Marooned

It‘s been 11 months and a day since I had arrived to this wretched year, and I’m at my wits’ end! I am by no means an engineer, but I figured, in the clutch, I would know my way around a 15-year-old piece of junk timeship. This is what I get for buying second-hand crap from a used time machine dealer on Elon-12. I should have considered the spare parts won’t be around for another millennia (not on Earth, anyway).

My name is CL-150, and I come from the year 3020.

Now, before you even ask — No, I cannot tell you the winning lottery numbers or which stocks or cryptocurrencies to invest in. Not just because I had to sign several dozen release forms with the Timekeepers Directorate (if anything has remained comfortably consistent throughout modern human history, it’s corporate red tape), but also because I honestly can’t tell! Believe it or not, not everything posted online is there forever. Data degrades over time, and no current-gen storage system is actually eternal. And when I come from, it has definitely been a minute.

Actually, part of the reason why I’m here is to “fill in the blanks”, so to speak. There is a lot of debate in my time over what life was like in the year 2020 and onward, what with the pandemic, the protests, the bushfires, on-going climate change, and Earth economy on the brink of (another) collapse. The Directorate has thus decided to send a team of ‘truthseekers’ to conduct data reconnaissance on the 21st century Earth; a team of foremost experts in the fields ranging from historical economics and agriculture to quantum mechanics and temporal entanglement. The team was supposed to document bits and pieces of everyday life throughout this undoubtedly tumultuous year and return back once they have collected enough data. The journey, of course, would be dangerous, and it was risky enough to potentially be left without such a brain trust. Such a long jump through both space and time.

So they sent me first! As a scout.

I work in marketing.

Also, I had to use my own, “homebrew” time machine that I had built in my garage.

So, long story short, the machine broke down on arrival and I got stuck in 2020, and now I’m just trying to survive through it, just like the rest of you, while I’m working on figuring out how to fix this old clunker and go back home.

Until then, feel free to check-in every now and again if you’re so inclined to listen to random rants and ramblings of a marooned time traveler.

Talk soon!