One Step Forward

The day Emma forgot her umbrella, the future split in half.

She didn’t know that, of course.

What she knew was that the rain had already soaked through her shoes, it was 7:42 a.m., and if the 8:05 train into the city was late again, she might actually start screaming at the sky like a cartoon villain.

She hunched over under the bus shelter that wasn’t actually a shelter—three glass panels, no bench, no roof worth mentioning—and scowled at her reflection in the puddle.

“Perfect,” she muttered. “This is exactly the weather I ordered. Thank you, universe.”

As if in response, the bus that was never on time hissed up to the curb at 7:47.

Emma groaned. “No, no, I need the train, not you.”

The bus doors folded open with a sigh. The driver, a woman with silver hair pulled into a no-nonsense bun, looked down at Emma.

“You getting on?” she asked.

Emma shook her head. “No, I’m waiting for the train.”

“The train workers are striking today,” the driver said. “Signal issue. It was on the news.”

Emma blinked. “What?”

“Train’s not coming. You want downtown, this is your ride.”

“Of course,” she said. “Of course they’re striking today.”

The driver made a small movement like she was going to close the doors.

And that was the moment.

A tiny fork in the road of time: Emma could wave, walk away, call a rideshare, go home sick, do a thousand other things.

Instead, for no particular reason, for no cosmic impulse she could later point to, she took one quick step forward and got on the bus.

She tapped her card, chose a seat near the middle, and spent the first ten minutes glaring at the rivulet of water snaking down her sleeve. The bus was warmer than outside, which felt like betrayal. She wanted the weather to commit to the bit.

At the next stop, a group of high school kids clamoured aboard, loud and wired on sleep deprivation and sugar. One boy dropped a binder, papers everywhere. A girl with blue streaks in her hair scooped them up with a practiced sigh and shoved them back in his arms.

Emma shoved her headphones in and opened her email.

The bus lurched, stopped, lurched again, crawling into the city as if personally offended by the concept of efficiency. People shuffled off, umbrellas unfurling like black flowers at each stop.

At 8:27, the bus stalled behind an endless line of cars. The rain and rush-hour traffic had fused into one miserable organism.

At 8:33, someone at the front began digging through their bag while the driver called out, “You have to pay, sir.”

At 8:34, Emma’s phone buzzed with a calendar alert: Presentation at 9:00 a.m.

At 8:38, something thumped against her foot.

She glanced down.

A small, battered notebook had slid across the aisle. The cover was dark blue, the corners soft and frayed, an elastic band half-snapped and hanging on by stubbornness. It had that particular look of something carried around every day.

Emma picked it up automatically, thumb brushing over the worn cardboard. She looked around for the owner, lifting it slightly.

“Anyone drop a notebook?” she called over the bus hum.

No one answered. Half the passengers had their eyes on their phones, the other half on the middle distance occupied exclusively by commuters.

Emma frowned and flipped it open, intending just to find a name.

There was no name on the first page.

There was a drawing.

A city, but not any city she recognized. Tall, slender towers twisted like strands of DNA, rising out of a river that shimmered with light. Bridges hung between buildings like filaments, and tiny dots—people, she assumed—walked along them. Above it all floated spheres with soft trails, like dandelion seeds made of glass.

It wasn’t perfect. Lines were crossed out, buildings half-erased and redrawn. But it was… different. Alive. Like someone had tried to sketch a memory of somewhere that didn’t exist yet.

She turned the page.

More drawings. Machines with petals instead of blades. Vehicles that seemed to swim through the air. Little notes in cramped handwriting:

Need lighter material here

Wind direction? Might need buffer zone

Energy input too high—rethink system

“This is really good,” Emma murmured, mostly to herself.

“Thanks,” said a voice right behind her.

She nearly jumped out of her seat.

A boy of maybe seventeen stood there, one hand on the pole, hair dripping onto his hoodie. He had the exhausted bravado of someone who’d had a growth spurt and was waiting for his confidence to catch up.

“That’s mine,” he said, pointing at the notebook, cheeks darkening. “Sorry. It fell.”

Emma shut the cover quickly, as if she’d been caught snooping in someone’s diary.

“Sorry,” she said. “I was just trying to find a name.”

“It doesn’t, uh, have one.” He took the notebook from her, fingers careful, like he was afraid it might tear. “Thanks.”

“No problem,” she said. “Your drawings are… really something.”

He shrugged one shoulder. “They’re just ideas. Dumb stuff.”

“It didn’t look dumb.”

He shifted his weight, clearly thinking of a way to change the subject, then blurted, “Are you… an architect or something?”

Emma huffed a laugh. “God, no. I do data analysis. Spreadsheets, charts, arguing with people about sample sizes.”

“Oh.” He nodded, but she could see the disappointment flicker across his face. Someone he’d hoped would recognize something didn’t.

She hesitated.

He started to turn away.

“Hey,” she said.

He glanced back.

“For what it’s worth,” she said carefully, “the notes you wrote? About energy input and material weight? That’s not dumb. That’s design thinking. You’re solving problems, not just drawing. That matters.”

“Uh… thanks,” he said.

“I mean it. Do you want to do that? Design stuff? Engineering, architecture, industrial design, whatever?”

He stared at the notebook in his hands, thumb worrying the snapped elastic. “I don’t know. My grades aren’t… amazing. And it’s expensive. And, like…” He trailed off.

Emma recognized the look. The quiet internal math of “people like me don’t usually end up in those jobs.”

“You don’t have to have it all figured out now,” she said. “But maybe don’t throw that away because it feels too big in your head.”

The words came out before she could overthink them. Maybe she was talking to her seventeen-year-old self as much as to him.

He let out a short laugh that sounded more like an exhale. “Yeah. Maybe.”

They rode the next few stops in silence. He flipped through the notebook, not drawing, just looking, as if re-seeing his own work through a slightly different lens.

At 8:52, the bus finally pulled up near Emma’s office district.

She stood, slinging her bag over her shoulder. The boy stepped aside to let her pass.

“Hey,” she said, pausing. “What’s your name?”

“Liam,” he said.

“Nice to meet you, Liam. I’m Emma.”

“Nice to meet you.”

She had the odd sensation that she should say more. Something profound. A mini TED Talk. But the door dinged, the driver looked impatient, and life marched on.

So instead, she smiled and said, “Keep drawing.”

By 9:07, she was in the boardroom, damp blazer off, slides up, acting like her morning hadn’t been a series of tiny panics.

By 2:23 p.m., she’d forgotten about the bus entirely.

By the weekend, she’d forgotten Liam’s name.

The universe did not.

Twenty-three years later, Emma stood at the floor-to-ceiling windows of a new building and thought, wildly, that the city looked shorter.

Technically, it wasn’t. The skyscrapers still stabbed at the clouds with the same greedy determination. But everything felt… different. Softer. The river below, once a sluggish grey, now shimmered with something that looked like dancing light.

“It redirects sunlight into the water,” said a voice at her shoulder. “Fish like it. Humans too.”

Emma turned.

The man beside her looked… familiar, though she couldn’t have said why. Early forties, maybe. Laugh lines at the corners of his eyes, though his expression at the moment was more thoughtful than amused. His dark hair was flecked with silver at the temples in that annoyingly attractive way some people managed to pull off.

He wore a badge clipped to his jacket: LIAM CHEN, LEAD SYSTEMS ARCHITECT.

The title still made him slightly uncomfortable. It felt, in his own head, like they’d printed it for someone else and he was just borrowing it.

He gestured toward the river. From the angle of the window, they could see the long, slender structures anchored along the banks, like a row of mechanical lilies. Their surfaces shifted subtly, following the angle of the sun, redirecting light into the water and powering the building at the same time.

“It’s beautiful,” Emma said.

The older she’d gotten, the more that word meant more than “pretty.” Beautiful, to her, meant functional and kind. Useful without being cruel.

“Wait until you see it at night,” Liam said. “The interface lights up when it registers movement in the water. Kids think it’s magic.”

“Is it magic?” she asked.

He smiled. “Just physics and hardware.”

They stood in companionable silence for a moment, watching the afternoon sun glint off the surface of the river. Below, people strolled along the pedestrian path, some pausing to look at the new installation. A few held up phones, recording it. A little boy crouched at the railing, pointing at the flashing lights moving lazily under the water’s surface.

“He’s waving to the sensors,” Liam said, amused. “People always try to be polite to machines that blink.”

Emma glanced at him sideways. “Is that from user research, or personal experience?”

“Both,” he admitted.

She laughed.

“You know,” he said, still looking out the window, “sometimes I think this whole project exists because the train workers went on strike twenty-odd years ago.”

“That’s oddly specific,” she said. “Long commute?”

“Worst bus ride of my life,” he said. “Best one too, I guess. Depending on how you look at it.”

Something in his tone made her look at him more closely. His gaze was far away now, not on the river but somewhere two decades back.

“I got stuck on this bus,” he said. “Late for school, soaked, convinced the world was personally victimizing me. You know the mood.”

“Vividly,” she said.

“I dropped my notebook,” he went on. “The one I carried everywhere. I thought about just leaving it when it slid away. It was stupid, I thought. Just doodles.”

He smiled, faint and self-deprecating.

“But this woman picked it up. Looked through it before I could grab it. I was mortified. And then she told me the notes I’d scribbled were ‘design thinking.’”

Emma felt something cold and electric slide down her spine.

“She said it like it meant something,” Liam continued. “Like I wasn’t just a dumb kid drawing impossible machines. That I was… solving problems. You know?”

He shrugged lightly, but his voice had gone soft.

“It sounds cheesy when I say it now,” he said. “But at the time, it was the first time an adult had taken that stuff seriously. I decided that day I would at least try. Look up what engineering actually was. Apply for the tech track instead of general. It was a small thing. A bus ride conversation. But everything else in my life kind of… branched out from there.”

Emma’s mouth felt dry.

“Do you remember her?” she asked.

“Not really,” he admitted. “I mean, I remember impressions. She was tired but funny. Totally soaked, like me. She joked about spreadsheets. I don’t even know her name.”

He paused.

“But every time I think about giving up on something difficult,” he said quietly, “I hear her voice in my head saying ‘Don’t throw it away just because it feels too big.’ My brain assigned that to her, I guess. So I keep going.”

He laughed once, a quick, embarrassed sound.

“Anyway,” he said. “Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.”

Emma’s heart slammed against her ribs.

She stared at him. At the laugh lines she could now recognize as the ghost of an awkward seventeen-year-old trying to hide behind jokes. At the notebook he still carried sometimes, though now it was a sleek tablet instead of battered cardboard.

She thought of all the tiny decisions that had led here: forgetting her umbrella, choosing the bus, opening the notebook instead of sliding it under the seat, saying something instead of staying quiet.

A small action.

A huge echo.

“Emma?” Liam said, misinterpreting her silence. “You okay?”

She realized she was gripping her bag strap so tightly her fingers hurt. She forced them to relax.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m just… thinking about how weird life is.”

“That is an accurate summary,” he said.

“What if she hadn’t picked it up?” she asked, testing the world with that hypothetical.

He frowned, considering. “I don’t know. Maybe I still would’ve ended up in design somehow. Maybe not. Maybe I’d be working in a shipping warehouse complaining about my boss’s handwriting. It’s impossible to say.”

He turned to look at the river again, the light glancing off his profile.

“But I like this version,” he said simply.

Emma swallowed hard.

“Me too,” she said.

He glanced at her, smiling. “So. You ready to see the control room? It’s the least shiny part, but the kids always think it’s the coolest.”

“Lead the way,” she said.

—

The control room looked exactly like the inside of a computer had decided to cosplay as a submarine. Screens lined the walls, displaying shifting schematics. Numbers scrolled in soft colors, monitoring energy input, water quality, structural strain.

In the middle of the room, a cluster of chairs sat around a circular display table. On it, a holographic model of the river system rotated slowly.

Emma watched the tiny virtual lights moving along the banks.

“So this,” Liam said, tapping the table, “is where the magic happens. Or, if you ask Facilities, where the ‘maintenance nightmares’ live.”

“I’ll side with magic,” she said.

He smiled.

“These units,” he said, pointing at one section, “are the first in the city to use the new adaptive materials. Remember that pilot project five years ago? The one everyone said was too risky?”

“I remember,” Emma said. She’d been one of the data leads on the environmental impact assessment back then. She’d fought tooth and nail to get the trial approved, bringing graphs and simulations to every meeting like armor.

“That only existed because when I pitched it,” he said, “I had this old sketch in my files. Rough, stupid, but it reminded me what I was aiming for. I’d drawn something like it in high school—same basic concept, just… nonsense physics attached.”

He chuckled. “I rewrote the physics, obviously. Took a while. But the IDEA came from that.”

He glanced at her.

"You ever have that?" he asked. "Some moment from way back that keeps… echoing into decisions years later?"

Emma opened her mouth.

The easy answer was no. That nothing so dramatic had ever happened to her. That her life was a collection of spreadsheets and coffee-stained reports and making sure other people's big ideas didn't crash into reality too hard.

But that would be a lie, she realized.

There had been tiny moments. A teacher who’d written “You’re good at this” in the margin of her math test. A friend who had dragged her to a coding club she hadn’t wanted to attend. A stranger in a café who had once told her that she looked like someone who got things done.

Small actions. Huge echoes.

“Yes,” she said finally. “I think we all do. Even if we don’t realize it.”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

They toured the rest of the facility as the afternoon wore on, Emma asking far too many questions for someone who “just did data”. Liam seemed delighted by this.

Outside, clouds moved aside, letting weak winter sunshine spill over the river. The units brightened in response, glass petals tilting to drink in the light.

From one of the bridges overhead, a child pointed down.

“Look!” she shouted. “The water’s sparkling!”

Her father crouched beside her. “It’s because of those machines,” he said. “They help keep the river clean and the lights on.”

“And Santa?” the child asked, because children understood that if something magical existed, Santa had to be involved.

The father laughed. “Sure,” he said. “Santa too.”

—

That night, Emma sat at her kitchen table with a cup of tea gone lukewarm and a notebook of her own open in front of her.

She’d dug it out of an old box—her first job notebook, pages full of cramped notes and terrible doodles of charts. On one page, in the margin, she’d written a phrase:

Don’t throw it away just because it feels too big.

She couldn’t remember when she’d written it. Or why. Had someone said it to her? Had she read it in a book, heard it in a talk?

Or had she said it, once, to a damp teenager on a bus?

The thought made her smile, a small, astonished thing.

She picked up her pen and wrote, under the old note:

Small things matter more than we think.

She tapped the pen against the paper, thinking.

Then, on a fresh page, she wrote:

The day I took a different bus, the future changed.

She sat back.

A ridiculous thought nudged the corner of her mind: She could write it down. The whole story. Not as a report or a case study or a technical breakdown, but as what it was:

A story about how a tiny action in a grey, rainy morning had rippled outward into light on a river and a better world for a little girl pointing over a bridge.

She smiled to herself.

“Well,” she said aloud to the empty kitchen. “Why not?”

She began to write.