It seems improbable, no impossible, to me now, looking back over the chaos of the months gone by, that anyone could ever forget about the Great Shift, could not know what it was.
However, for completeness, or if perhaps this journal is read in hundreds of years time when this world-altering event is just a historical footnote, I will remind us all what happened.
I'm not a scientist, but a journalist, so my understanding of the technology involved is limited to say the least.
What I do know is this: one otherwise happy and innocent afternoon, some fool scientists somewhere in the New Mexico desert started playing with some technology from an alien spaceship that they'd found, but not understood. They caused an explosion that sent a huge shockwave around the globe. The shockwave was invisible and undetectable until its life-changing effects took hold. As it passed across the world, people's minds were uprooted from the safety of their bodies and thrown at random into the bodies of strangers. These were not one-for-one swaps for the most part, but random switches that could in some cases take a mind into a body hundreds of miles away!
Over four-fifths of the population of the world was affected. Understandably for a while there was chaos, then as things began to settle down new problems emerged. Identities could not be confirmed, no one knew who was who, what had happened to their loved ones. It was a mess. It's really taken the past year for things to settle down, and even now a lot is still strange.
I was one of the lucky ones. From my fat, balding 45 year-old body, I found myself in the athletic 25 year-old body of one of my colleagues. What happened to his mind, I'm sad to say I never found out.
I took this as a sign. I got off my newly-thin behind, gave up the desk reporting and went back into the field. There were a lot of people out there with a lot of amazing stories to tell, and we owed it to history to write them down, to remember what we all went through and how we adapted. So, I set off around the continent and the world, talking to people, experiencing their new lives and putting it all down in my journal.
This is the end result. These are stories of people like you and me, people whose lives were thrown upside-down by a random event they had no control over. Some are tragic, some are uplifting, all will amaze you. Read on and remember the Shift.
