Three Thousand Years

Opening my eyes in a panic, I took in a deep, gasping breath of air, feeling like my lungs hadn't held air for an eternity. I wheezed as I drew in as much breath as possible with each inhale, one hand grasping my chest as I tried to stabilize my breathing. It felt like I had just recovered from asphyxiation and needed as much air in my lungs as I could possibly get. I paid no attention to the passing of time, only focusing on recovering my breath and slowing my heart rate. By the time I had done so, I had no idea how much time had gone by.

Once I felt better, or at least good enough to be satisfied at the moment, I slowly sat up, groaning at the stiffness in my limbs now that the rush of adrenaline from the panic had mostly passed. Taking a look around, I noticed something was very wrong. I... didn't recognize anything around me. At all. Everything around me looked straight out of one of the most famous science fiction movies from the late 1970s, except in a cityscape and not on a desert planet. Maybe a famous trilogy of sci-fi video games of the early 20th century? Whatever the case, it wasn't familiar to me, a 25-year-old Aussie-American bloke living in the United States of America.

I awkwardly stood up and staggered over to the closest window, which was covered by red-tinted blinds not far from the bed. I grumbled a little as I tried to figure out how to open them, as there wasn't a string, a cord or even a rod to turn. After a moment, I found a button on the side of the window that, upon holding it down, caused the blinds to open and, after fulling opening, slide upward to combine together at the top of the window. However, as I looked out the window from the blinds, I became too stunned to remember to remove my finger from the button. The red tint wasn't the blinds.

Outside the window reminded me entirely of a Bruce W*llis movie from 1997. Like, carbon copy almost. If it hadn't been for the breathing panic I had just experienced, I would've wondered if I was going crazy. I half expected a floating boat to come up to the window. As I looked down, though, my acrophobia began to kick in when I realized I couldn't see the bottom... at all. I stumbled back from the window, tripping over something on the floor and landing heavily on my back. "Ah!" Then I stopped for a second.

That voice... was that... my voice? I sound like a teenager, there's no way that's my voice... "T-testing..--?!" No, that was definitely coming from me, there's no mistake about it... Is there a mirror around here? I got up to look for one, noticing I had slipped on a pair of worn-out boots as I did so. As I shambled around the flat, I managed to find what essentially counted as a half-bath by most American building standards and found the mirror over the sink. As I stood in front of the sink, I... well, honestly, I blanked. Total blue screen. Error 404: Brain not found. All that.

I looked like I had around the time I started learning to drive, about 15. No acne scars yet, barely anything more than peach fuzz on my face so far, and I didn't have a Widows Peak going a third of the way up my scalp! Still, I knew it was my actual face, which threw me for a loop. The scar from the metal BB round I took to the space between my eye and my eyebrow was still there, Even the tiny mole just a bit left of my nose and above my mouth was there.

I stood confused, staring at myself in the mirror, for far longer than necessary, when an electronic sound came from outside the loo, startling me. Making my way back out, I found what I could only describe as a retro-futuristic laptop, lid closed, but a light on the side was flashing red. I opened the laptop and waited for it to boot up. As it did so, I chuckled involuntarily seeing a degraded Windows logo appear on the screen. How old was this machine? Eventually, it booted up and, upon attempting to log in, it checked my identity using technology I'd never seen outside of sci-fi movies and such. A body-scan ray, iris scan, voice analyzer, all that jazz. Only then did it finally open.

It took me a minute with how it was designed, but I managed to figure out how to operate it just like a new user to a computer. After a bit of trouble, I managed to find the calendar and check the date.

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January 1st, 5022 CE

00:15:43

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New Year's Day... 5022!? Impossible! I still clearly remember yesterday being June 1st 2022, as I'd just gotten back to work at a college cafeteria as a summer employee. Unable to believe my current situation, I started laughing as I leaned back in my chair, staring at the ceiling. After several minutes like this, I straightened back up and started digging into the internet, which thankfully was only easier to access now. With the intent to learn more about where I was now, I began my search for knowledge