6025

I fell asleep and woke up four thousand years later? I made a point of setting the alarm on my phone to make sure it would wake me up an hour earlier in the morning due to daylight saving time. The meeting tomorrow was a great opportunity. My book was being turned into a mini-series.  I set the phone alarm. No big deal, right? It shouldn’t have been. I woke up an hour early. Mission accomplished. I wouldn’t be late. Good beginning to the spring season. Great! Something had changed though. 

When I drove the thirty miles into town almost everything was changed. The publishing company I work with was there, but not the way I remembered it. The building was there but it was weightless. It floated and I, my Sahara...an old world classic, they called it, had to be transported up there since the truck didn’t fly. The people I worked with no longer existed.

Where? Long gone, centuries ago. Something otherworldly occurred between last night and this morning. You see, I set my clock forward as I mentioned. But when I woke up this morning I refused to believe I had been transported thousands of years into the future. I hadn’t aged any. I was able or allowed into the floating facility due to my credentials being still good. I’m a writer, remote. I create from home mostly or wherever I might be. 

But I can use the publishing house’s space when I’d like. As was the case in 2025 the time from yesterday when I set the alarm to coincide to spring forward. The meeting this morning was at the  Perry Publishing a part of Tyler Perry Studios. Perry Publishing bought the rights to my novel Nebula a sci-fi story to produce six episodes⎯tight, taught, to the point. We would decide two years later if we wanted to continue our partnership and do another six, maybe eight episodes. It was a definite yes on my end. We decided to meet.

As far as the people in the year 6025 were concerned,  I belonged there. I was supposed to be in this future. I was just, Silas. An old soul who somehow through my writing, my imagination, predicted the conflict between the planets in the Trifid Nebula. The Trifid Nebula planets is an amalgamation of the posterity of the Milky Way Galaxy’s planets, the Andromeda Galaxy planets and the Sombrero Galaxy planets with a smaller number of other galaxy beings living among them.

It was only a thought in 2025. Fiction in the moment like all things with the possibility of becoming a reality. But once you light a match you must be careful that it doesn’t become a towering inferno or a blaze in dry brush. I don’t mean that an idea will turn negative, I simply mean that it will grow into something bigger than one might imagine. 

And here I am four thousand years later and a simple thought has turned into something enormous.

It was peaceful for a long while in the Trifid, I learned. The idea was working. We, the peoples of the Milky Way, the Andromeda, the Sombrero found what we were seeking in the Trifid, planets that could sustain life; planets much like Earth. Planets not like Earth, more like Mars,  Mercury, Nuri, and Jhans. 

It mattered not. We along with other beings explored Trifid Galaxy planets. If it was solid we explored it for indigenous beings. New contact. We didn’t want to step on any toes. So we looked first. Learned as much as we could about our new potential home planets. 

We learned there were beings out there that looked nothing like humanoids. So we learned as much about a planet’s environment as we could before we, and I hate to use the word,,, colonized...it, they told me. We learned from millions of years of history. And on this foray into the Trifid Galaxy much like other galaxies, we arrived and executed with no ill intent.

Any planet with sentient beings we made contact and if agreed upon created a treaty. Any planet we settled we brought our own supplies and resources so as not to upset the ecosystem of said planet. We were completely self-sufficient. 

They asked me why I asked this since it was common knowledge after so many centuries. I couldn’t tell them the simple true story of daylight savings time. I set the alarm on my phone to wake me an hour earlier since I was losing an hour sleep this way I could hit snooze until I was ready to get up; I wouldn’t wake groggy rushing out the door.

I told them being a writer I like to ask people in the know so as to be sure of what I’m writing about. Measure twice cut once type of research and revision. But here’s the wild thing. It’s as if I visited this time before. Everything I wrote in my book Nebula is manifested before me. Much has remained the same on Earth, Mars, the Milky Way. But much has changed.

I have nothing to compare it to. I would like to say it’s like going from the horse and buggy era to breaking the sound barrier. But it’s much more than that. I wrote about being able to travel millions of light-years in hours much like we traveled thousands of miles in hours in the year 2025. 

I believed I was visiting with the producers and writers of the series scripts for an in-person get to know and more discussions about how much of the novel would be produced over six episodes. Plus if every part of every episode would be filmed at Perry Studios. 

Yes. I was told. Thirty to forty percent of what we’d like to film would be produced at the studio. The other sixty to seventy percent would be filmed on location amongst the Trifid Nebula planets some 9,000 light-years from Earth. 

“What?” I replied. I’d forgotten I was in the 61st century. The team of writers and producers looked at me shocked.

“Flying has never been a problem for you that we remember.” 

I gathered myself. “No, no. It’s not. I’ve visited Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. I’ve never been to Andromeda, Sombrero or the Triangulum Galaxy. I’ve never been outside the Milky Way is what I’m trying to say. I guess I know what to expect between our Sun and Pluto.

“Well why not,” everyone said. “Many of the planets we’ve settled in the Andromeda, like Earth, have four seasons. There are great beaches to visit when it’s warm. And in the winter the snow seems to fall forever. There are frozen lakes that are as big as the Americas. The mountain ranges stretch the length of Jupiter. You can ski, snowboard, tube or simply hang out at the resorts, go to all the music festivals, go to mass or take a class.”

“I’ll do some of those when I have the time. But what is it like in the Trifid Nebula?” I asked.

“We thought you’d been there since you wrote of it in such detail.”

“No. Pure Fiction.”

“Well to be made up you would have thought you were there from the beginning of the settlement fifty-five years ago to today.”

I shake my head no caught up in four thousand years ago not fifty. Four thousand years ago. I’ll never say as much. If anything slips I’ll simply laugh it off as a joke. They’d never believe me. It just doesn’t happen⎯to jump forward four thousand years. Or does it? It’s still going to be some time before I believe it.

“It’s just as beautiful as you described in your book,” one producer said. “Ironically, much like the Andromeda planets we just described to you. But much like the Milky Way planets and the Andromeda planets, the Trifid Nebula planets are going through their fighting phase.”