The surface of the earth is pockmarked with distortions in time & space. It is difficult to say when exactly this distortion happened, although most people will agree that it was sometime in the 2040s. Depending on where you were, you might have seen the pockmarks erupt all of a sudden in 2042, or seen small distortions which gradually got worse over few years. No one agrees on the 'when', because the topology of time became less like a straight and simple path, and more like rolling mountains and plains and roads diverging downhill or onto highways, where you can go into a roundabout or walk on the sidewalk or fly off a cliff; in the pockmarks, time becomes more like space, its contours depending on the geography.
Time and space may seem 'normal' outside these pockmarks — known more widely as rips in reality — but this is an illusion. Everything has always been an illusion, all moh-maya. When reality got torn up, it simply made naked this fragility (as old as the universe), made it more perceptible, made it more malleable.
You & I are in the Great South Asian Rip in Reality. It does not make sense to most people. That's fine. As long as they live & keep going, it all works out. That's what they think, anyway.
