I woke up suddenly in a bed that felt nothing like my own. I always wake up immediately, there is no lag between asleep and awake. This let me quickly realize that the room I am in now is nothing like the room I slept in last night.

I slept in a normal king size bed with a spring mattress in a decently lit room next to my wife and I suddenly wake up in a single bed in a very small room with 1 small window. No wife, no lights, the usual sound of a ceiling fan not present (something I couldn’t do without) and the droning of a background AC (which I definitely did not have).

Worse than that were the weird posters on the wall of people with cyber enhancements. The last I heard was when neuralink was being tested on a second person so seeing this felt weird. Almost like that weird Teen Titans character.

I got out of bed and stumbled. I was never athletic before but I had a rough sense of my body. Never a great one but was comfortable with it. There seemed to be a disconnect between how I moved my body mentally vs how my body was actually moving. It felt like my brain did not expect to hit the floor so late and stumbled. This just fed me with a little fear. I looked around and saw a door leading out of the room I was in.

I opened the door I was in which led to a small living room/dining room, a washroom with beads covering the door instead of a proper door (wasn’t that weird) and a wall with a TV on it. All of this was weird since I did not have any of this.

My first reaction was that I was dreaming and that this was a nightmare. So, I pinched myself. That smarted a bit but I still did not wake up. Guessing that was very little pain, I did the next (dumb) thing and slapped myself. That hurt! But I still did not wake up from a dream (slowly becoming a nightmare).

I remembered that falling in a dream always woke me up. Guessing that would work, I went back into the room I was in and tried falling off the bed. I couldn’t do it immediately. I mean, have you tried intentionally falling off the bed? It gives you a real feeling of fear.

Slowly I worked up the courage to fall of the bed. Boosting myself by repeating ‘Akai you can do this’ over and over in my head, I fell off the bed.

It was blissfully short before my body hit the floor. That feeling of vertigo existed for a small duration which seemed like it lasted a very long time. In that moment, in the air, I knew that this was not a dream. Not something that I could wake up from. This was real. I had somehow (like in all the fanfiction / isekai stories I read) been transported to God knows where. I had this startling revelation and then hit the floor. The sudden jerk and brief flash of pain, and the brief flare up of dust, from hitting the floor brought me back to reality and confirmed that this was not a dream.

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Damn, this place needed vacuuming if it was so dusty. Wonder how people slept here. But more importantly, where am I? And why the hell was I chosen? Or was it condemned? I was an average middle-class white-collar IT professional. No huge sports skills to write home about, no hunter survivor instincts, not ambitious, not self-driven for anything beyond a comfortable life. I was one of those people who would sit on a couch and rest once I hit what I thought was a comfortable life. Not try to change the world. Hell! I was in one such comfortable life before I woke up here. Heavens alone knows what happened to my wife when I am not in bed? Or am I not in bed? Is this me directly teleporting, a copy of my consciousness, a next life or some weird cloning ability? Who is to say it could not be something else. Was I even dead in my other life? Wait, is calling it other life accurate?

Ok! Deep breath, 4 in 4 hold, 6 out through the mouth, 2 hold. Repeat 3 times.

Mental philosophical debate about my existence aside, I need to figure stuff out. This could impact life since I have no idea what is going on.

I stepped out of the bedroom again today. Went into the living room/dining room/hall, you know what lets just call it the hall for now. I went into the hall and there it was. A shard or gem or weird long rhomboid type structure. I cannot believe I missed this the first time. Was I so out of it?

Anyways, back to the shard.  It was a weird purplish shard with a soft cream light wafting on it from somewhere floating right in between the Sofa and the TV. I had no idea what it was but I am hoping this is something that can help me out with whatever is going on today. Should I look at that first or look for other clues?

I decided to walk around the shard and see what I could see from the window. I could not see much. Lots of Neon lights and a Skyline with another high-rise building directly opposite my window separated by about 100 meters. And did I say lots of lights! I meant there were a lot of lights in weird colors. Whoever thought fluorescent purple looked good for baby diapers really needs to be removed from their job. With nothing else I could get from looking out the window, I tried the door and realized that I was not able to open it. There was no knob as such that could open the door. Just a pad on the right that did not look like it takes fingerprints.

I saw a weird burrito dispenser attached to the wall in a corner of the hall area. I looked at the washroom and it looked like a standard washroom with a place to do your business and a very small shower zone. Almost as if folks don’t want you to spend too long in the shower.

Seeing nothing else of interest, I debated turning on the TV to see if that gives me any information against just touching the magical shard that somehow appeared in the middle of the hall and seems to be floating.

I gave up, touched the shard and had time to think ‘Damn! ‘ before I was knocked out again.