139 Years to the End of the World

Door to Tomorrow, Part Two

On the list of weird things I had ever done, walking through the halls of the E.F.A Headquarters after waking up would have been in my top ten; along with being cryogenically frozen and that one time I ate a broccoli blindfolded and somehow managed to guess sausages instead.

For me, I had walked through the halls in the same black jeans and blue shirt I had just a few hours ago. Yet, everything seemed foreign in one way or another. The once pearl-white walls had a grey tint of age to them that, to people who saw them everyday for the past few years, would not have noticed. Nor would they have noticed the fade of the blue of the carpeted floors. The stain on the windows hit my senses and memories hard, but definitely not as strong as what I saw after them as I walked out the sliding glass door to G, standing beside a black sedan just as when I first saw him.

Still looking up as I walked to the car, I asked, "What happened to the sky?"

G turned his attention upwards, only to show a short look of puzzlement before realizing what I was talking about.

"The Mist has been getting lower," he explained. "And as it gets lower, it gets denser, since there's not as much surface area around its atmosphere level."

I remembered the last time I saw the sky, it was a light teal. At that moment though, standing there with G, it was noticeably sea blue. Though light still managed to shine through, the surroundings were slightly darker in exposure.

"Is that what I'm trying to stop? The Mist from engulfing us?" I thought of my own predicament with Mist Poisoning and how exposure to the gas had led me on a path to certain death.

"Maybe," G replied. He headed round to the driver's side as I entered into the passenger's. "But I highly doubt it," he finished as we both closed out doors behind us.

He started up the car and we both buckled up. I asked him, "Why not?"

As the car revved out from the pathway and onto the road that lead through the guardhouse, he replied, "Cause the Mist will be on ground level in about a decade. Nowhere close to your hundred and thirty-two years."

"Thirty-two?" I replied, confused, before connecting the situation. "Right! Seven years in the future. But won't everyone just end up dead in ten years at this rate?"

"Don't worry your time travelling head about that," G said as the guardhouse raised the gates for us to pass through. "We're already working on something for that. It's quite cool actually."

"And what 'master plan' is that?"

"Oh, you'll see when we get to the city."

"And where are we going exactly?"

"That's..." G's tone of voice softened considerably. "That's um...you'll know it when you get there."

The city had expanded over the years and for a moment, while we drove through the refurbished outskirts, I could not believe my eyes that we were in the same New Roagnark that I grew up in.

"It's just Roagnark now," G corrected. "We got rid of the 'New' a few years back."

The city had expanded by over a dozen streets, with much more pedestrians on the road than there were before. I wondered how many of those walking around were my students from half a decade back. How many of them are people I could have met had I not been terminally ill. How many were living the life I could otherwise had.

We crossed back into the part of the city that was familiar to me. The older, more inner portions had buildings that were around my time, and suddenly the streets and roads were as clear to me as the back of my hands. One detail stood out from the older buildings though. Hundreds of glass covered walkways connected each of the structures, spanning over the roads like human delivery tubes.