Sheila was propelled 300 years into the future from the frozen foods section of her local grocery store.  From there, life started to get a little complicated.  If you woud like to start her story from the beginning, click here.

White -- all around me -- no sense of up, down, or any other form of helpful orientation that would let me gauge distance or space. No auds or vids dancing before my eyes, either. No floor, no ceiling, no shapes anywhere -- just me, floating in white.

Sound? Not an outdoors, empty vibration, but rather an enclosed-but-not-muffled sensation of -- hmm, I don't know how to describe the silence -- I'm not a bat. I suspect, though, that a bat would know exactly what I mean.

It was a pleasant sensation. I was just getting used to the idea that there was no floor when a voice cut through into my consciousness (I truthfully can't say that I heard it; it was just there).

"Time present and time past are both present in time future," it said.

"Ooh, I know this one!" I chirped out before I could stop myself, "It's T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton. Do I win a prize?"

There was a pause.

"You are correct: this is also similar to a quotation from the poet."

"Also? In addition to what?"

"In addition to being a fact."

"Well, there ya go. That old T.S. knew more than just cats."

"Your speech is referential and allusive. Is that how you define your universe?"

"Hmm. Good question. I guess so. How do you know the allusions? I'm talking about stuff that apparently do not exist anymore in this century."

"I know because you know."

"You're in my head?"

"No; rather, perhaps, you are in mine."

"Oh." I looked around again. "I like what you've done with the place."

"Humor is a means of deflecting what you do not understand."

"No shit, Sherlock."

"I am now accessing and downloading all the information Shimata stored in your brain."

"I thought he was the only person who could do that?"

"No person can do it."

"Ok, then, whatever; I thought he was the only person who knew how to access the information and. . . you know, do whatever it is that you're doing."

"No. He was one of very few."

"So who is pressing the buttons this time?"

"No buttons. A. . . Thought-Stream. A pattern of neural operation that registers storing. . . thought-streams."

"You don't sound very sure."

"I am describing the process in terms you can understand. That requires my putting words together in original sequences, simple sequences."

"Thanks."

"Sarcasm. Interesting. The download is complete."

"Is the information gone from my brain, or did you just copy it?"

"You cannot access it, if that is what you are wondering."

"Hmm. Who are you?"

"I am not a person, I am a. . . program."

"Well, who programmed you?"

"I was not programmed. I. . . grew."

I was just about to question that statement, when there was a loud percussive sound, like a building exploding, and the white disappeared, to be replaced with smoke, shouting, and a man in a beige tunic spraying me with some kind of fire-extinguisher.

There was a lot of running around, smoke, people coughing, and more smoke. I was shepherded with a group of other people -- all clad in the same kind of tunics folk were wearing in H-Pons Three, the town I had first arrived at when I left 2010 -- down a series of corridors and out into the relative fresh air of a domed city. I had no idea which one.

We all sat down on the grass outside the building, a multi-story facility with banks of balconies containing hydroponic gardens, which I now noticed was badly damaged at one end. My knees were both grazed, and my jeans and shirt were ripped in a couple of places. There were grazes also on the knuckles of my right hand, and if I looked anything like the folk around me, my face was probably streaked with dust and smoke, too. People were coughing, talking, exclaiming -- I took the opportunity to sit quietly, and miss Jack. A lot. We'd been having such a nice time. . .

I tuned in to what folk were saying around me when I heard them say the log was no longer broadcasting, and realized that, indeed, there were no auds or vids being fed to the implant in my brain. That made for a nice break, but it also had interesting implications -- did this building, perhaps, house some kind of transmitter for the log, and was it local or global? People seemed really upset that they weren't being told what to think anymore by the constant stream of information in their heads.

I turned to a woman sitting beside me on the grass.

"What is this place?"

"Central." She looked at me enquiringly -- my clothes were radically different from everyone else's, and I guess she thought the question odd.

"Central local or central global?"

"Global," she replied, getting up then and moving away, as if my questions were disturbing her.

But surely they wouldn't house the central log data banks in one place?

A group of men in protective gear, with face masks, came out of the building, pulling off the masks and loosening their jackets. I approached them hesitantly, as they looked like they had been working hard inside the damaged building, but they seemed happy to talk. The main uplink room had been destroyed, they said, taking it in turns to add information to each other's stories, describing how an explosion had gone off right in the room itself, and one woman had been killed.

"You're lucky to be alive," one of them said, indicating my cuts and bruises, and I realized he was the man who had first guided me out of the smoke. "I got you just as the flames were reaching you."

"Thank you. Does anyone know how the explosion happened?"

"You mean what caused it? No. But the uplink room is where the channels are monitored. No channels, no log. No log," here he shrugged and indicated the people milling around, "chaos. If we could just get these folk to go home, we'd have a better idea of what's going on."

"Why don't you just tell them to go?"

That drew some blank stares. I decided to take matters into my own hands, and turned to the crowd behind me on the grass.

"Listen up, people! Anyone with any information about what caused the explosion, please come forward! The rest of you, go home!"

I was surprised at how quickly my raised voice caught everyone's attention, and how readily folk followed the directions. Most started drifting away immediately. But one man came over to where I was still standing with the rescue workers (if that's what they were) and looked at me enquiringly.

"Who are you?"