I went to visit my family 20 years from now, apparently after not having seen them in a long time. Everyone seemed to be the same age they are now, but a lot of other things were different.
The furnace in my mother’s house had just been repaired; there had been something wrong with it for a while. I said that it was a good thing that she had a carbon monoxide detector, but she said that actually she didn’t. I went to a store and bought one for her. When I got back and tried to get it set up, I had a lot of trouble with it. It had a single button, but there were a lot of adjustments that needed to be made, so it played recorded speech prompts, but I couldn’t hear them well over the background noise, and the voice had some strange accent.
It could be set to use either 9 sensors or 27, and the sample interval could be set. Obviously these affected the battery life, and I didn’t want my mother to have to replace the battery too often. The detector had some kind of feature for predicting the battery life, but I couldn’t figure out how to use it.
I went to visit my sisters. Their houses were very run down (as were everyone else’s), but instead of making conventional repairs, they were using some sort of “solid hologram” generator (like in later episodes of Red Dwarf). You could still sort of see through them if you looked closely. For instance, several stairs on a staircase had broken and were replaced by these. It was very disconcering, but everyone else was used to it.
The deck had collapsed, which was somehow blamed on the dogs, and this was not replaced by a hologram.
We went out on some kind of errand, and about two blocks away from the house there was a huge crater, maybe 50 meters in diameter. I asked “What the hell happened here?”, but no one seemed to have any idea what I was talking about. The city streets that had run through that area were gone, but houses had been built in the crater, so apparently the crater had been there for a while.
When we got back to the house, the kids asked if I wanted to play a network game. I said sure, so we went to the attic, where there was some kind of portal (wormhole?) into a game area. One of the kids opened the hatch, and there was some kind of maelstrom, which apparently wasn’t what anyone expected. My sister yelled “Shut the door!” She looked at a control panel next to the hatch, and there was a message that the system was malfunctioning due to a software virus or something. I asked what would have happened if someone had tried to go through the portal, and she said “you don’t want to know!”