by the middle of the 21st century

consensus reality was under constant stress from the pressures introduced by accident when experiments in quantum physics got out of hand.....a lot of historians tend to blame the Chinese, since they did not heed the warnings from the CalTech Group which started the whole thing.....the folks in Pasadena had predicted that excessive "dark force" manipulation could lead to undesirable and dangerous consequences.....but with the state of anarchy that came after the fall of the ChiComs in 2132, there was nobody to police the radicals in the Chinese universities, and they still had vast resources at hand....

So the South China Group went hog wild with the new gravity wave technology, pushing things to the extreme......they were trying to achieve an anti-gravity engine, to seize the high ground by levitating industrial complexes to Earth orbit.....but the complications of messing around with basic constants were not fully understood at that point in space-time.....and so the China Accident came to pass.....

The space station they had been trying to lift to orbit was instead transported to another layer of the multiverse, along with a thousand or so hectares of the Chinese countryside.....all that was left to see was a big hole in the ground.....

The newscasters said "This is unreal!" And they were right, un-reality had been introduced into our environment.....the "dark matter" that underlies the consensus reality had shock waves running through it.....so everything started "shaking like a bowl full of jelly".....

One thing that happened was that a small town in South Carolina was whisked away to an alternate history......the moon and the stars and all were still there, and you could breath the air and drink the water.....and there were birds and flowers and trees.....but there were no other people they could find anywhere close by.....and no electrical grid, no radio waves.....nothing technological besides what that had with them.....batteries that would soon run out of juice, cars that would soon run out of gas......drugstores that would soon run out of drugs......no trucks bringing in foodstuffs....you starting to get the picture?

(to be continued)