It was Thursday, and Jordi had the day off from school. National Synergy Day was honored across the world as ‘A day to take care of you.’ For Jordi, his parents knew that meant one thing: a trip to the museum. Not just any museum, but his favorite one in the city. Today they were going to the Gordon Chase Museum of Time Travel.

Jordi ran down the stairs, his father chasing after him. They lived on the thirteenth floor but only had to walk down two flights to get to the bottom thanks to the temporal stairwell. Jordi’s father barely caught the five-year-old before he was out the door of the lobby. The boy waited impatiently while his father tugged the sweatshirt Jordi had left behind over his head and down his arms.

“Excuse me, sir,” the ConciErge said from the touch screen, “The forecast shows rain all day.”

The boy’s father pressed the soft button along the zipper of Jordi’s sweatshirt, changing the fabric from cotton to windbreaker, then took a translucent umbrella from the rack before the door and exited the lobby. The monorail station was barely a block away, but the wind made several attempts to steal the umbrella before father and son reached its protection. The journey into the city was uneventful. Jordi spent all of it with his nose pressed against the window, feeling the slight vibration of the hover jets as they kept a smooth passage for everyone aboard.

Minutes later, The doors opened, and Jordi rushed out, his hood flickering ineffectively behind his head as the rain plastered him. It made no difference to the boy. He loved the time travel museum. There were so many fun things to do inside. The best ones were portal hopping and era spinning, more commonly known as Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR).

In honor of the holiday, admission to the museum was free, just like every other public attraction throughout the city. Jordi crawled under the turnstile, but his father was stopped by the security guard, who made him go through again to account for the boy’s admission.

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Thanks to this delay, Jordi built up an ample lead on his father. He got to the nexus and looked at all of the options glowing on the holo display. There were eight different wings to the museum, mostly based on era: Pre-Industrial Revolution, World War Era, The Collapse, The Reset, Tech Era, AI Revolution, Space Colonization, and the Beyond Institute. The boy made his choice and ran down the hallway towards The Reset.

The Reset was the invention of time-travel. Whether the Collapse’s extinction-level events in the early twenty-first century had brought about the Reset or had been caused by it was a matter of much academic debate. Even the best scholars disagreed on what had come first, the time travel or the apocalypse.

By the time his father got to the nexus, Jordi was long gone, but it didn’t matter. He knew exactly where his son would go. Jordi’s father ran down the hallway towards The Reset. The doors slid open upon sensing his arrival, revealing a room that stood out amongst all the other exhibits and displays in this part of the museum.

Jordi was standing at the central node. The massive windows behind him revealed a sweeping landscape of the rainy city. There was even a blimp in the sky, lit by the bioluminescent architecture of the skyscrapers. The faint illumination outside stood in stark contrast with the light beaming down onto the central node in an otherwise dark room.

The column of light, where Jordi stood, housed the original copy of the IVR the boy was playing right now. Most people, especially kids, called the ‘game’ Zombie Survival, when in fact it was the most pivotal moment in the history of humanity. After a century of world wars, the technological revolution brought on by the Internet had put society through unprecedented strain, culminating in the Collapse.

Jordi’s father walked up to the central node where his son was playing and pulled out a hard copy of the record Jordi was dialed into. The first book ever written by a time traveler.

The boy would take a while to get his fill of era spinning. His father waited patiently, again reading the preeminent dissertation of its time, What Becomes of the Forgotten American West.