The Subway Station

Gasp! Two hundred or more years into the past??? That must mean that you are back in the Information Age or more likely the Pollution Age. You have no intention of sticking around on Earth at a time where you have to breathe car exhausts, protect yourself from the harmful sun rays that slip through the ozone hole and all of that stuff! Yuck! And obviously travelling around will be a lot slower than the nifty personal shuttlecraft that can zip around Earth in ten minutes and where a one way trip from Earth to Pluto would take half a day.

You carefully put one foot on the step below the hallway floor and slowly lift your other foot and put it on the same step. You repeat this process carefully with the next step. As you do so, you are surprised by a woman walking down the stair pretty fast! How does she do that? That is amazing. You notice someone staring at you as you slowly navigate down the stairs. Nevertheless you continue down the stairs, and you find yourself down at the bottom five minutes later after seeing lots of people rapidly scramble up and down the steps.

You look around. This scene looks familiar - a subway station that you have seen in the NYC 34th Street/Penn Center Museum where they had a Subway Station. Except that this place sure is a LOT dirtier! A sign that reads "To Trains", where you have to go through a gate that accepts tokens or a magnetic swipe card and then down *gasp* another set of steps to the train platform. And there is the line of people leading to a ticket booth, presumably where you can buy tokens or magnetic swipe cards. If your hunch is right, you need real dollar bills to buy a token.

Well, you do have a gadget with you from the future that may be able to replicate anything made of paper, like a dollar bill or maybe a swipe card, but you would rather go back to the future. You might be able to build a gadget that will let you travel back to the future, but you probably can write yourself into the history books by "inventing" gadgets that didn't exist right now. After all, you are a clever engineer.

Well, what do you intend to do about your current situation?

1. Plan to build a time-travel device so that you can immediately travel back to the future without creating a time paradox.
2. Plan to rewrite history by inventing nifty gadgets that would address the global pollution problem.
3. Plan to replicate a swipe card so you can experience what it really is like to travel on a subway train.
4. Go back up the steps so that you can experience what life really is like in the late 20th century/early 21st century.

Go Back

View Forward Story Tree
View Back Story Tree