The Time Squad have a no meat policy to be eco-friendly. On the lunch menu, there were things like minute steaks made of beans. Mrs C Eckler asked me to read the menu out loud because I have a clear voice. I pronounced minute steaks miNUTE by mistake. Mrs C Eckler corrected me and said it was MInute, as in of an hour. I felt humiliated but Mrs C Eckler said she’d made the same mistake herself which made me feel so much better.

Yesterday, Mrs C Eckler gave us a quiz about 2048 to see if we’d been listening in class. It had questions about eco-robots who collect rubbish. I liked it because it was multiple choice, which means they give you some silly answers, some not-so-silly, and the correct one, and you have to choose. I like reading the silly answers best because they’re like jokes. The best ones were:

Question 2: Why must we keep the Time Squad trip a secret?

Answer B said: To stop the wristwatch becoming extinct.

The correct answer was C: Because we all swore the Oath of Secrecy to protect The Gift and everything connected with it.

Question 6: Why is the population smaller than in 2020?

Answer E said: Everyone went to live on the moon!

The correct answer was A: The global one-child-per-family policy.

There was one I had to guess.

Question 7: What was significant about the year 2000?

I put A: The Time Squad was formed.

But I thought it might have been C: There was an upsurge of eco-crimes.

I couldn’t remember if the upsurge BEGAN in 2000 or just after.

After that, she showed a video about the Time Squad Centre.

First ‘2020’ came onto the screen followed by a picture of the globe with green for land and blue for water. Then ‘2048’, and there was more blue on the globe. The camera zoomed into the green really quickly, so it was like the view from a plane. Rain seemed to be dripping down the camera lens.

The camera zoomed in again on an aerial view of a glass building surrounded by lots of fields and trees green as a tropical rainforest, a play park with everything made of wood and a group of yellow dome-shaped buildings that looked like upside-down baskets. It was still raining.

Big letters on the screen said ‘FIGHT CRIME ACROSS TIME’. That’s the Time Squad motto. A voice said, ‘Welcome to Time Squad Centre, 2048,’ and the camera zoomed in on an old white woman. Her face was like earth when it hasn’t rained for months, her hair was a white electric shock and she had cat’s eyes. She looked 200 years old. A caption said ‘MILLENNIA, Centre Director’ and she said, ‘I run the Centre.’ I smiled when she used the word ‘run’, imagining her sprinting down the track in the 100 metres, doing a dip finish.