Harney sat, stewing in anticipation and summertime sweat. The fan above her chirped like a cricket. Surely it wasn’t real. Harney watched her clock tick a minute past noon, feeling the weight of anxiety come crashing down on her like the wave in her dream. In her nightmare, she was treading water and feeling the entire ocean shift underneath her as a monumental ship sunk. She began sinking with it, as though somehow it had a hold of her. Looking down, she saw the last of the emergency lights had flickered until they shut off forever, jolting her from her dream. When she had woken, she was shivering uncontrollably from the arctic waters she swore were real.  

    “Come on, the drinks are gonna be served soon! If we don’t go now, we’ll miss them! You know how the lags are this time a’ year.” Mama Gerch hollered from the base of the stairs.

    Mama Gerch was right; the lags always were the worse mid-summer. July was the month for cyber travel, according to the Hologram Holiday magazine, and this year was projected to be the busiest yet after the release of Dome update, Dome 1200. Everyone updated, from Harney’s trailer home society all the way to the president’s mansion. The creators of the Dome boasted that in the new update, anything society as a whole deemed unpleasant was taken out while all the likable things were left in. This meant that in the Dome, one could lay in the sun and feel the soft glowing heat without obtaining sunburns. In the previous edition, there had been some ‘minor’ fatalities and therefore needed correcting.

    “Harney, we’re waiting for you!” Mama Gerch yelled.

…

    Lags are a strange thing in the Doom. Everything around Harney was out of focus and overexposed. As she walked around the blurry landscape, it took a second to load the next equally as blurry scene. Time crept by. Other vacationers came, but sound had not loaded yet so everyone’s voice was muted, including Harneys.

A couple minutes went by. Harney wandered a bit farther away from the others, following what appeared to be a ripple in the code that came up as a neon green line that cracked through the blurriness. Deeper and deeper it led her until there was nothing. Not a defocused treescape or meadow but rather something vast and dark. Harney felt a chilly breeze loft from the vacant darkness, like the breath of winter. She took a step into the nothingness.

…

“Today we celebrate Dome Nova Exploration, the safest way to travel throughout time and space.” said the news reporter, “It was 87 years ago to the day that Harney Scotte became the first time traveler through what had been a glitch in Dome 1200. Tragically, her whereabouts are still unknown, yet new evidence has been revealed that she may be in the year 1912 on an ocean liner called the RMS Titanic. Historians are researching where this ship will port next.”