Eleven

“Sorry I’m late,” a voice over by the door said. “What did I miss?”

Geoff strained his head to look toward the voice, but his view was blocked by a number of people, all crowded around him. He now thought he recognized a few of the faces, but he couldn’t be sure. With his head raised, though, he was able to look down at his own body, which he noticed was draped in a green sheet of some description. For a moment he thought there might be a better description for the sheet, but he just couldn’t remember what it was.

For a moment nobody said anything. They all just looked awkwardly at the man who had just arrived.

“So…what’s happened?” the man asked. “I haven’t done something wrong again, have I? I mean, I swear I haven’t told a soul what I do for a living, or—”

“Geoff…you might want to come over and have a look at this,” another man interrupted, motioning the man who had just arrived to come toward them.

Geoff’s head was beginning to ache, so he rested it back down again. To his side, he could see that the man had moved close enough to look at his face.

The man stopped still and looked around at everyone.

“Is that who I think it is?” the man said, extending his index finger slowly toward Geoff. The man looked to be in his late twenties, with thick chestnut hair, pale skin, and a round face. He was an average height, with a skinny build and narrow shoulders, and the more Geoff looked at him, the more he couldn’t help but think he looked extraordinarily familiar.

He just couldn’t remember why.

“I don’t know,” the other man said, walking across the room to stand next to the one who was looking over him. “Who do you think it is?”

And so it continued, with Geoff experiencing everything his past self had seen, but this time from the other perspective.

While an army of doctors, physicians, and surgeons frantically tried to work out why their patient was about as capable of rational thought as a piece of cheese was capable of driving a bus, Geoff’s mind began to wander aimlessly, his unconscious drifting from one dream to another like an unmoored boat floating across a lake in whichever way the current decided to take it.

First of all, he dreamed about a limited-edition meal deal from his local pizza restaurant. It was called the Geoff Box, and it was amazing. In the box you got a large pizza, twenty pieces of garlic bread, fifteen chicken wings, a massive pile of potato wedges, and three dips. In fact, you got so much food that the meal had to come in three separate boxes. Over time, people from all over London regarded it as the best limited-edition meal deal anybody had ever created, and it became so popular that it won several awards, including the coveted “best limited-edition meal deal” award. Ultimately, the Geoff Box made it onto the restaurant’s permanent menu, and the owner of the restaurant was so grateful to Geoff that he got free pizza given to him for the rest of his life. There was a problem, though—every time Geoff went to eat his free pizza, he noticed that it came with lots of little pink pills sprinkled on top, shaped like elongated footballs. No matter how many times he tried to eat the pizza, something would put him off, and he would end up spitting everything out again.

A few moments later, Geoff found himself floating in space, only he wasn’t inside a spacesuit—he was just wearing his regular clothes, like someone who’d left the airlock of a space station without really reading up on this whole space thing. He was pretty sure this oversight would normally present a bit of a problem in terms of not being able to breathe, but for some reason he felt fine, as though he were just drifting through the sky like a balloon. All around him, thousands of spaceships were in the middle of blowing up, but everything was completely silent and moving in extreme slow motion, the bright explosions happening at a fraction of the speed they would normally. Geoff watched as giant frigates broke apart spectacularly, swarms of fighter craft imploded on themselves, and alien flying saucers crashed into each other. At this speed, though, the destruction looked quite gentle, as though the very fabric of time had turned into a thick, gloopy syrup that reality had to wade through in order to get anything done.

As he drifted through the floating wreckage, looking around at all the different spacecraft in various stages of destruction, he felt strangely relaxed, as though he were watching a peaceful ballet. The dead bodies drifting around him no longer looked like dead bodies—they looked like graceful dancers, pirouetting in one synchronized movement across the stars. And the giant explosions no longer looked like giant explosions—the powerful flashes looked like a beautiful light display, dazzling some sort of cosmic audience watching from afar. However, as Geoff took in this fantastic vista of light and sound, his insides began to hurt a little. He didn’t think much of it at first, but after a few minutes he was in extreme pain, clutching his stomach in agony. He began unbuttoning his clothes to see what was causing him so much discomfort, but when he finally ripped his shirt open, he was horrified to see a huge gash running vertically down his chest. There was no blood that he could see, but his body looked as though it had been surgically cut open.

This must have been about as much as his unconscious could bear to imagine, as Geoff soon found himself leaving space altogether, and standing at the top of a big green hill, overlooking a sprawling city. His stomach no longer hurt, and when he looked down at himself, he could see his shirt was buttoned up again.

To his left, he noticed a girl about ten meters away, with long dark hair. For a moment she looked as though she was running away from him, but as Geoff continued to watch, he realized she was moving backward, which meant she was actually getting closer. The girl appeared to have a nasty wound in the back of her head, and just as she looked as though she was coming to a halt, a large bullet burrowed out of her skull and shot toward him through the air. As had happened when he was in space, Geoff perceived all of this in extreme slow motion.

The girl turned to face Geoff, her head completely healed. She looked angry and was screaming something at him, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t make out what she was saying. Then he realized that the bullet that had emerged from the back of her head was heading directly through the air toward him. He thought about dodging out of its path, until he noticed that it wasn’t actually moving toward him as such—it was moving toward the gun he was pointing at the girl, which he just realized he was holding. The next thing he knew, the bullet had disappeared down the barrel of the gun in a reverse muzzle flash, and his finger released the trigger.

He lowered the gun, and walked toward the girl. She just stood there crying, but her tears were flowing back up her cheeks and into her eyes. When he was standing right in front of her, he said something in reverse. He couldn’t hear exactly what he was saying, but whatever it was, it must have been quite nice because by the time he’d finished talking, the girl looked happy, with no signs that she’d ever been upset.

Then Geoff leaned forward, slipped his hand around the girl’s back and pulled her toward him. They looked each other in the eyes for a few seconds, then kissed. It should have been a moment of pure ecstasy, but something didn’t feel right. Geoff could feel something moving up his throat; something small, round, and hard. The sensation was quite unpleasant, and he felt his face beginning to contort into a frown. The next thing he knew, the small round thing was rolling around inside his mouth, before he felt it getting sucked out between his lips into the mouth of the girl.

He stopped kissing her and took a step back.

The girl looked at him and smiled. As she did, Geoff noticed she was holding a small pink pill in between her teeth.

And that was the last he saw of the girl with long dark hair before his surroundings melted away again, this time changing to a plain white room. Geoff was just standing in the middle of it, wearing nothing but a surgical gown, his feet bare. For some reason, he felt absolutely exhausted, as if he’d just been for a run.

The place was so white that he couldn’t tell where it ended.

He began walking in the hope of finding an edge, but instead of walking forward, he walked backward. He wasn’t entirely sure why he was doing this, but he decided to just go with it.

As Geoff continued to walk, he began to notice a small crack running along the ground. At first it was barely noticeable, no wider than a human hair, but the farther he walked, the wider the crack became, and the wider the crack became, the faster he began to move. Soon, the crack was so wide that he found himself breaking into a backward run, and as he did, he could feel the floor beginning to vibrate violently with each footstep, the two sides of the crack splitting farther and farther apart. Geoff was now sprinting backward, yet instead of feeling exhausted, the farther he ran, the more energy he felt he had. Finally, at the moment when he couldn’t run any faster, everything around him shattered like shards of glass in a giant greenhouse. The floor gave way, the ceiling caved in, and he found himself falling.

There was something odd about the way he was falling, though—if memory served him correctly (which it wasn’t really doing at the moment, but he decided to ignore that), when most people fell, they usually fell downward. That was kind of how gravity worked, wasn’t it?

In Geoff’s case, though, gravity appeared to be reading its job spec upside down, because he was actually falling upward toward a big bright light.

What’s more, as he fell he began to remember things.

He remembered his name.

His job.

His email password (geoffisgreat1, all lowercase.)

He remembered Zoë.

And by the time he had reached the light above him, he finally began to remember everything else.

He finally remembered the truth about Continuum.

And that he needed to change his password to geoffisgreat2 in three days’ time, because it was going to expire.