At the heart of the city lies an older one. The borders are fuzzy. You'll hardly realise you're entering a different time zone until you feel the effects on yourself. This is not immediate. Time slows down gently, according to sine wave pattern. You set a foot over the line and you get younger than you should be. This small bud of a white hair on your temple will have to wait. This nefarious lump under your skin will stop growing. But it is not until you've climbed down a certain flight of stairs, or checked your reflection in the window of a particular wine shop that you can tell yourself "I'm here". Not that you feel strange, or exhausted, or better. Your face remains the same. The architecture is brand new old. People dress and talk differently. Posters advertise stale products and long dead movie stars. But it so natural, so true, so unlike a period movie set with its period props, that you feel at ease. You think the world was always like this. You imagine the future as a bright place where people eat pills and live all day long in coloured pyjamas, and you don't miss the future anymore. The merging process makes you catch up with the past, until it becomes the present, and you're lost to your previous world. Do you understand, my daughter, why you should never