Prologue:

It’s easy to get lost if you aren’t paying attention.

            Which I suppose is my biggest problem. But really, who on earth gets lost by falling through a door? Especially when you’re on a fishing trip in the middle of the lake, and the place you get lost in, according to the basic laws of nature, shouldn’t even exist.

            The concept of the Fishnet Highrise was altogether impossible. A place not bound by the simple, everyday laws of time and space? Somewhere that anyone could find, whether they were from the beginning of time, the end of the universe, or anytime in the past, present, or future? But maybe that was the point of the Fishnet Highrise, to twist those three words until their meaning was lost.

            I think originally it was intended to be a meeting place, so that some

inventor genius like Ben Franklin could meet up with someone from an earlier time, and give them electric lights. That way the future would suddenly have much more advanced technology. It didn’t end up being quite that simple, however. It turned out that the Fishnet Highrise drew people to it. Specific people. And, as my crappy luck would have it, I ended up being one of them.

            I guess I came into this on a foggy Saturday, sitting in a tiny motorboat with my friend Mary and her uncle Thomas. We were fishing, or at least trying to fish, since you can’t really fish when there are no fish to fish for.  I guess they’d all been scared away by the noise of the motor. Isn’t that why people fish in rowboats and stuff?

            The lake was ice-cold, I was soaked, and I was beginning to consider suicide when I noticed something weird. There was a door on the back of the boat. A plain wooden door, leaning against two or three stacked boxes. And that was the moment that everything began.