Searching For Answers

They called themselves Sw1tch3d-1 and sure they were just an anonymous name on a message board somewhere but they had theoretically gone through this before. They could be lying, sure, but that would be one hell of a lie.

Because the things they were saying just lined up so well.

The old woman in a tent and the offer of a second chance and getting stuck in their own past but in a body that wasn't theirs and their search for her but their hesitation about a way back.

"Things feel different now," they'd said, "They feel electrifying. Everything feels so much more intense, like all my senses are dialed up to eleven. Everything. Everything is so different now."

Including them.

I logged back into the website and checked my messages to see if they'd responded but my gut feeling that they hadn't been around in a year and so it was likely a lost cause seemed to pay off. I mean it was only really a few hours since I'd sent the message but still that along with the gap in timing meant that my hope was rapidly dwindling.

I tried to search for them other places. The username they went by was unique and uniquely timely for the year so I figured I could get a lead but I quickly found that I was running up against a restriction that I hadn't quite expected.

It's been... well it had been a long time since I was at this point in my life. In my original timeline I'd graduated from college. I had a career. I had an apartment. I had multiple jobs.

I cannot and will not give an exact number of years since I feel like that would certainly date me, but it's been over a decade...

Well over a decade...

And the thing of it is that in that time things changed. I mean I didn't, I was still stuck on the same path that I'd been on all along but the world around me wasn't quite as stationary and static as I was. The world around me changed significantly.

Nowhere was that more pronounced than the technology that surrounded me in life. While I wasn't quite old enough to have gone to college without cellphones, I was old enough that the smartphone was a very new and untested gadget. The laptop I carried with me weighed four times as much as the ones that I was used to and in fact it was so heavy and the battery life so poor that most people didn't actually bring them into class.

That's right. Paper and pen. The horror.

But if there was one thing that was more of a horror than anything else it was connectivity. I was used to a world where I was online perpetually, with a little computer in my pocket and tghe internet available to instantaneously tell me what was happening around me, where I needed to go, and a thousand things I didn't need to know all at once even if I never asked for it.

And all of a sudden I found that wasn't the case. Not only was the internet over a decade back in terms of usability, it was slow as fuck.

Sighing after I watched the seconds of my life quite literally tick by I slammed my laptop shut and gathered it up into a bag. I glanced at the clock, making a note that the job fair didn't start for another hour at least, before slinging my bag over my shoulder and heading out the door.

The internet in the library hopefully would be better, I thought to myself as I stepped out into the bright midday sun, and hopefully I could use it to get some answers to things.

Because that was the plan and that was what I needed to do.

Find Sw1tch3d-1 and get in touch with them. Find out what they know about the old woman. And then find out the truth about myself.

Whether this is something I want and need.

Or whether this is all just out of control.

For a limited time you can join my Patreon for only $2 and get access to over a month's worth of new pages of My Second Chance as well as SEVEN FULL STORIES with a new one every month! Join here: https://www.patreon.com/SophiePert