The scene had obviously been recorded by an amateur, ignorant about the technicalities of the sensitive piece of equipment he was using. The shutter-speed and aperture had been set incorrectly resulting in the over-exposure of the left-hand edge of the negative where a ray of sunlight gasped through a chink in the curtains. The unnecessarily narrow depth-of-field meant that the focus lay some distance short of the suspected subject and centred instead on a pile of rubbish that lay at the foot of a bed. Struggling, an observer could just about decipher a solitary figure sitting semi-lotused with head bowed to a bottled deity that he clasped desperately with stained hands. A siren seemed to circle the image briefly before reifying itself and penetrating the two-dimensional glossed silence.
He rubbed the photograph from his eyes with the balls of his hands, simultaneously removing a weekend’s worth of sleep.
In his waking world, the picture seemed to be terribly acute, telling at least one story beyond its poor quality.
The yawn of the curtains allowed the sun to penetrate the darkness of the environment and he was blinded whilst his pupils furiously attempted to adjust. He sat on a king-sized mattress, crossed-legged, gripping a bottle of Jim Beam that was now barely a quarter full. The scream of the police car plunged into the background and his attention was once more drawn toward the barren cigarette boxes, left-over slices of pizza, syringes, beer cans and spent matches at the foot of his bed as it had been for some time previously.
For the last fifty-two hours in fact, he had been somewhere else entirely, taken away from any corporeal existence by a concoction of drugs and alcohol.
Slowly his mind was becoming sensible once again and his heart, remembering that other parts of his body existed, sent waves of blood hurtling towards them. Pulses throbbed through his veins, eventually bursting out in epiphanal agony at the surface of his skin and then tracing the rhizomatic stem of nerves back to his mind. Every heartbeat carried with it the blood of pain and fear and anguish.
Unable to tolerate the light, his eyes remained faltering and his other senses seemed sharper to compensate their inadequacy: the smell of urine mixed with the taste of alcohol rose in legions, attacking his nasal hairs and transmitting poignant, stabbing messages to his brain; a chill swarmed through his body, making him shiver as it spread like volcanic disaster from its epicentre at the base of his spine. Together, the emotions created a thudding which formed the increasingly sharp pain at the front of his skull.
With a smooth, automatic action a hand massaged his temples, kick-starting his mind after it had initially stalled.
The surreal gone, now, and the dawn of cognisance breaking over the horizon with excruciating clarity.
Impressions that had flooded his head drained away in an instant, leaving only the feeling of nausea.

It’s a strange feeling when somebody takes away the only thing you ever wanted.
You work a sixty-hour week, forty-nine weeks of the year, enjoying every moment until it becomes who you are, the very essence of your soul. Holidays are a mere bore, a distraction from the main event, from the adrenaline rush of a tight deadline. Two weeks destroying your body with deadly rays to promote a natural image and give your brain a rest so that it can be even more profitable when you return. You sell your soul in public to buy it back in private. Of course, you never truly escape. Your overworked mind cannot simply forget your one big deal. The one that will get you recognised from the range of designer haircuts protruding the ocean of grey monitors. It doesn’t function on any other fuel, and soon you’ll be an individual.
There’ll be no more labouring to perish.
Only ten days to go and you’ll be back in that sterilised environment…
And then bang.
It goes.

The LED displays fought for his attention mercilessly; vying as siblings might for the pride of an exhausted parent. He acted atomic bomb, throwing out a palm and pressing a button on the stereo remote laying prone on the bedside cabinet.
The stereo danced triumphantly, a successful male peacock, before releasing the necessary barrage of noise through invisible speakers. The sound of the radio filled the room, mid-song, as it always seemed to be.
He stood, swaying whilst his head danced in the place he had just vacated. It joined him a few seconds later, delivering a surge of blood to his brain and dizzying him further.
A preparatory intake and he felt well enough to fire himself to the en-suite bathroom.


There was an ominous silence when it happened. Or at least when we realised it had happened.
The monitors blinked a few despairing times before finally expiring in a dramatic sigh.
Pandemonium reigned all day. Shouts and screams could be heard on the streets as people fought to gain control and with each other.

The coffee was a fraction short of boiling when he removed the jug from the electric hob. He had done this a thousand times before, but it shocked him now how measured and exact his routine actually was. He poured the thick mixture into a mug, adding more sugar and less milk than he normally might.
His newspaper lay maiden upon the breakfast bar where he had placed it as he came into the kitchen.

The panic set in as the dread was vanquished. A virus had managed to deceive all the safeguards and crash the System. Wiped it out in its entirety.
There is nothing in my head but.
The System had been obliterated.

He carried his coffee over to the bar and sat it upon a coaster so as not to spoil the machine-perfect surface.
Glossing the first few pages with no interest, he finally found what he was looking for. Although they had not caught the terrorists responsible for the virus, yet, a new failsafe system was being developed and might be implemented early next month. A specialist army unit had already replaced the hardware of the larger corporations and they expected the program to be complete next week.
Jack smiled. He had something to aim for again. Just like another drab holiday then.
Only nine days to go…

The System had been the source of all trade in the civilised world. Various peoples exchanged ideas in astronomical amounts. My firm alone had handled over five billion dollars worth of concepts every year, and we were a relatively small company in London.
The record number of sales had been achieved ironically two days before the virus struck. But that didn’t matter now. The System could only obtain its true potential if it carried on constantly, moon and sun. All that we had achieved as a race had been compiled on the disks that had been so utterly destroyed. There had been no back-up; it was far too multiple to even consider copying.
Each operator knew individually that reality had faded to black, but none could quite tell exactly what the darkness held.

The sun outside was bright and he marvelled at the fact that everything tangible had remained the same despite the chaos caused to the underlying infrastructure. He had had the impression that all would crumble away once the ideological foundations of the System had been removed but, if anything, the phenomenal growth had simply continued without as much as a shudder of recognition.
The air tasted cleaner, maybe, as he stepped outside. The faint bite of a spring morning whispered to him that he was alive.
A list of small chores hung over his head and he smiled for the second time that morning.

Most of the operators had jacked-out, a remaining intuitive sense realising that something was wrong; but there were a few who hadn’t been so quick and had suffered the greatest initial shock. Many hadn’t recovered at all in fact and a feeling deep inside me wished that I had been one of those lucky ones. Lost in the lattice of communal intelligence permanently. Actually absorbed into the System. Purer than any of the original preachers could ever manage. Purer than those that had inspired us so much.
The rest of us descended quickly from our purged state. There were those who had died almost instantly, those who had to end it themselves to ease the pain, and then there were those like me who inexplicably refused to die, filling the vacuum that had been left with something else.
I filled it with alcohol.
Temporarily.

The list fully checked, the gloom descended once again and he finally acknowledged the acid beginning to build in his stomach.
He couldn’t remember the last time that he had eaten. It must have been two days ago at least. The pain redoubled given a hint of encouragement from his brain and he found himself wandering in the direction of his favourite bar.

You can’t help but marvel at the beauty of the opaque liquid in front of you.
You know that it is going to burn if you sip it slowly and enjoy the flavour, or sting sharply for an instant if you throw it back in one.
Looking through the bottom of the cut crystal, whiskey magnifies everything in its sight.
_Everything becomes tinged with a sepia-induced nostalgia, clear and understandable.
_Everything is definitely there.
Though everything is forgotten in the haze of passing-out.

Entering the exceptionally narrow entrance and descending the stairwell to the bar, he noticed the smiling pictures of celebrity endorsement as if for the first time. He had come here occasionally after work, when the buzz of a big deal had brought the office together in a rare glimpse of human association.
He hung his overcoat on a peg as he entered and turned to see a sparsely-clustered populous staring at him.

Feeling uneasy, something close to pride made him carry his head up as he strolled to the bar and sat down on the nearest stool.

It sticks to the back of your throat and you have to get used to this uneasy sensation before you can fully appreciate the affects.
The problem with coke is that it makes you ultra-sensitive, ultra-confident, ultra-aware, ultra, ultra, ultra…

Smoothing the bar with a cloth, the barman ensured the safe arrival of a cheap-whiskey glass and grinned a “Laphroig” as he poured from the bottle in his left hand. “Three fingers and a dash,” he continued assuredly. “Just the way, right?”

Taking the money, the barman turned away then with a laugh over his shoulder, “We ain’t seen you in a coupla days fella. Been busy all of a sudden?”

The heightened reality is more painful than the actual, but it is the only one which offers you any hope. You want the affects to start faster and last longer, knowing you are on the way to a certain type of destruction, passing sonic speed, accelerating beyond the white light and onto that ultimate velocity.

The eighth scotch stung the back of his mouth with almost the same venom as the first. He didn’t know why he had stayed. Maybe it just felt like the right thing to do with money in his pocket and nobody at home.

You can go the other way instead of course, numbing the pain with depressants rather than reaching for a lifting euphoria. But that doesn’t work any better.

It was late evening when he left the bar, and only then because he was out of money on his card. He did the nearest impression of a man walking until he arrived at the tube. The clock howled in a new day as he placed his left foot on the concrete step of the subway. Only eight days to go then.

Injecting morphine for the first time is an extremely meticulous operation. You don’t necessarily know what you are doing, but there is something external driving you to pierce the epidermis - a sense of autopilot once you’ve set your course - then your muscles free-fall.

The platform was empty as it usually was at this time of night. Those who hadn’t gone home yet would be out for some while. He lit a cigarette and breathed it in for an unfeasibly long time, watching the smoke mingle with his breath in the chill of air as he exhaled.

And then it hits you properly. If you are trying to avoid what’s in your head rather than merely flee the physical realm, Heroin is not what you need. Only the mental agony escapes the editor’s scissors and the film plays on, looped and slow.

A scurrying noise distracted him from his intense smoking and he turned sharply despite the affects of his drinking. Nobody there. Though the sensation of something in the shadows lingered.

If you’re like me, you know that this stuff isn’t what you are after sooner than you do with alcohol, so you turn back to liquid amnesia with a renewed vigour. Apparently if you use it long enough to get a habit though, you live solely for the fix. A primal urge of ending the ache with a single solution and maybe your mind escapes the hurt for a more natural one.

Returning to his cigarette, it barely touched his lips when he felt the object strike his right kidney. The glow tumbled to the floor, spinning until it struck concrete tip down to create an unseen firework display.

A sweat covers your body and the torture is realised in every cell.

The faces were as indistinguishable as the boots reigning over him.

You know this will last forever.

He whimpered and screamed but nothing would stop them now except his unconsciousness.

You try to turn your mind away, onto something else, but it screams at you louder, until you acknowledge that it is there.

Straight-jacketed by their violence, every move restricted him further.

A final biting pain signals the retreat as your mind suppresses the actual agony that your body is going through.

There was a flash of metal meshed with dirty skin in his eyes and then the floor started to revolve.

The pain a mere sign now, dominating the collage of your vision but barely allowing you to glimpse that there is something underneath and beyond.

The concrete absorbed him completely, sending him spinning. He felt hands reach for his pockets, furrowing out his wallet and house keys. A brief muttering of retreats, fading quickly.

The poster torn in a crucial spot flapped in the stagnant breeze
The graffiti merged with the train spotlighting slashed seats
The scratched glass plates rendered those beyond indistinct
Each article slowly gained in precipitation and blurred
Suddenly sucked through the vacuum of the spray-tagged stairwell
Into the deafening headlights of the oncoming cars
Through the broken panes of a squat where the rain fell freely
The taste of winter inherent in the lonely atmosphere
Out through the boarded door plastered with a ménage of loose bills
Exploding into an autumn garden where the flowers drooped
Partially degraded leaves disguise eroded headstones
Through the tarnished paint of rusty bars
Arriving at the sleepy lamp-lit streets
The roads blinking with the electric glow of television –
The glass melted to red brick;
The scarlet burned to white;
The stucco revealed heaving timber;
The wood burst into flames;
The sparks revolved into rats;
The vermin scurried to the river;
A swarm of parasites before plunging upward –
The ebb of blood flowed across the aqueduct
The swords were engulfed by it all counter-clockwise,
A wheel of birds soaring to escape
Merged together to a forest
Scythed-down branches floated wordlessly -
The metaphor of dissolving flint
The greenery receded in the wake of ice,
The ice fought with magma
As the last statue screamed and shattered into atoms
An infinite plane made from bronze sand
The still of a desert taken via satellite amongst the stars, beamed back to Earth.
The pinnacle of pain.

A black nothingness.