"It contains Bane," said Karyn.
"What?"
"Never mind. You couldn't get the joke. It doesn't contain Bane. It's called bubble tea and they invented it... oh, let me look it up...." She rummaged in her purse and came up with a flat device the size of a wallet. After fiddling with it, over a minute later she said "let me see... Ah. It was invented in the 1980's. So you missed it."
"What did you just do?"
"I looked it up on my phone."
"Your phone?"
"Yeah, mine is a lot newer than yours."
"You just found out a random fact from all of human knowledge by using your phone?"
"I don't think you'd expect me to find alien knowledge. That's limited to your stone."
"Sure, sure. Speaking of which, I wish I knew why and how the stone managed to do all of this."
Jon paused. Karyn said, "you don't need to wait to make me feel better; I know the stone's faster than the Internet."
"It told me, Karyn," said Jon. "First of all, there was a freak stellar alignment which made the stone act strangely. I wouldn't be able to make a wish covering this big an area for another six months. Second, there was this complicated thing about the world being an overlay of different probabilities which I altered."
"What does that mean?"
"That depending on what school of philosophy you believe in, people really did the things they remember doing, so I don't have to worry that there are a million people in jail who never commited a crime or married to someone they never met, things like that. I can ignore that. I'm in the future, even though you're still here, regardless of how little sense it seems to make."
"So how do you like being in the world of tomorrow?" asked Karyn.
"It's pretty keen, but I haven't been here that long. Is there anything I should know about that you didn't mention? Flying cars? A cure for the common cold?"
"Nobody would trust drivers with flying cars. It would mean accidents anywhere. We haven't cured the common cold, no. We don't have jetpacks either."
"I never understood that. If you're wearing a jetpack, how do you keep the exhaust from burning your ass and legs?"
"Anyway, I think you should see Star Wars. Wish up some Blu-rays. Then Harry Potter."
"Are those books?"
"Harry Potter started as a set of bookks, but they also made movies. Star Wars is a movie. And yes, you can own movies at home now. And I swear, if you respond to this by saying 'groovy'...."
