Early one morning, the worst noise in the world began. It was bright and harsh and cheerful and it sawed into the warm thick fog of sleep with all the tenderness and love of a cheese grater applied to bare flesh. After some forty cruel seconds of this it summoned an arm attached to a body attached to a very suffering brain and all three of them fumbled together until the alarm was silenced and the air was clean again.
Twenty minutes later it came back.
And then ten after that.
Then five, and there was nothing for it but the last resort. George awoke, and found that amidst his dreams he had been transformed into a monstrous ape with a calendar and a schedule and a to-do list.
He stared at the ceiling instead. It was a good ceiling; he barely had to crack his eyelids open to hold all of it within his grasp, and it was a soft and giving texture that demanded little effort to understand. The walls were a soft blue that neither reflected light into his face nor soaked it into gloom.
Getting up was difficult. The blankets kept holding him back, and they had more warmth and vigour in their grip than he did. Far, far below the carpet gently cupped his toes, sucking them deep into its plush abyss. He swayed like a drunken oak and felt the cruel whip of cold air around his shoulders.
Coffee. He just needed coffee. Coffee would trick him into believing this was sane.
***
The coffee was nearly as warm as George’s bed. He put extra sugar and milk in it on a bizarre impulse and nursed it as lovingly as any mother would her child. Outside the kitchen window the world looked like the sort of thing you’d see growing in an old open jam jar: soft, feathery, fuzzy, grey. George looked into it with what he decided could be interest as he sipped.
The coffee ran out. He made another, choosing to do so without conscious decision.
There were no clouds in the sky, but presumably there was a sky somewhere in all that cloud.
The coffee ran out. He made another.
Somewhere outside the window a bird mumbled something and fell asleep. A dog didn’t bark. Far in the distance traffic snorted and rolled over.
The coffee ran out and he still wasn’t awake. He looked at the bag, and the words ‘decaf’ looked back unto him.
“Never mind,” he said. And then yawning, he went back upstairs and went to bed.
***
Time passed. Now and then, if George felt particularly close to waking, he rolled over and felt that subtle bliss of the cool, gentle touch of a fresh section of pillow. Sometimes one of his feet escaped from his blanket and tasted the empty, lonely chill of the air just long enough for him to treasure its return to the warmth of under-the-sheets.
Eventually he was hungry and went downstairs for breakfast. Someone had replaced his house with a server farm and he nearly tripped over some stray cables.
“Mornin’” he grunted to a passing vacuum drone. The kitchen was missing but a janitor had left a nutrient bar on top of a rack of burnt-out bitcoin mining rigs so he ate that and savoured the sensation of an appetite filled without any waking thought paid to flavour or texture.
“I think I’ll sleep in,” he told the security camera. It fell off its perch and shattered; a sticker on its back said MADE IN CANADA.
His bed yawned open, and he fell into it.
***
Bright light woke George, not all at once, but in a slow and creeping way that made him uncomfortably aware of his own body and its limbs and their creeping, bulging sensation of acquired energy. Suddenly keeping his eyelids shut felt like an effort rather than a relief; staying still became an itchy and restless torture. And there was some godawful siren wailing outside that wouldn’t shut up.
With no other choice, George committed a grave sin and stood upright, muscles wobbling and leg hair charged with static. The light was coming from his window, and if he pressed his face close against the glass he could just barely see a bright flash in the distance: some giant mushroom cloud was consuming the metropolitan center.
“Fuck,” he mumbled blearily. The room spun around his inner ear in loops as he fumbled clumsily through the detritus of his closet, knocking over moth-eaten clothes and dusty shoes and – there it was!
He pulled out his spare sheet, double-folded it, and hung it over the window. Then he went back to bed.
Ten minutes later he gave in, got up again, and put his second spare sheet on top of his other blankets. Then he fell asleep.
***
There was an extra weight on George’s chest; thick and yielding and with a warmth all of its own. Air wheezed from it, in-out, in-out, in-out, in-out forever, intercut and interwoven with a high-pitched little squeak.
This was all well and good as far as George was concerned until it licked his face, and even then it was okay until it started chewing on it.
“Erf. Off. Geez,” he grunted, shoving his way upright. The creature on his bed stared at him wide-eyed; it looked like a rat that had forced its way into a pigeon by way of a cocker spaniel. Its face was a mess of jowls and teeth and no less than four separate arrays of whiskers, which twitched and made soft crickety noises as it padded downstairs after George’s unsteady footsteps. The server farm wasn’t there anymore but neither was the rest of the city so it was a little hard to find anything in the roots and grasses of the vast wetlands that stretched from horizon to horizon to newborn seaways but after some grumbling and rooting around he managed to find the corpse of a small mangled thing that looked like a miniature horse with a flexible trunk. The ratter spaniel accepted it with a squeak.
“Happy breakfast,” muttered George. An eerie wail crossed the horizon as an insect the size of a red-tailed hawk shot across the sky. He shook his head in irritation, staggered back upstairs, and got into bed the wrong way round. It was easier to reach down and move the pillow up to his head than to turn himself around, and he was lulled to sleep by the whistle of the long wind through things that weren’t quite reeds, sedges, or grasses anymore.
***
It burned. Burned. Burned. A cinder that grew greater and grander until its sensation spread through every inch of George, head to heels. He squirmed, torn between bliss and hell, but at last he had no choice. He stood up, nearly fell over, and was forced to open his eyes.
The world was aflame with light that cut. No moisture for his sleep-crud-filled eyes; no atmosphere to dull the terrible brightness of the sun, no soil, no water, no sound, no life. Nothing could be seen but slow-cooked rocks and the terrible, terrible light of a senile and overburnt sun.
George reeled under that awful glare, tottering like the long-gone trees, but he would not halt. Sun shine, dead world, boiling bedrock – nothing would stop the furious demand within him until oh look there that would do. After a short adjustment of pajamas he whimpered in relief as his urine cascaded and the fire in his abdomen abated. Then he turned around and – with a little wince every time he stepped on a particularly hot stone – slipped and staggered his way back into the crevice that was his bed.
***
The next time George’s eyes opened a crack they didn’t see anything. No matter, no light, no energy, no movement.
He sighed and snuggled a little deeper down into himself.
Bliss.