You wake up one day and things may not be as they were. Your lamp is no longer a lamp, your bed not a bed. These things still exist and yet somehow they don’t. Let me make one thing clear, we did not sign up for this.
At 32 years of age, I had a wife, a son of five, and a daughter of eight. We had our own house. We had our own little town. We had steady jobs. It was 2014, and everything was as it should have been.
Wake up and it’s 2162. They will tell me it was an accident. That’s what they will tell all of us. They will say something about time travelers on one-way missions to the past. They will tell me how everything at the transference site gets swapped in the timeline. They will also tell me that we weren’t supposed to be there.
I will tell them that the town was new. I will tell them that their calculations were off, and again they will apologize to us.
There is no little town anymore. Not here, not anywhere. It is just solid populace. Our house was still our house, but it was no longer amongst the swaying countryside. It was now buried deep within an enormous government building. They informed us that we could not stay there.
We moved into a furnished apartment, they gave it to us, no strings attached, they were very sorry after all. The retirement age was now 25 so we didn’t have to work. We were on the 312th floor and the view was simply that of another building’s 312th floor. We were told that it was a super structure. We were told that the buildings themselves needed one another to stay up. Alice and little Tonya hated the view. Tonya always thought she was going to fall. Little Greg loved it.
He loved everything really; the heated gloss plastic floors, the self-recycling sink, the food production unit, and he loved the people. We all loved the people. It was odd in that way. Every floor acts like a small town, but they could be even closer than that. Here there is no countryside to separate us, only walls. We eat together often and swap stories constantly. Even after 148 years, people don’t change much.
They want to know about the past. They long for a better time, but they make do with what they have left. Some of them get to go back. That’s why we are here after all.
They go back because the Earth is dying. They go back because the human race needs to leave, needs to vacate. They go back because it is already too late. There are too many to move and not enough time. In the grand tale of the human race, they have chosen not to re-write their ending but instead to re-write their beginning. They just hope that the ending will follow.