“Argh!” Yang Fan screamed as he woke up.
He’d dreamt that he was falling into a bottomless pit.
But when he woke up, he was even more scared. He was not laying down or standing, but squatting. He reached down and felt a pile of skeleton bones, which looked familiar.
Who slept like this?
Maybe he had been sleepwalking and woke up?
Fan looked around. It was still the cave he was exploring; the dust on the rocks seemed a lot thicker, though. How long had he slept?
He patted his head. His mind felt like a jumble, like he’d forgotten something.
He reached down again and felt more confused. His head . . . felt different. Did he change his hair somehow, or did he crush his hair when he’d pa.s.sed out?
Before he figured this out, his gaze went to something else—the skeleton on the ground. Something among the pile of bones seemed familiar. It was his pocket device, which he had saved two months’ salary to buy. He used it for everything, from music, to reading, to watching racy movies; it was Bok Choy’s latest vintage-style model q2818.
The machine was covered in dust, however; if he hadn"t been so familiar with its shape, he wouldn’t have recognized it.
Fan dug out the device from among the bones, then screamed.
He finally realized why the bones seemed so familiar.
Half of the skeleton’s left arm was red, which meant it had been filled with manmade material after a fracture. A fracture Fan remembered even now; it was when he had fallen off a cliff, and was left with a serious fear of heights. Even now, he was limited to exploration work far from high places.
It was his skeleton! It was his body! He had seen it once when he had an MRI. It was him for sure; there was a mark behind the head on the right, also from that fall.
It was from when his bone density had grown and a lot of blood-clotting glue had been used in that same spot.
Then there was the teeth; the third top tooth from the right had a filling, a different color than the rest.
It was his body, his skeleton! So he was dead?
Fan could feel a coldness rushing toward his neck from his back and then crawling back down again; gooseb.u.mps grew all over, even on his arms.
But how could he have gooseb.u.mps if he was dead? Did ghosts feel cold?
Fan felt his forehead; it was warm and his temperature felt okay. Then he felt his heart; it was beating, and quite powerfully.
Fan noticed what he was wearing; it was old and shabby, and while clean, it seemed to be have been worn for at least ten or twenty years and was nearly in tatters.
His arm seemed thicker than before, his chest was broader, and he was . . . taller? If only he had a mirror, he could see his face.
What had happened to him?
Did he time-travel?
He’d never heard of time-traveling to your own future corpse.
Was he a zombie now?
He’d never moved. He didn’t remember dying or living, so how could be possibly be a zombie now?
Wait, the earthquake!
Fan remembered the last thing he knew. The earth had shook, and he’d been in the deepest part of the cave exploring. He had been terrified, got a strange feeling, and then nothing.
If nothing happened in the cave, then the earthquake was probably not earth shattering, but in that case, what exactly had happened?
He considered this as he rubbed the top of the hand device. The dust was hard to scrub off, but he finally wiped off the keyboard.
Fan’s eyes lit up when he realized the machine wasn’t broken, but had merely turned off. The machine was hibernating, so he pressed the power b.u.t.ton.
The screen shocked him. September 20, 3218.
If his memory served, the last day he remembered was June 7, 2415.
Eight hundred years! How did he miss 800 years?
Fan didn’t know if he should cry or laugh. He’d read tons of time-travel fiction online, but there was only people going back in time; how come he went forward instead?
Eight hundred years . . . What was technology like now? How was he going to survive on his measly knowledge? In the twenty-fifth century; everything everyone had ever done was already recorded, so even if he was willing to be a lab rat and offer up his body as a living fossil, why would they want him?
He was dumbstruck for a while, but thought of no solutions.
Fan pressed another b.u.t.ton on the device. His familiar desktop showed up. The machine seemed to work okay. The energy chip was still going to work . . . for another two years and nine months.
But there was no signal anywhere. How was this possible? Back in the early twenty-second century, electromagnetic signals were already on every part of Earth. The lack of signals only meant one thing: the era he was in now already had something more convenient, safer, and energy-efficient with which to communicate.
He sighed and tried to leave the cave.
He did seem to be much taller now. He had to lower his head or even bend at the waist to pa.s.s through the old tunnel.
He walked and walked, and made it more than halfway through the tunnel.
The cave was very deep, and unlike other caves with stalact.i.te rocks, it was a single straight path to the deepest part of the cave, where he’d been looking for minerals. He had walked this path plenty of times before, so he could do it blindfolded.
What he hadn’t realized, however, was that there wasn’t a single source of light around him. Whether he opened his eyes or not made no difference—he was seeing in the dark with his normal eyes.