It’s been nearly ten years since the world ended. Or it may as well have. Jon’s a man in the twilight of his twenties now and his delicate frame holds his clothes as best it can.Outside, across the road from him, a little blonde girl in a pink dress runs down the pavement outside into her father’s sweat-soaked arms. The father shoots wildly with a stolen pistol at the police teleporting in, who are yelling at him to stop. As she grips his neck with her tiny arms and holds tight, a single shot fired from a young sergeant hits the father in the shoulder, sending a spray of blood into the air, just missing his daughter’s head. His blue eyes go red and his face grimaces in pain, but still, he instinctively whips his body in front of her, his only daughter, and they fall backwards into the bright blue light behind them; a light coming from the stolen government teleporter the man, apparently, has illegally modified. And then silence for a second. Then a little blonde girl in a pink dress suddenly appears outside and runs down the pavement outside into her father’s arms, who’s shot in the shoulder, again. They have looped like this, for years. They’re just ghosts. The theory is that the man’s illegal modifications caused this infinite loop but no one really seems to know what causes the teleporters to loop, just that they do. And now humankind must deal with chronological waste sites, where teleporters have terminally jammed. It must watch the same thing, again and again.There are thousands of these waste sites and these ghosts are the reason that access to technology has been extremely limited. Jon stops watching. He’s been absent-mindedly playing with his father’s brass pocket watch, turning it over and over in his hands, feeling the engraving with his fingers: You will become whatever you want to become. He returns it to his inside jacket pocket, where it’s close to his heart. The view of this particular ghost, this endless loop of a quite famous bank robber trying to rescue or kidnap his daughter—depending on who you speak to or what newspaper you read; there are only two newspapers that are still published for the remaining populace, and they still disagree with each other—once drove the property prices sky-high amongst the last humans.But now, this place, like the little girl outside, is just another ghost.