Eduardo the line cook would scream at me to hustle. Is there elegance in how an old grain of rice cleaves stubbornly to its heat-induced receptacle on the edge of a plastic bowl? Is there music in the disharmonious scree of a small spoon bouncing around the garbage disposal?

Consider the following, which serves as an object lesson in both restaurant logistics and the imperial system. Suppose you squirt a teaspoonful of Dawn into a carefully chosen place within the load of dishes. You scrub for 45 seconds, and two minutes later the load has been reincarnated in the sink, maybe not the same dishes, but definitely the same souls of dirt and residue. Eight minutes later, one tablespoonful's gone down the drain, fifteen minutes is an ounce. After an hour, the small plastic bottle that would last you months at home starts looking mighty scarce. Multiply by the number of sinks, and don't ignore the other waste generated by the customers as well, and you can see why in four hours flat the conscientiously sorted trash can needed taking out.

"We're doing you a favor," said Tim the delivery boy, "don't get used to it." I counted my blessings that I got the recyclables bag. With it slung over the shoulder, I prepared to walk down the block to the recycling center. I was halfway there when--

I felt the spot on my knee where my blue jeans had torn and flecks of gravel intermixed with the hair on my legs. The bag had split, and scattered evenly in the grass between the sidewalk and the road to a radius of about six feet, lay soda cans, dish soap, frozen food packaging which the adverts had sworn they didn't use.

Well, there was nothing to do but pack it up, continue the walk with a hand over the seam in the bag, and face Eduardo's wrath when I got back late.

But through all of this, I continued looking for...something. There was a reason hope was the last thing out of the box - it was a curse just like the all the rest. But I knew someone had to be out there, just as lost as me, hoping for Systemspace to come back. I checked the thread.

Imageboards were definitely the closest thing the Internet had to a contact sport at the time. The thread had about fifty replies, most of whom derided me. Some, of course, were open, but even they used unprintable words in their backhanded compliments. But one guy had said:

"If this guy really did travel back in time, he could easily have made his own religion and made a fortune out of the things he was saying about the future. But he didn't and instead came to help us. Doesn't that mean anything?"