Neil Gaiman - Fragile Things - Short Fictions and Wonders

And then everything lurched so hard I thought we’d been hit by another train.

And then we went through Euston, and half the passengers got off, and then the train stopped in the tunnel, and then everything went-

(Normal service will be resumed as possible, whispered a voice in the back of my head.)

And this time as the train slowed and began to approach Euston I wondered if I was going crazy: I felt like I was jerking back and forth on a video loop. I knew it was happening, but there was nothing I could do to change anything, nothing I could do to break out of it.

The black girl sitting next to me passed me a note. ARE WE DEAD? it said.

I shrugged. I didn’t know. It seemed as good an explanation as any.

Slowly, everything faded to white.

There was no ground beneath my feet, nothing above me, no sense of distance, no sense of time. I was in a white place. And I was not alone.

The man wore thick horn-rimmed spectacles, and a suit that looked like it might have been an Armani. “You again?” he said. “The big guy. I just spoke to you.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Half an hour ago. When the missiles hit.”

“In the carpet factory? That was years ago. Half a lifetime.”

“About thirty-seven minutes back. We’ve been running in an accelerated mode since then, trying to patch and cover, while we’ve been processing potential solutions.”

“Who sent the missiles?” I asked. “The U.S.S.R.? The Iranians?”

“Aliens,” he said.

“You’re kidding?”

“Not as far as we can tell. We’ve been sending out seed probes for a couple of hundred years now. Looks like something has followed one back. We learned about it when the first missiles landed. It’s taken us a good twenty minutes to get a retaliatory plan up and running. That’s why we’ve been processing in overdrive. Did it seem like the last decade went pretty fast?”

“Yeah. I suppose.”

“That’s why. We ran it through pretty fast, trying to maintain a common reality while coprocessing.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“We’re going to counterattack. We’re going to take them out. I’m afraid it will take a while: we don’t have the machinery yet. We have to build it.”

The white was fading now, fading into dark pinks and dull reds. I opened my eyes. For the first time. I choked on it. It was too much to take in.

So. Sharp the world and tangled-tubed and strange and dark and somewhere beyond belief. It made no sense. Nothing made sense. It was real, and it was a nightmare. It lasted for thirty seconds, and each cold second felt like a tiny forever.

And then we went through Euston, and half the passengers got off…

I started talking to the black girl with the notebook. Her name was Susan. Several weeks later she moved in with me.

Time rumbled and rolled. I suppose I was becoming sensitive to it. Maybe I knew what I was looking for-knew there was something to look for, even if I didn’t know what it was.

I made the mistake of telling Susan some of what I believed one night-about how none of this was real. About how we were really just hanging there, plugged and wired, central processing units or just cheap memory chips for some computer the size of the world, being fed a consensual hallucination to keep us happy, to allow us to communicate and dream using the tiny fraction of our brains that weren’t being used by them-whoever they were-to crunch numbers and store information.

“We’re memory,” I told her. “That’s what we are. Memory.”

“You don’t really believe this stuff,” she told me, and her voice was trembling. “It’s a story.”

When we made love, she always wanted me to be rough with her, but I never dared. I didn’t know my own strength, and I’m so clumsy. I didn’t want to hurt her.

I never wanted to hurt her, so I stopped telling her my ideas, tried to kiss it better, to pretend it had all been a joke, just not the funny kind…

It didn’t matter. She moved out the following weekend.

I missed her, deeply, painfully. But life goes on.

The moments of deja vu were coming more frequently now. Moments would stutter and hiccup and falter and repeat. Sometimes whole mornings would repeat. Once I lost a day. Time seemed to be breaking down entirely.

And then I woke up one morning and it was 1975 again, and I was sixteen, and after a day of hell at school I was walking out of school, into the RAF recruiting office next to the kebab house in Chapel Road.

“You’re a big lad,” said the recruiting officer. I thought he was American at first, but he said he was Canadian. He wore big horn-rimmed glasses.

“Yes,” I said.

“And you want to fly?”

“More than anything.” It seemed like I half-remembered a world in which I’d forgotten that I wanted to fly planes, which seemed as strange to me as forgetting my own name.

“Well,” said the horn-rimmed man, “we’re going to have to bend a few rules. But we’ll have you up in the air in no time.” And he meant it, too.

The next few years passed really fast. It seemed like I spent all of them in planes of different kinds, cramped into tiny cockpits, in seats I barely fitted, flicking switches too small for my fingers.

I got Secret clearance, then I got Noble clearance, which leaves Secret clearance in the shade, and then I got Graceful clearance, which the Prime Minister himself doesn’t have, by which time I was piloting flying saucers and other craft that moved with no visible means of support.

I started dating a girl called Sandra, and then we got married, because if we married we got to move into married quarters, which was a nice little semi-detached house near Dartmoor. We never had any children: I had been warned that it was possible I might have been exposed to enough radiation to fry my gonads, and it seemed sensible not to try for kids, under the circumstances: didn’t want to breed monsters.

It was 1985 when the man with horn-rimmed spectacles walked into my house.

My wife was at her mother’s that week. Things had got a bit tense, and she’d moved out to buy herself some “breathing room.” She said I was getting on her nerves. But if I was getting on anyone’s nerves, I think they must have been my own. It seemed like I knew what was going to happen all the time. Not just me: it seemed like everyone knew what was going to happen. Like we were sleepwalking through our lives for the tenth or the twentieth or the hundredth time.

I wanted to tell Sandra, but somehow I knew better, knew I’d lose her if I opened my mouth. Still, I seemed to be losing her anyway. So I was sitting in the lounge watching The Tube on Channel Four and drinking a mug of tea, and feeling sorry for myself.

The man with the horn-rimmed specs walked into my house like he owned the place. He checked his watch.

“Right,” he said. “Time to go. You’ll be piloting something pretty close to a PL-47.”

Even people with Graceful clearance weren’t meant to know about PL-47s. I’d flown a prototype a dozen times. Looked like a teacup, flew like something from Star Wars.

“Shouldn’t I leave a note for Sandra?” I asked.

“No,” he said, flatly. “Now, sit down on the floor and breathe deeply and regularly. In, out, in, out.”

It never occurred to me to argue with him, or to disobey. I sat down on the floor, and I began to breathe, slowly, in and out and out and in and…

In.

Out.

In.

A wrenching. The worst pain I’ve ever felt. I was choking.

In.

Out.

I was screaming, but I could hear my voice and I wasn’t screaming. All I could hear was a low bubbling moan.

In.

Out.

It was like being born. It wasn’t comfortable, or pleasant. It was the breathing carried me through it, through all the pain and the darkness and the bubbling in my lungs. I opened my eyes. I was lying on a metal disk about eight feet across. I was naked, wet, and surrounded by a sprawl of cables. They were retracting, moving away from me, like scared worms or nervous brightly colored snakes.