Karyn and Zoe felt themselves fading away. The room flickered and turned into darkness. There was a dim light around them....
Zoe rubbed her eyes and looked around. "It's nighttime."
As their eyes adjusted to the darkness, they looked around. They were in what seemed to be the same room they were in, but it was dusty, unlit, and looked as if it had been abandoned. Looking out the window, they saw the time and date flashing on the bank halfway down the street--but it was not only past 8 PM, it was 54 years in the future!
"Zoe," said Karyn, "what did Jon do? That date... He sent us to the future! We're never going to be able to stop him now...."
They left the house, which was apparently for sale by some realtor and had nobody living in it. As they left, Zoe tried her key in the door.
"It isn't working," she said. "They must have changed the locks in the past 54 years... Wait! I know."
"Hm?" said Karyn.
"We don't really need to come back here. Jon wished that his family, including me, never has to work and could buy whatever we want. I can get money and we can stay at a hotel while we figured this out."
"What if they say you died 54 years ago and you can't get any money?" replied Karyn.
"Then I can't buy whatever I want, right? And Jon wished I could. If the mall's still here it should be open until 9. They have a bank machine there."
The mall was there, and so was the machine, but some other things seemed strange. It didn't look like what they'd have expected from the future at all. There was no futuristic technology except for the occasional hologram. There were few women and the ones they saw were all wearing dresses. There were fewer people who weren't white. The balance of stores seemed dfiferent. A clothes store with "Jesus Saves" printed on all the shirts, a CD Warehouse that sold only religious music... Then as they left the bank machine, a mall guard approached them.
"Excuse me," he said. "What are you two girls doing here?"
"We're getting some money," replied Zoe.
"I bet you are," said the guard, leering. "Nobody but a prostitute would wear clothes like that. This is a city for decent people. I bet you're heathens too. Now come with me."
Zoe blinked. "Do people call each other heathens any more?"
The guard ignored her, but when either Zoe or Karyn tried to walk away he pulled a gun on them.
"I didn't know mall guards carry guns," said Karyn.
"Must have changed in 54 years," muttered Zoe.
"We have to escape!" said Karyn.
Zoe thought and said "I have to go into the bookstore. I want to buy something."
The guard's eyes lost focus for a second and then he said "Of course. Girls shouldn't be reading books, but somehow I feel I have to let you." Gotcha, thought Zoe--the wish that she could buy what she wanted was still working. He walked them to the bookstore, and Zoe bought a World Almanac as the horrified cashier (a teenage boy) pointed at Zoe's black clothes and the guard reassured him. Then Zoe turned back to the shelves, grabbed Karyn's hand, and ran around them. The guard fired, missing, and Zoe tried to push the shelf over. The shelf wobbled and stayed upright, but a pile of Bibles fell on the guard.
"Let's run!" They fled the store and tried to lose themselves in the crowd, though even Karyn's clothing msde her stand out too much for comfort--no woman would ever wear jeans in this future.
Somehow they managed to make it away from the mall and onto the street. Across from the mall was a Holiday Inn, where they went, as it was getting late.
There were two large crucifixes on the wall near the front desk, and the first question the clerk asked was "Are you renting this for your husband?"
"I don't have a husband!" said Zoe. "We're just teenagers!"
"Then how do you support yourself? You're not with your parents and you don't have a husband. You don't... have a job, do you?"
"We don't," said Karyn, "but what's so bad about having a job?"
"But you're girls!" said the clerk. "How can you take care of your children if you have a job?"
"I feel like I'm in the Twilight Zone," said Karyn.
"Wait a minute," said the clerk. "You're not... you can't be.... lesbians?" He said the word with emphasis, but in barely more than a whispered tone of voice. "You'll get the electric chair, you know, for that."
"We're not," said Zoe, "but we have friends who are, and there's nothing wrong with it. Is this the future or is this the Stone Age?"
The clerk seemed about to yell at Zoe, until she explained. "I just want to buy a night's stay in a room."
The wish came into effect, and the clerk suddenly became cooperative. Zoe's credit card worked, of course, and the two girls went up to their room.
"Stone Age is right," said Karyn. "Everything seems... wrong."
"Here," said Zoe. "Look at this. I think I understand now. Here's the history...."
Karyn looked over Zoe's shoulder at the World Almanac. It seemed, from the history, that America had gotten religious, and not in a good way. The religious revival began with a celebrated court case, "Pleasantville Board of Education vs. Jennifer Montgomery." In the early twenty-first century, a teenager was punished by her school for being pregnant. Jenny, with ACLU help and against the wishes of her parents, knew that this was against the law according to Title IX, and she took the case all the way to the Supreme Court. The court said that Title IX was unconstitutional, and that women who get pregnant in school are sluts and deserve to be punished. People were quoting that court decision for decades.
"That doesn't make any sense," said Zoe.
"I think it does," replied Karyn. "Look, it's against the law to kick someone off the cheerleading squad for being pregnant. But that's what Jon wanted to happen. Either the wish read his intentions, or future-Jon just gave him what he wanted, or both. So the magic changed the law. Which means rewriting the minds of the people who run the country. And once Jon's wish turned them into sexist pigs, they stayed that way and kept running the country like sexist pigs. Not just the Supreme Court either, Congress backed them up, and the President....
"But that can't happen," said Zoe. "The Supreme Court is out of the wish range."
Karyn replied, "You got rid of that wish, then Future-Jon put it back, and he doesn't worry about wish ranges. And here's something else... look at this!"
"Preacher Peter McGruder?"
"That's the one. Jon turned Claudia McGruder religious and said she'd always act that way. Look, a normal person's beliefs change, they learn things, even a redneck doesn't stay exactly like they are in high school. Claudia wasn't a normal person. Nothing could ever make her anything other than what she was. She became religious, and she stayed that way, and it was the kind of religion that says that things like sex before marriage are wrong--and that kind's never just sex before marriage. It's modest clothes, and birth control, and gays and lesbians, and stem cells, and blasphemy, and women being independent.... She taught her son to be a fanatic, and he didn't have a wish saying he had to treat everyone with kindness and generosity. He became a preacher, and helped turn the country into something out of Jerry Falwell's dreams.
"But what do we do?" said Zoe, suddenly afraid.
"I don't know," replied Karyn. "Unless..."
