Fic: After All This Time
Mar. 27th, 2025 06:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
badly_knittedTitle: After All This Time
Author:
badly_knittedCharacters: Ianto, Jack.
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Nada.
Summary: Jack and Ianto are back on earth for the first time in centuries, but Ianto is a bit disappointed that it doesn’t match up to the future he’d imagined as a child.
Word Count: 1126
Written For: Prompt 240 – Future at
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fandomweekly.Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters. They belong to the BBC.
A/N: Set in my Ghost of a Chance ‘Verse.
“The future’s not what it used to be,” Ianto commented, leaning casually against one of the Wanderer’s landing struts, the massive bulk of the spaceship towering above him, big as a building.
“Huh?” Jack wandered over to join his husband as a team of spaceport stevedores, following his instructions, set about unloading the goods from the ship’s largest cargo hold. “What’re you talking about?”
Smiling lazily, Ianto shrugged. “Where are the robots everyone said would be doing all the manual labour by now? Where are the flying cars and the moving walkways? This could be any shipping dock on earth, people handling all the loading and unloading, goods being moved around by truck…” He trailed off, shaking his head. “I thought by now things would be a bit more advanced. It’s been almost a thousand years, but it’s still mostly manual labour here. I know earth is a bit backward compared to most of the worlds we visit, but I didn’t realise it was still lagging this far behind the rest of the universe, technologically speaking.”
“We should come back here more often, you’re getting spoiled,” Jack said, grinning. “Too used to all the luxury on the more advanced worlds. You forget how many difficulties earth has had to overcome in the last few centuries, recovering from climate change, the whole AI fiasco when everything crashed and no one knew how to fix it, fighting off a couple of invasions, not to mention the Rigellian Measles epidemic of 2547. That would’ve been a lot worse if the Doctor hadn’t shown up with a vaccine that could be easily synthesised with the technology available. Thanks to him, there were relatively few deaths, but it took people a long time to recover, set progress back by a few decades.”
“I suppose. I just thought be now we’d have some of the things I read about when I was a kid.”
“Like I said, spoiled.” Jack poked Ianto in the side, tickling him. “Take a closer look at the transport vehicles, solar powered and automatic. Just slot the destination card into the control panel, and they take themselves to where they need to go. Smell the air, clean and fresh, zero pollution. And how about the oceans? Clear of plastics and sewage, teeming with life… Okay, I know you can’t see that from here, but they are. Why complain about the lack of robots and flying cars when so many other problems have been overcome?”
“Well, when you put it like that, I suppose humans aren’t doing so badly.”
“You suppose? You’re focusing on all the wrong things. Instead of bemoaning what earth doesn’t have yet, you should be thinking about everything that HAS been achieved. No more overpopulation thanks to colonisation of Mars, and several nearby solar systems. No more poverty, drought, or starvation, the deserts are flourishing, producing more food than the population needs, leaving plenty available for export, and many animal species that were close to extinction in your time are now thriving.”
“Elephants?”
“Whole herds of elephants, rhinos, gorillas, orangutans, pangolins, and hundreds of others. Whales too, and all sorts of endangered birds.”
“But the extinct species are still extinct, right?”
“Yeah. No Jurassic Park levels of cloning yet, but who knows what the future holds? Give earth a couple thousand more years, and you might even get your flying cars.”
“I should hope so. I’ve wanted a flying car since I was seven. The ones on Orpix don’t count; they’re not cars, they’re more like bubbles.”
“You’re so picky. Once the cargo’s been offloaded, we should go take a look around. Spaceports give a skewed vision of what the planet’s really like. Can’t have anything growing nearby because it could be a fire hazard, and the spaceport workers live in barracks to save commuting every day.”
“Not much of a life, that, stuck here in the middle of all this concrete.”
“It’s not like they’re here all the time. They work two weeks, then get three weeks off, going home to their families until they’re scheduled to work again. It’s a good life, and it pays well.”
“It would have to.” Ianto watched as the stevedores carried vast rolls of alien fabrics off the ship.
“It’s easier than it looks, all done with anti-gravity clamps. Dock workers have things pretty easy. They have games rooms, a cinema, swimming pool, top-rated chefs doing the cooking, and a first-class medical facility. The people in charge know how to keep their workers happy.”
“Maybe I should apply for a job myself,” Ianto teased.
“Cheeky! You already have a job, and it pays even better than working as a stevedore. Plus you get perks the stevedores don’t.”
“That’s true.” Ianto eyed Jack appreciatively, grinning.
It didn’t take much more than an hour to unload all the goods, leaving the Wanderer with an empty hold. They spent a couple of hours at the negotiating tables in the portmaster’s office, securing some outward-bound cargoes to be loaded the following day, then took public transport, a sort of solar-powered tram, away from the spaceport and out into the surrounding countryside of what used to be North America, getting off somewhere along the coast of what was once South Carolina.
Everywhere was green and clean, buildings blended in with their surroundings, there were gardens and arboretums everywhere they looked, and colourful flowers blooming, filling the air with fragrance. Walking down to the shore, there were a few other people about, strolling to and from the beach, but nobody paid them any attention. They stood staring out across the crystal-clear Atlantic Ocean as the sun dipped down towards the horizon somewhere behind them.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Jack murmured.
Ianto drew a deep breath of clean, salty air and let it out with a sigh. “Very beautiful,” he agreed.
“Still want to complain about the lack of flying cars?”
“Not right now. Maybe later.” Sitting down, Ianto pulled his shoes off and dug bare toes into the sand, just watching as the sky gradually grew darker and the stars came out, sparkling overhead, changed somewhat from when he’d stared up at them on family camping trips to the Brecon Beacons so many years ago, but still almost painfully familiar. He’d studied the night sky on more than five hundred worlds by now, and while the stars were always beautiful, nothing quite compared to this.
Soon enough, he and Jack would be out there again, travelling from world to world, delivering cargo, but right now he was closer to home than he’d been for more than three hundred years. This wasn’t the future earth he’d imagined as a child, growing up on a dreary council estate in Wales, but in some ways, it was better.
The End
“Huh?” Jack wandered over to join his husband as a team of spaceport stevedores, following his instructions, set about unloading the goods from the ship’s largest cargo hold. “What’re you talking about?”
Smiling lazily, Ianto shrugged. “Where are the robots everyone said would be doing all the manual labour by now? Where are the flying cars and the moving walkways? This could be any shipping dock on earth, people handling all the loading and unloading, goods being moved around by truck…” He trailed off, shaking his head. “I thought by now things would be a bit more advanced. It’s been almost a thousand years, but it’s still mostly manual labour here. I know earth is a bit backward compared to most of the worlds we visit, but I didn’t realise it was still lagging this far behind the rest of the universe, technologically speaking.”
“We should come back here more often, you’re getting spoiled,” Jack said, grinning. “Too used to all the luxury on the more advanced worlds. You forget how many difficulties earth has had to overcome in the last few centuries, recovering from climate change, the whole AI fiasco when everything crashed and no one knew how to fix it, fighting off a couple of invasions, not to mention the Rigellian Measles epidemic of 2547. That would’ve been a lot worse if the Doctor hadn’t shown up with a vaccine that could be easily synthesised with the technology available. Thanks to him, there were relatively few deaths, but it took people a long time to recover, set progress back by a few decades.”
“I suppose. I just thought be now we’d have some of the things I read about when I was a kid.”
“Like I said, spoiled.” Jack poked Ianto in the side, tickling him. “Take a closer look at the transport vehicles, solar powered and automatic. Just slot the destination card into the control panel, and they take themselves to where they need to go. Smell the air, clean and fresh, zero pollution. And how about the oceans? Clear of plastics and sewage, teeming with life… Okay, I know you can’t see that from here, but they are. Why complain about the lack of robots and flying cars when so many other problems have been overcome?”
“Well, when you put it like that, I suppose humans aren’t doing so badly.”
“You suppose? You’re focusing on all the wrong things. Instead of bemoaning what earth doesn’t have yet, you should be thinking about everything that HAS been achieved. No more overpopulation thanks to colonisation of Mars, and several nearby solar systems. No more poverty, drought, or starvation, the deserts are flourishing, producing more food than the population needs, leaving plenty available for export, and many animal species that were close to extinction in your time are now thriving.”
“Elephants?”
“Whole herds of elephants, rhinos, gorillas, orangutans, pangolins, and hundreds of others. Whales too, and all sorts of endangered birds.”
“But the extinct species are still extinct, right?”
“Yeah. No Jurassic Park levels of cloning yet, but who knows what the future holds? Give earth a couple thousand more years, and you might even get your flying cars.”
“I should hope so. I’ve wanted a flying car since I was seven. The ones on Orpix don’t count; they’re not cars, they’re more like bubbles.”
“You’re so picky. Once the cargo’s been offloaded, we should go take a look around. Spaceports give a skewed vision of what the planet’s really like. Can’t have anything growing nearby because it could be a fire hazard, and the spaceport workers live in barracks to save commuting every day.”
“Not much of a life, that, stuck here in the middle of all this concrete.”
“It’s not like they’re here all the time. They work two weeks, then get three weeks off, going home to their families until they’re scheduled to work again. It’s a good life, and it pays well.”
“It would have to.” Ianto watched as the stevedores carried vast rolls of alien fabrics off the ship.
“It’s easier than it looks, all done with anti-gravity clamps. Dock workers have things pretty easy. They have games rooms, a cinema, swimming pool, top-rated chefs doing the cooking, and a first-class medical facility. The people in charge know how to keep their workers happy.”
“Maybe I should apply for a job myself,” Ianto teased.
“Cheeky! You already have a job, and it pays even better than working as a stevedore. Plus you get perks the stevedores don’t.”
“That’s true.” Ianto eyed Jack appreciatively, grinning.
It didn’t take much more than an hour to unload all the goods, leaving the Wanderer with an empty hold. They spent a couple of hours at the negotiating tables in the portmaster’s office, securing some outward-bound cargoes to be loaded the following day, then took public transport, a sort of solar-powered tram, away from the spaceport and out into the surrounding countryside of what used to be North America, getting off somewhere along the coast of what was once South Carolina.
Everywhere was green and clean, buildings blended in with their surroundings, there were gardens and arboretums everywhere they looked, and colourful flowers blooming, filling the air with fragrance. Walking down to the shore, there were a few other people about, strolling to and from the beach, but nobody paid them any attention. They stood staring out across the crystal-clear Atlantic Ocean as the sun dipped down towards the horizon somewhere behind them.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Jack murmured.
Ianto drew a deep breath of clean, salty air and let it out with a sigh. “Very beautiful,” he agreed.
“Still want to complain about the lack of flying cars?”
“Not right now. Maybe later.” Sitting down, Ianto pulled his shoes off and dug bare toes into the sand, just watching as the sky gradually grew darker and the stars came out, sparkling overhead, changed somewhat from when he’d stared up at them on family camping trips to the Brecon Beacons so many years ago, but still almost painfully familiar. He’d studied the night sky on more than five hundred worlds by now, and while the stars were always beautiful, nothing quite compared to this.
Soon enough, he and Jack would be out there again, travelling from world to world, delivering cargo, but right now he was closer to home than he’d been for more than three hundred years. This wasn’t the future earth he’d imagined as a child, growing up on a dreary council estate in Wales, but in some ways, it was better.
The End
