WTF Happened?

I found myself in the familiar void.  Darkness in every direction.  And in the middle of all of it was a pillar holding a giant plasma ball.  I looked on the ground where I had left my letter to My Friend.  It was gone.  This was the whole reason I suspected that there was a friend or another side to begin with.

"How to meet you or get there is the question."

I took out a piece of paper and an old style writing pen.  Not the easiest things to obtain on the ring.  I had thought about using a tablet, but I wasn't sure if My Friend would be able to use it correctly.

I put my pen to the paper, but for the first time I wasn't sure what to write.  A sat down on the dark tiled ground, staring at the globe instead.  All I could think about was the man in the jetpack who had been trying to kill me.

Coming here had saved me, but I couldn't stay too long.  I had a wedding to attend after all.  Marrying Lady Freud excited me and made me afraid at the same time.  I had only been with A.I. companion robots, so some would refer to me as a flesh virgin.  Though honestly, a lot of people never bothered seeking out real women or real friendships.  Why would you when an A.I. robot could offer everything you wanted?  Of course, if you weren't well to do, like I was, it could be a problem.

I decided to tell my friend about my upcoming wedding.  It was a quick note, but my heart was still racing and I couldn't concentrate on anything else.

"How many minutes do I need to wait?"  That was an important question.  I didn't want to arrive back in Old Town with the jetpack man still running after me.  Perhaps counting would be best.  I should count to ten minutes and see how long that takes in the real world.  The real world should go ahead quite a bit, making my exit safe.

I counted and waited in the darkness.

********************

I came back to reality.  I found myself sitting in a pile of brick rubble.  I looked around.  The house I had been in was gone.  There were just piles of bricks everywhere.  Had I been transported somewhere else?  That had never happened before.

I can't keep this orb here any more.  I'll have to find a better hiding space.  I went to put Tesla's orb inside my jacket pocket, then I realized that I wasn't wearing my jacket anymore.

"That's right.  I used it to get a head run on that guy."

I walked carefully.  The fog here was thicker than where I had been before.  Worse than Old Town?  I didn't know of any such place.  My heart stopped as I saw the remainder of a brick fountain.  This wasn't a different place.  This fountain was the same one I had passed earlier.

"What happened to Old Town."  I tried to calm myself down.  Had the man in the jetpack done this?  Had he completely demolished all the buildings?  It was the only logical thing I could think of.

I came to the tube that led to the other side.  The door was oddly opened, and the console looked busted.  I considered jumping down the tube and using gravity to get to the other side.

Either one of two things would likely happen.  The first was that I would just be stuck directly in the middle of gravity.  The other was that I would be shot to the other side by the force of gravity.  And when I got to the top, I would fall back down.  Over and over again....  For who knows how long.  My body would turn to mush, and I would likely die.

Luckily, there were emergency stairs.  But I dreaded taking them.  I walked until I found the old metal grate that lead to the stairs.  I sighed and lifted the grate.  The lights leading down were all broken.  I wouldn't even be able to see going down.  I carefully held the handrail as I climbed the stairs to the center of gravity.

Here the stairs stopped, and there was a pole to grab onto.  Finding the pole in this darkness took me a couple of minutes.  I need to be careful here.  This was the place where I crossed zero gravity, or the place where both gravitational forces pushed equally down on both sides.  My body wobbled a bit as it crossed this boundary.  Then I got to the other set of stairs.  This was the part I had been dreading.  The climb up.  And unlike the stairs that lead to The Round Table, going up these could take several hours....

[Please give me strength Friend.]

My legs screamed as I climbed nonstop.

********************

Gasping for air, I forced my way through the hatch on the other side of the ring.  I rolled over on the ground, holding my sides.

"It hurts so much.  I will die for sure."

For the next several minutes, I wheezed and puffed, every part of my body throbbing in agony.  My vision blurred, and I found it hard to focus.  Was I really going to die from walking up those stairs?

I rolled around until I bumped into a leg, or at least I thought it was a leg.  Not looking around, it seemed as if I had bumped into another person.

"I'm sorry, sir...."  Or at least that's what I tried to say.

The leg didn't move.  

"That's odd."  I tried to sit up to have a better look.  It took me several tries to get up.

Then I looked at the person that I had bumped into.....

That's when I screamed, and the bones of the dead person that I had bumped into fell down onto me.

"No.  What the hell?  What the hell is going on?"

Even though I had no energy, I found the power to stand up.  The pile of bones now lay scattered all around the grate I had come out of.

And that wasn't the only dead person I found.  All around me....  Dead bodies.  More then dead.  No flesh on their skin.  Just bones.

[FRIEEEEEND!  Save me from this hell.]

I sat down and put both my hands over my head.

"This isn't real.  Why are there dead bodies all over the place?"

But that wasn't the end of my torment.  That's when the real reality truly set in.  All the massive buildings were crumbling or already smashed apart.  It was like a bomb had exploded in the city and killed everyone.

I crawled around, trying to reason out what had happened.  That's when I found a tablet.  Then I came to a realization.  I had traveled very far into the future.  At least one thousand years.

"Oh shit.  I'm in real shit now."

That was the only thing I could say as I tried to come to grips with what had just happened.