What if:

What if: you came home one day…

At your door your key goes in but doesn’t turn. You do some delicate movements to no avail. You pull it out and look at it. It was definitely the same one you used this morning. You stare at it as if you can telekinetically alter it to function correctly, empowering it to be the key that will open this door.

You have a light bulb moment: What if someone’s left the key in the other side of the door? That’ll be it. It’s a matter of time before they realise what they’ve done. You accelerate the process by pressing the doorbell and look around. No one is rushing to answer the door so you see what’s going on behind you.

There’s a gardener looking at you and he asks if you know the old guy who lives there? Old guy, you think. You glance uncertainly at your front door, which remains closed. You choose to humour them while you wait.

“When did the old chap move in?” 

“He was here before me, which was at least six years ago.”

“And before that?”

“He moved in after a disappearance. The guy who lived there went to work as normal and was never seen again. His family moved away somewhere. You need to talk with the old guy for the details.”

You feel cold. Five minutes ago. This was your home. If this was true, now you had no home and no family. But you’d just left that morning. If this neighbour was right, you’d been gone years. What did that mean?

You retraced your steps that day.

You’d sat down in your desk and waited for the computer to fire up. And waited. And waited.

Rather than stare at the spinning blue circle, you went for a walk and checked out the new room at the back of your floor. It would be a café at some point. The floor was all laid and there were a few tables next to the window. In between two of them, there was a space. You stepped into the gap to enjoy the view of the fields beyond. As you leaned on the window frame a static discharge made you jump. Perhaps this was a timely reminder to return to your desk.

On your way back you spot a new flight of stairs you hadn’t seen before. You worked on the ground floor and knew there was a floor above but not a basement. Wondering what’s down there and feeling no rush to get back to your desk, you decide to check it out. As you closed the door to the stairwell, a strong wind blew up determined to take your balance. You cling on to the banister for support with every step down.

The corridors below were a mess.  It was pretty dark and the light switches were no use. You could make out boxes, stacked up everywhere. Some had fallen over but the floor was full of debris already. If littering was a competitive event, this had gold medal written all over it. And the less said about the smell the better. You walked a couple of paces and could hear things cracking under your weight. There was a squelching sound, which combined with the smell, made you think something might be eating into your shoes.

You thought, stuff this floor, not that you can stuff much more into it. The stairs continued down. It could hardly be worse down there. In fact it’s the opposite. The floor is so clean, you could eat your dinner off it.

The equipment was fancier than it was on your floor. There were holographic interfaces rather than keyboards. There’s television screens as thin as a hair. The users down here wouldn’t have spinning circles holding them up. In the space where two floors above you’d touched the window, there’s a camera fixed to the ceiling. It tracked you wherever you moved. Sunlight streamed through the windows but wait… aren’t you underground? A closer look and the sun appeared differently on each window: sunrise here, sunset over there with all the positions of the sun in between. A screensaver, perhaps.

This looked a good place to explore in the future. For now, you returned to your floor where you discovered a miracle: the computer had booted up. Another bonus was the clock read five to five. Almost time to go home. Terrific. Who’s going to argue with an earlier than expected end to the day? And there’s no one around... time to go.

And that was your day. Except it wasn’t just a day. It was a plus at least six years.

This is one of the challenges facing the characters in my books. They enter a building and the floors below are different time zones. In other sources of fiction, when you time travel, the expectation is that you can return to the exact moment you left. What if there’s a drift. The further you go forward, the more your starting point gets dragged with you.

What if you figured this out, what would you do now?