1

I was wide awake when the time-shift occurred, though at the time I hadn't the faintest idea such a thing had happened. Normally I sleep like a baby on planes—something about the constant droning of the engines puts me out like a lullaby—but I didn't then.

Not on that flight.

It'd been a spur-of-the-moment thing, getting that ticket back home to San Francisco. Had to leave my girlfriend behind in Tokyo, which was tough, as I wanted—needed—her love and support to strengthen me for what I was about to face at home. My mom had cancer, a particularly vicious kind, and it had gotten into her bones. It sounded bad from the phone call my dad had made to me. Mom was down to a weight she hadn't been since she was a teenager, and losing more and more by the day.

I needed to get home fast, Dad said. "Your mother is calling your name at night," Dad said.

Fearful I wouldn't see my mom again, paralyzed by the idea drilling away at my mind that she'd never see me get married and have kids, I maxed a couple credit cards and booked the last seat on the next flight out. ANA Flight 008. Seat 14C.

My first time flying business and I couldn't even enjoy it.

I remember it well.

The movies and shows weren't grabbing me, but my mind was running on autopilot, haunting me with visions of my mother looking skeletal, her hair falling out in brittle clumps, crying out in pain with every shaky, perilous step she took. It was close to five in the morning and my eyes felt as though they had sand in them. But I still couldn't sleep. And I couldn't think, either—those visions, you see.

So I tried to distract myself by playing my Nintendo Switch. The guy in the seat across the aisle glanced at the device in my hands, smirked, then went back to resting his head against the window shade, watching something on the screen in front of him.

At exactly 4:58 AM, as I killed Bokoblins in Zelda, the plane lurched ever so slightly, all the in-flight entertainment screens flashed pink for a fraction of a second, and my Switch restarted itself.

I hadn't the faintest idea my life—all our lives—had just changed.

2

We knew once we started descending from the clouds that the world we were in wasn't the one we remembered. Something had happened, though at the time nobody knew what. I'd been away longer than some, but even I could see this wasn't the same San Francisco I'd left behind. All of us stared out our windows at the changed city below, and those who didn't have the privilege of a window seat crowded around those who did.

Solar panel–covered buildings glinted under the rising Sun. On others, windmills lazily turned on the rooftops, each of them shrouded by some type of firm mesh screen to keep the birds from being mangled by the rotating blades. Growing below, various grasses and trees and shrubs brought new meaning to the concept of a "living roof," as birds made nests of the plants. Cars driving the streets looked sleeker, more modern and uniform than any I'd seen before—in Japan or otherwise.

"This must be a joke," someone said. I looked over to see a man tapping on the window beside, as if doing that would break the spell and he'd see the normal San Francisco again.

I saw the Golden Gate Bridge—given a new, shinier coat of red paint—draped in fog yet to be dissolved by sunlight. It made me hopeful about my mom, seeing that eighty-year-old bridge looking brand-spanking-new, as if all the wears and tears of time could be forgotten with only the right treatment.

The plane angled left.

Most amazing, perhaps, was what at first glance looked to be a normal patch of trees in some park. As I took a closer look, however, I realized the trees weren't trees at all. They glimmered, their leaves sparkling, and everything moved. The branches raised and lowered and turned together, synchronized, and the leaves rotated. After watching for what might've been ten minutes, I determined the "trees" were tracking the slow movement of the Sun. It was a solar-tree forest, and it was beautiful.

We were still turning left, had been for some time, when the pilot chimed over the speakers, "This is your captain speaking. I've— Uh, I've got some interesting news for you all. I'm sure you've noticed how everything looks, and..." His voice had taken on an excited tone, and he spoke faster and faster. "Well, I was told when I tried to clear us for landing that we're a bit of an unexpected arrival." He laughed.

People chatted in hushed tones, wondering what the pilot was going on about.

"What's the meaning of this!?" an older woman bellowed from the seat in front of me.

"Folks, this is not a joke. Not a gag, or anything like it. We're in the year 2037, and the planet is beautiful. Thank you for flying All Nippon Airways, and we hope to see you again."

3

2037.

The numbers repeated themselves in my head from the time I first heard them to the time we finally hit the runway. 2037. Twenty years later. My mother was dead, more than likely had been dead for twenty years now. I felt a dull ache inside of me.

Too late.

Far too late.

To make matters worse, I couldn't just pack up and fly home, either. I had no home. And no way to get anywhere. My credit cards would all be expired. My passport would be expired, too, as the one I had was only good until 2025. Miruki, my girlfriend, would surely have moved on without me—and if she hadn't, she was now older than me by twelve years.

I couldn't believe it. How could I? And, really, who could?

Staring solemnly out the window, looking at the futuristic-looking planes but not really seeing them, I felt completely screwed. And hopeless.

"Sir?"

I looked up and saw a smiling stewardess. Looked around and saw we were disembarking. "Oh, sorry."

She nodded and I got up and grabbed my bag from the overhead compartment, scooted out of my roomy seat and exited the plane.

I didn't smile. I thought I'd never smile again.

4

Customs took an inordinate amount of time by normal airport standards, but I suppose given the unique situation those of us on Flight 008 were in, it was probably pretty reasonable. Once they saw who we were, once they saw our long-expired passport photos and the people in the pictures up close and in the flesh, it was as if we were royalty.

"You look the same!" I heard the woman in the uniform say to the family of four who'd been on the flight with me. "Exactly the same!" She came down the line, checking all our passports, glancing up at us in that same astounded way. She got to me.

"I think I look the same," I told her before she could tell me.

"You do!"

A gentleman down the line piped in: "And what are you gonna do about this? Have our families been informed? Does anyone else in the world even know what's going on?"

Shouts of "Yeah!" "What do we do?" and "Will we be refunded?"

"People, people!" The woman in the uniform waved her hands over her head. "I'll tell you what I know. I know Flight 008 suddenly disappeared on June 28th, 2017 at 4:58 AM, approximately fifteen hundred nautical miles off the West Coast of the US. I know that until now, the plane was never found, no wreckage, no nothing. And we searched a lot, believe me. I know that the world watched with wonder as it was reported on TV. I know that your families were worried sick, and I know that the airline compensated them for your apparent loss. And they have been informed, certainly. Other than that, I know about as much as you."

I wondered how long that "compensation" took to receive, and how much it had been. I doubt it'd soothed my dad's sorrows much.

An elderly Japanese lady behind me asked her husband in Japanese, "What is going on?"

He shrugged and said, "I do not know."

The woman in the uniform came back up the line towards us and pulled a device from her belt. It was white and rectangular, looked quite a bit like an old iPod Shuffle. She spoke into it: "What did you say?" A split-second later, a female voice repeated what she'd said in Japanese.

The old lady asked, "What is going on? I do not understand," and then the female voice said it again in English.

The woman in the uniform repeated what she'd told the rest of us, and the device translated it automatically.

A man wearing the same drab grey uniform stepped forward and directed us to move through the metal detectors.

The world had changed. I hoped it was all for the better.

5

The flat-screen TVs throughout the airport were all tuned to the same story sweeping the nation—the "magically" returned Flight 008, apparently in perfect condition with all its passengers healthy and intact, looking exactly as they had on the day they'd left Japan twenty years prior. How had such a thing happened? the reporters asked with feigned innocence.

Those of us who'd been on that flight marched together through the airport. There was an unspeakable bond between us. We'd experienced this, nobody else. Only we would truly understand the fear and awe winding its way through our minds as we took in the myriad ways in which things had changed. To speak of it was to cheapen it.

Other travellers stared, they pointed. Cameras appeared on the scene, reporters standing live as they attempted to get an interview with any one of us.

We huddled together, kept our mouths shut, and kept walking.

The uniformed woman had said our families had been informed, and I wondered whether Dad would be waiting for me on the other side. If he hadn't moved, he would be just a twenty-minute drive from the airport.

The idea warmed my spirits.

It's strange. Though for me no time at all had passed, I still felt older and wiser beyond my years. Perhaps because the world had changed around me—without me—and I was mentally still stuck in the age of Twenty Years Ago, hadn't grown with the world, but had been ripped from it and set aside while time passed me by, then instantaneously dropped back into it. It felt similar to the initial culture shock I'd felt when I'd first moved to Japan from San Francisco. Similar but different.

My hands trembled as I stepped past the luggage carousels. Most of us had opted not to wait around. I wasn't concerned about my suitcase. I wanted to see my dad, wanted to feel his aged arms around me, wanted to tell him I was sorry, that I'd tried to get home as soon as I could, and that I hoped Mom hadn't suffered too much.

I stepped through the automatic doors with tears in my eyes.

Heard a familiar voice shout, "Ty!"

Shocked, I raised my gaze and saw Mom, healthy as a horse, waving her arms in excitement. She looked older, with more wrinkles around her eyes and mouth than I remembered, but healthy still.

"M-Mom?" I sputtered, more to myself than her.

Then I saw Dad grinning with his arms crossed. He'd lost most of his hair and had gained a bit of weight, but he looked strong as ever.

I hadn't realized I'd stepped over to them—felt more like I was gliding on ice—but there I was, with my mother who should have been dead from numerous cancers still alive and kicking, touching my still-twenty-seven face, running her fingers through my hair that hadn't changed.

"Oh, Tyler," she said. "You poor, poor thing."

The tears spilled and I struggled to speak. "Mom, it was you I worried about! What happened? Did you beat the cancer? I-I thought you were dead. I had convinced myself I'd never see you again." I wiped my eyes and she guided me over to a place to sit. Dad sat on the other side of me.

"It was because of you, Ty," she told me.

"What?"

"Your mother was going to die, Tyler," Dad said.

She nodded. "When the plane went missing and I thought I'd never see you again, I wanted to. Die, I mean. But I didn't. I'm a fighter, you know, and I kept fighting. I think it was the hope. And then the airline gave us a lot of money, and we could afford experimental treatment."

"Very expensive treatment," Dad added.

Mom shook her head quickly. "Very, very expensive. But we could afford it thanks to your plane going missing." Her eyes were red and tears dripped from her chin. "It was such a bittersweet thing, you know? I'm here, but my son isn't, and I'm here because my son isn't. It was tough. But we managed."

"We did." Dad reached over and patted her knee.

"Your father was diagnosed with a brain tumour two years ago."

"What!" I nearly leapt from my chair, but didn't.

"Don't worry, son," he said, waving it off. "Cancer's nothing. Not anymore. They detected it early, removed it without surgery." He snapped his fingers. "You remember that gizmo in Star Trek? You wave it over the patient like a wand and it detects any abnormality?"

"Yeah..."

"It's a lot like that," he said and laughed.

"Wow." Nobody said anything for a minute or two. Finally I said, "So things are a lot better now, then?"

Dad shrugged. "No wars, no worries about climate change—we've got that under control now, once people finally opened their eyes—cancer gets eaten for breakfast, we've all got a living allowance. I'd say things are going pretty swell."

Smirking, I asked half-jokingly, "Have aliens contacted us yet?"

"Now that you mention it..." Mom said.