Foston Slacks - Time's Flies

19

"I think it's settled down, now. We should be safe, as long as we don't integrate anymore than we already have." Foston tried to grab her hand, but couldn't get her to let her phone go. "Clara? Focus. Don't get caught in it. This is just like the queue. Remember? The evil queue? Put. The. Phone. Away."

She looked at the phone, then looked at Foston. Then she looked at the phone again. But, something deep inside told her to look at Foston more than she should be looking at the phone screen. The phone she couldn't use, because it had no signal. Because her phone, this phone was from Earth, her Earth, not The Corridor. With extreme difficulty, she tore her eyes away from the useless screen and looked at Foston as she put the phone back into her handbag.

"I did it again, didn't I? I nearly became part of the story." Now her mind cleared, she felt sorry for the residents of The Corridor.

It had all been so quaint, like an idealised world. Weird, but quaint. And now? Now it just looked like Earth. Boring. Nondescript. Unoriginal. Superficial. There was nothing quaint or idealised here anymore. Even though it was quite clean, much like her Earth was, it still, somehow, felt grubby. And a little greasy. Again, much like her Earth. She almost felt dirty just being there. Again ...

"We have little time left. Our presence here has stopped the author only having ideas, they are actually beginning to rewrite the story again." He wiggled a finger, urging her to follow him and she did, at a fast pace. "If we're not careful, we could get subsumed in this new iteration of the concept and then ... well ... then we wouldn't know any different. We'd just be two more strange characters in a story that will never, ever get read."

"That's pretty sad." They both jinked around two people arguing about politics. She didn't know a damn thing about the politics in The Corridor, but she could tell a political argument a mile away. And avoided them like the plague. Nobody argued before the lurches changed the corridor.

"It's very sad. If we were in a story that had been finished, or, at least, pre-edited, we'd at least be in a stable environment. But, no! I had to drag us into the unstable, constantly updating story model of a hapless, talentless wannabe." He shouted up at the strip light covered ceiling, shaking his fist. "Bloody amateurs!"

"I don't like it. Everything seems more sharp, more detailed, but at the same time, so very, very dull." They passed more people. "And everyone seems so angry. Uptight, repressed and angry. It's horrible."

"Well, you must understand, this story began in the Seventies and Eighties. Many, many things were really bad, back then, so many prejudices, but there was a blissful, ignorant innocence to it all." Even Foston seemed to feel a little less larger than life. Even his fur seemed more dull. "Now, decades later, the author's inserting a cynical, post-modern realism to an intrinsically surreal idea and world. That kind of thing never works well."

"I feel sad for them. The author, I mean. I wonder what could have made such a wild, batshit crazy imagination become ... this?" She swept a hand outwards, taking in the vastly different landscape of the corridor. Even the shoe shops seemed to have lost their lustre, and good shoes never stopped being fun and interesting. Never! Except here. Now.

"Just keep reminding yourself that it isn't real. None of this is real. None of the people are real. Not even that waiter back at the café." Foston stood to his full height and looked around, clicking his tongue. "Now, if only we could find a taxi. We can't risk walking the last few miles. Ah!"

Foston saw a taxi. It looked like a London Black Cab. In fact, it looked eerily familiar. Time seemed to slow as the cab drew near, the light atop the roof indicating it was available. Foston reaching out a hand, waving the cab down. The cab continuing to pass them by and the cab driver turning, staring right at Clara and giving her two thumbs-up. The driver. In a blurry memory of only a few days ago, she recognised him. The same driver that had given her the double thumbs-up back on her own street before Foston turned up.

"That's odd." Time reasserted itself and the taxi cab sped past. "That's the exact same cab driver that I saw back in London. I mean, the exact same driver. Weirderer and weirderer said Clara."

"What?" Foston spun, grabbing Clara by the shoulders, his head moving this way and that as he tried to glare into her eyes. "Say that again!"

"That cab driver is the same ..."

"Oh, no!" He interrupted her, even though he had been the one to ask her to repeat what she said. Clara found that quite rude, but par for the course with Foston. "It's worse than I could possibly have imagined."

"Why? What's wrong now?" Foston didn't say anything, only pushing and pulling her shoulders to make her turn around and look at what he'd seen over shoulder. "Oh, balls! Not another me!"

There, across the street, stood another Clara, staring right back at her.