The World is Your Oyster: A Future Novel Preview

You awaken to an unusual aroma, one that may have been markedly putrid if you hadn't already gone nose-blind to its pungency during your contiguous state of blissful slumber. Strangely enough, this was the first night in quite some time now that you hadn't suffered severe insomnia, a compelling phenomenon considering you ran out of melatonin three nights prior.

You're sweaty, at least that's the closest adjective you can come up with to describe the quality of the moisture that seems to be precipitating about the surface of your fleshy tegument. Although, as far as you're concerned, human sweat isn't quintessentially agglutinative, yielding high suspicion about the origin of this particular secretion. You're confused, but also acutely aware that you're not operating at peak cognitive performance upon cessation of unconscious resting; you haven't yet performed the act of producing medium-coarse coffee grounds from that fresh bean sack of Moroccan dark roast that you picked up just yesterday on your way home from visiting your third-cousin-twice-removed.

You fumble to find your corrective lenses in the dark and vociferate cuss words at the erroneous decisions made by your former self at the optometrist when she had inquired about your desire to undergo vision-correction surgery rather than subject yourself to the harrowing affair of selecting new frames to house your impossibly thick, convexly-fashioned glass wreaths.

You successfully locate your glasses and attempt to dry them off on your sticky, suffocating shirt. If it hadn't been for the humidity, you are fairly certain that your clothing would transform into a wrinkly, brittle shell, shattering instantly upon being affected by movement.

It has occurred to you by now that something is off, but it's abstruse when your surroundings are so atramentous. You've now become acutely aware of how much you've taken luminosity for granted, as you toil with searching for the light switch. You travel around the perimeter of your room, feeling every reachable surface in an unrelenting hunt for that magical ivory rectangle that will gift you luminescence and clarity.

You stop suddenly, drawing back from the walls in terror.

There's something unusual about the texture of these walls today... Actually, there's something idiosyncratic about the texture, the temperature, and the curvature of these walls...

Your eyes adjust to your dark surroundings and you feel your heart sink into the pit of your stomach... How did you wind up here?