On February 14th, 2200, at approximately 15:30, we were walking independently — we did not know each other — on the Michigan Avenue overlook in the upper Shelf District. We have compared our experiences in detail since. They are identical in every respect that matters.

The city changed. Not gradually. Between one step and the next, the skyline was wrong. The Spine was not there. The arcologies were not there. The sky was a different color — clearer, bluer, without the perpetual haze of industrial output. The buildings were low, brick, old in a way that nothing in GLMZ is old. There were trees. Not the engineered varietals in the upper-tier planters — real trees, large and wild, lining a street that we both recognized as the same geography but two hundred years earlier. We were standing in the same place, looking at a city that had not existed for two centuries.

The experience lasted approximately four minutes. We could hear the old city — traffic sounds that were mechanical, combustion-engine, not electric. Voices speaking English with accents that sounded regional in a way that modern speech is not. Wind through leaves. We could smell it — green, organic, with an undertone of vehicle exhaust and lake water. The sensory detail was complete. This was not a hallucination. Hallucinations do not synchronize between two strangers standing thirty meters apart.

At approximately 15:34, the experience ended. The modern city returned. The Spine was there. The haze was there. The trees were gone. We looked at each other across the overlook — two strangers with identical expressions of disorientation — and Dr. Okafor-Chen said, "Did you see it too?" Neither of us was running a simulation. Neither of us has a BCI capable of generating environmental overlay. Neither of us has a psychiatric history. We saw the past. We do not know how. We do not know why it stopped.