Somebody had spoken to him. "Something was waiting for you."
It was rare for Colin to oversleep, but his mind had been seized by dark dreams.
"Something was waiting for you."
Dreams of fear and doubt, of being lost in a place of death and darkness. Waiting for him.
In an instant he jerked awake and was falling suddenly. And he was back. Awake.
The place was familiar enough. He must have still been in his hotel suite. A large window above his bed showed the pale blue sky of a summer morning. When he sat up to look outside, he immediately remembered. He was still at the pembroke coast with John and Virgil. The window at which he slept looked straight down the line of the cliffs and headlands, and in the east were other landmarks; old, stone churches and clusters of cottages beneath the morning sun.
But he had still been drowsed enough to overlook the rest of the suite, let alone, for that matter, the music that was playing...
The radio at his bedside had been quietly leaking out the sounds of an old electric guitar for over a minute now. How slow he had been to notice it astonished him.
The rest of the place resembled a bedroom suite that could neither be described as luxurious, nor particularly meagre. The walls held a solid white and the floor was carpeted with thin and brittle blue. However, a three-person sofa perpendicular to his bed was made of a costly, black leather. But Colin had soon noticed something much stranger, much closer to him.
On his bedside table, a fresh cup of tea - still steaming-hot and sweet-smelling - and a small plate of toast had been prepared for him. He took the butter knife in his hand, wondering to himself. Clearly, he was not alone.
A sharp click sprung from the far wall, and the door was opened. Without thinking, Colin secured the knife firmly in his hand beneath the duvet.
The door gave a creak, and the gaunt figure of Virgil walked proudly into the room, quickly clicked his knuckles, and sat down on the black sofa. "Hello Colin, how are you feeling?"
It took Colin a strange moment to remember who the man was. "I'm fine...Where's John?"
"He'll be back with us shortly," Virgil said with a curious smugness.
Virgil stood up; six feet of pure skin and bone. His entire appearance gave the impression that he had been starved for several years at least. A grey-coloured skeletal thing that threatened to cut anything that touched it like a blade. His face was young, yet so frail. His hair had receded by a curious amount for somebody his age, and he had a thin smile that always seemed to say "I'm up to no good."
"Now, Colin, you do remember...erm...the reason why we travelled to Wales?"
The solemness of his tone had chilled him, but Colin had soon become distracted by something else. When Virgil pulled back his long sleeve to adjust his watch strap, it gave Colin a brief glimpse of a number of red scratches on Virgil's forearm. "Err...We were..." Colin tried to answer his question, but was struck sharply by what his memory held, or how much it didn't hold. "I can't..."
"You don't know?"
Colin was hesitant in disbelief. "I don't know." He shook his head. "We were...getting away from something."
"Yes. Now Colin, can you tell me...what you remember happened after that?"
In that moment, Colin was frozen as still as stone.
"Something was waiting for you."
The suspicion that had been slowly gathering in his mind was now starting to form itself.
Colin gave him a malevolent, demanding stare. "Okay." Beneath the duvet, his grip tightened on the knife. "What's going on?"
Virgil awkwardly paused, clearly not knowing what to do next.
"Just tell me one thing." Colin demanded. "Where am I?"
Virgil sat back down on the sofa and put his hands together, exhaling loudly. "I...must tell you now...that this place is not where you remember being, nor anywhere remotely near it for that matter." He nodded to the window. "Do you believe that that's Wales on the other side of that window?"
Still shivering, Colin lifted himself up so that he sat on his bed and looked beyond the window. "That's...not Wales?"
"I'm sorry," Virgil said simply. "It's just an illusion. It's not real glass."
Colin moved his head from side to side, up and down, and even forward and back. There was no way it could have been true! It couldn't have been a painting, nor even a hologram; his mere perception of depth told him that. Even focusing on small objects in the far distance - the individual hikers and gusts of the wind - he saw no explanation.
"Colin, I need you to do exactly as I say. Stand up slowly." Virgil gave him an authoritative look. "And give me the knife." He said slowly.
Colin was amazed. But there was not much he could do. Colin obeyed without any sort of resistance, slowly stepping further backwards. It was only when he stepped behind Virgil that he saw the iron hammer in his fist.
It seemed as if Virgil was offering it to him. "Smash it."
"What?"
Virgil nodded to the view. "The window. Smash it. Then you'll see."
Reluctantly, Colin took the hammer, keeping his eyes fixed on the centre of the glass. His arm swung back and hesitated for a second. But Colin was determined to learn the truth.
The window was smashed with one great slam and shattered, leaving a cobweb of cracks stretching corner to corner.
And piece by piece, the fragments of glass fell to the ground like falling snowflakes. As this happened, the room fell into darkness, but he saw what was on the other side...
"What sort of magic is this?" He gasped.
There was a low and soft boom followed by an electric buzzing that soon faded, and the white ceiling tiles illuminated in a checkerboard pattern. But Colin hardly noticed. For lurking on the other side of the window frame had been nothing but wall, as white as the rest of the room. The view of Wales had gone.
"How..."
"I told you." Virgil sighed. "It's not real glass. It's only a decorative material for places that...I guess can't afford a real view.
"Normally, light travels through glass at three-hundred-million metres a second. Don't ask me how, but some mad scientists created a material that dramatically slows down any light beams that pass through it. Then, after the light has been passing through it for six months or a year or ten years, the photons shoot out again as if nothing happened. And the person on the other side will see a view that's six months or a year or ten years old."
Colin nodded to show he understood. But he now had something else to worry about. How old was the view he had seen of his old home? If what Virgil said was true, it could have been a century ago, or maybe more!
The thought was chilling. But to a level he knew...
Suddenly, a line came to him from an old text. But who had written it?
"Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before."
But what had those dreams he had dreamt meant?
He feared he knew the answer, held in those words that haunted him most of all.
EPSILON IX
BUILT IN TERMINAL ONE
YEAR 2775
"So...exactly what date is it today?"
"Accurate to anything closer than twenty years, I can't tell you. There's absolutely no way of knowing. But can you tell me Colin: what was the date when we were last in Wales?"
"The twenty-first of February."
"Of what year?"
Colin opened his mouth, but said nothing. Virgil could almost see him turn grey.
"Just as I had thought." Virgil gave the "I'm up to no good" smile again. "At least now you wont be shocked by the true date."
"Can I ask you a question?" Colin didn't wait for an answer. "What does the year 2775 mean to you?"
It looked as if Virgil couldn't believe what he had said. He sucked in his lips, and after a moment of thinking deeply, took in a deep breath. "I think, the sooner you know, the better. And you're perfectly capable of accepting it.
"This is the beginning...of the fourth millennium. The year 2775 was over two centuries ago." Virgil slowly stretched his palm out towards the door. "Come with me."
"Where?"
"I want to show you what 2775 means."
Colin didn't move. He only stood there looking sadly at the outspread crumbs of broken glass across the floor. "You know, don't you?" Colin's head never moved to look at him. "John's dead Virgil."
Virgil simply nodded, not speaking a word.
And now Colin was nearly crying with anger. "You know about the dream! About awakening in darkness."
"Dream? What are you talking about?" Virgil nodded to the empty window frame, where the view of his old home had been not long ago. "That was the dream."
* * * * *
The hallway he had been lead out to he instantly recognised, with the fortunate difference that there was adequate light this time. The walls were patterned with thin, diagonal tines, and the floor, built of white rectangular panels, had a charcoal catwalk running down the centre.
They hadn't walked far before Colin lost his patience and demanded to know where they were going. But he had barely opened his mouth to speak before he noticed something strange. When he looked upwards, he could have sworn to any person that the ceiling was narrower than the floor - perhaps three quarters of its size at most - and the walls were slanted so that they came inwards as they rose. But when he stopped to give this further inspection, the wall was unmistakably at a perfect right-angle to the floor.
"Colin? You coming?"
Cautiously, he rose to his feet and backed away. "Yeah, I'm coming."
They met no people on their walk. The place seemed so devoid of life that Colin felt a ghostly presence the whole time. And this had been lurking so strongly in the back of his mind that he had failed to realise something so blindingly obvious.
He stopped to look behind him. That singular corridor through which they had walked stretched straight down, further and further, completely unchanging for at least a hundred metres. And it tapered away into darkness. "This place must be enormous!"
Virgil looked at him and gave the "up to no good" smile. "You aint seen nothing yet."
As far as Colin could judge, they had been walking along the same exact corridor for just about half a kilometre when he began wondering. Just how astonishing a place could the capabilities of the fourth millennium take him? He prepared himself for any possibility.
The journey was almost at an end. At last, the corridor had come to a dead stop, where a ladder in the wall plummeted down through an open hatch in the ground.
Colin looked at him uncertainly. "Where does this go?"
"The observation platform. We're at the outer wall now." Virgil gripped tightly onto the metal bars and slowly began to descended into the ground.
Colin was next to go. The iron bars were cold to the touch, and the odour of rusted metal haunted him.
A voice called up to him saying "I hope you don't get dizzy too easily."
And at last, his feet touched the ground of a large room, and he turned to see a giant, panoramic window that curved around his field of vision.
When he saw it, Colin knew exactly what the view meant.
His legs were ceased by an uncontrollable shaking, and his vision began to darken. His stomach cramped, and he opened his mouth but there were no words that could describe how he felt. He looked away and sank down into a seat, aware of nothing except his fear like a man being told he has terminal cancer. He would have agreed to have been killed, or even to have some awakening which showed that this was only a dream.
And then, preparing himself, he dared to look again...
The window curved around his field of view, and beyond it, a ceaseless, black void was ablaze with a million dots of light. He knew exactly what it meant.
"We're in space?" Colin said after a few attempts.
Virgil nodded. "I'm afraid so."
It was his fear that forced him to believe. Perhaps millions of stars had gathered themselves into clusters here and there, and some had been engulfed by the vivid tendrils of some nebulous cloud. But it had taken him some time to realise that the spaceship (or whatever kind of vessel he was onboard) was spinning. The entire spectacle of stars and clouds spun slowly, and looking straight ahead, Colin was staring straight down the axis of rotation.
He thought it needless to say that that was where the gravity came from; the entire vessel must have been a long, cylindrical body spinning in space like a bullet.
"So where exactly..."
"Absolutely no idea."
"But how..." Colin found no way of finishing the sentence.
Virgil remained hesitant. "I suppose a lot of pain will be spared if I answer all of your questions right now." Virgil sat down in one of the seats and nodded to the one opposite him. Colin sat down slowly, and Virgil took a deep breath. "You asked me what I knew about the year 2775."
"There was a signpost..."
"Not a signpost." Virgil interrupted. "A dedication plaque. In honour of the space vessel Epsilon IX, constructed in 2775." He sighed deeply. "John was the first of us to arrive here, and a day or so later I came too. And for several days we searched, learned, feared. But the scariest thing was having no memory. We had absolutely no idea why we were there. For all we knew, we could have been kidnapped, or our previous life could just have been a dream."
"And you never remember your own dream."
Virgil nodded. "Aside from the few details, but that's all. We three have only one memory: we were running as fast as we could, because we knew what was coming for us."
"You just didn't know what was waiting for you."
Colin remembered. "But we don't remember what we were running from."
Virgil hesitated, and then the thin grin came back. He had a new idea. "Yes we do." he said.
"You remember?"
"No, I only heard about it."
"From who? Or what?"
"From the wine glasses."
Colin's eyebrows knitted in puzzlement. "What do you mean 'wine glasses'?"
"The ones that can talk."
* * * * *
It had nearly shocked Colin an hour later to realise that Virgil had not been joking.
Virgil had taken him to a dusty, windowless place presumably used for storage; many random items and objects lay on rusted, metal-grilled shelves. Canned food and preserved goods were so filthy that the labels could no longer be read. There were old books, water bottles, bags of crisps, soda cans, children's toys, decorative candleholders and paperweights. And, hiding away in the corner, were wine glasses.
Virgil pulled a large, tattered old rag off of the wall, battering a thick cloud of dust into the room.
Colin coughed. "Jesus!" He said, waving his hand. "Doesn't this room have ventilation?"
Virgil held up the rag to look at closer. "Some idiot left this hanging over the vent."
Colin regarded Virgil strongly as he took one of the wine glasses and filled it half way with water. "These are the talking wine glasses?"
Virgil nodded. "Historical records. People are always finding ways of hiding information."
Colin raised an eyebrow. "How do they work?"
Virgil looked at him with a smile and set the wine glass down on the table. "Watch this." He dipped his bony finger in the water, and slowly, he began to slide it along the rim of the glass.
It was the vibrations that activated the recording, stored as a frozen lattice within the structure of the glass itself.
There was only time for a brief, low-pitched humming before a tinny voice began to speak, through the very resonance of the glass.
"This is the Wartime Broadcasting Service. This country has been attacked with nuclear weapons. Communications have been severely disrupted, and the number of casualties and the extent of the damage are not yet known."
Virgil took his damp finger off the rim. "That's where the recording cuts off."
"That's it?"
"For this one, yes." Virgil nodded to the shelf. "But there are plenty more."
Colin pulled another one from the shelf and regarded it in amazement. "It's a clever idea. I need to hear them. All of them."
"You do it." Virgil offered him the water.
The wall clock had frozen at six, on the 20th of November 2775. Whatever the purpose of Epsilon IX's voyage was, it had not lasted long. In his short exploration of the place, he had seen no bodies. For the crew to disappear and the vessel to go on drifting, clearly something had gone gravely wrong. A thought struck him coldly. Whatever had happened that he did not remember, and whatever had brought him to this place, it was not over yet. He was not trapped or lost in the depths of space. There was a reason for all of this. And the reason was still waiting for him.
Colin took the water and filled the glass. And then, like the rare occasions when he had been bored in a bar or a restaurant, he brought the sounds to life.
And a different voice began to speak:
"On the 28th of February, the Third World War has lasted for mere days. but many billions of human lives have been lost. There are too few of us left to fight with, and our surrender has not been the result of choice.
Our nuclear missiles and bombs have obliterated nearly every part of the planet, and the surface is so flooded with radiation and pollution and deadly thermal energy that to step outdoors into the open would be an act of suicide.
The last of the great archologies built during the decades since the new millennium are the only hope of our survival. Failure can result only in our extinction..."
The voice died away, and Colin became aware of the silence.
None of them spoke.
It was all coming back to him. He had known (or all three of them had known) what was coming when they were escaping to the coast at Pembrokeshire. But he reflected that he still didn't know the ultimate secret. He remembered the final moments of world peace, but he remembered nothing more.
Colin took another glass...
"My name is of no importance. What you should know however is that five decades since the war, I am one of the last to remember the struggle we had.
History is how the past communicates with the future. But history was lost into the war a long time ago. With no history, there is no future. This is the new generation of mankind. We know nothing of what the human race once was. We know nothing of the internet, or the great cities that once ruled the world.
There is nothing I can say now except to warn that this is the end of humanity, and the future is trapped here. And it shall remain until the day we die..."