This change in setting is not a change in location but rather in time, from the year 1940 to the present to be precise. Riggs describes the shock of this time change on page 389: “The circular staircase we had descended from was also gone, replaced by an escalator. A scrolling LED screen hung above the platform: TIME TO NEXT TRAIN 2 MINUTES. On the wall was a poster for a movie I had seen earlier in the summer before my grandfather died. We had left 1940 behind. I was back in the present” many of the main characters in the novel have never experienced the time past 1940, so traveling to a world that is more than fifty years in the future poses many challenges, one of which would be the adaptation to new technologies. and lifestyle. The main characters have to deal with this stressful new environment and have to learn to adapt very quickly because this change in setting happens at the climax of the book, where some of the most ruthless changes in the plot