Someone had hacked intuition and was broadcasting on that frequency, he knew it — they all knew it. They had been coming together under a loose banner for an age now. Their groups had many names but the one thing that each and every member had in common was their fleeting relationship with sleep. That sleep was something that was not natural for any of these people was perhaps their saving grace — they occupied the midnight hour and ruled the pre-dawn and post-dusk. Shadow dwellers that were charged with carrying torches to illuminate the way for others who were doomed to fall by the wayside.

Jerry had told him that he was a true Philosopher King — that all the tests, which they had been forcing him to take at school, were in fact part of clandestine recruitment programme that the Elders had been running parallel to the education system for centuries, ever since The Sand first emerged as a threat. Who would believe that when they first heard it? Who would swallow that line with its hook and sinker? The first thing he had been taught to do was to question things and that was what he brought to bear upon the whole situation — taking razor thin slices with Occam’s razor to get to the heart of the matter. He made sashimi of their logic — took the whole machinery apart and then put it back together while they were still blinking in the shine of his inquisitor light.

‘You are perfect for the job,’ said Thomas, of whom it was rumoured that he was the actual Torquemada that had led the fearsome inquisition.

He flipped what Ersatz at first took to be a coin towards him and which he found to be a small button badge with a question mark super-imposed over an eye.

‘So put it on,’ offered TT, with a smile to make sharks nervous.

‘I get a membership badge?’

‘Sure, why not? Tattoos like we used dish out in the old days are a lot more painful, but if you are feeling brave we can have Egon knock one up for you.’

‘Egon?’

‘Schiele: well-known painter sometime.’

‘You use sometime as a phrase a hell of a lot.’

‘Well, what would you prefer? You realise of course that time as a unidirectional phenomenon is a myth that was debunked a fair while ago? We think now in terms of simultaneity and frequency modulation when we talk of different temporal indexes.’

‘You lost me somewhere around the point where you started speaking.’

‘My boy, if I believed that you would have the last bullet in my revolver’s chamber nestled between your frontal lobes. Now, we expect you to go out there and start recruiting your team — start taking apart the organisations which The Sand rests its kingdoms on.’

The whole place seemed plagued by some kind of weird Doppler effect — you could whisper in a lover’s ear and it might sound like you were half a room away; that was why he had come here by himself. He liked to work in silence anyway, and in a place like this precautions were paramount. He had meditated for two hours and practiced with hard chi and soft chi in preparation for what he might find..
He flipped open his gauge and took a psionic reading: picking up little but random residue from the daily traffic that skirted the edges of this piece of land. No one ever came specifically to this point — the place was grown over with myths like thorn bushes and he had an idea that somehow that might be key to its power. There were leylines criss-crossing this place and he could feel the potential surging up through his feet — still, neither he nor the others who had been sent out here had been quite able to get the drop on what the exact nature of the energy was. If you didn’t have the means to identify something it often got tangled up in all the negative bullshit that seemed to have stuck to this place, he wanted to dig through that — and it was something he was good at; he still had the dirt of a thousand cases under his fingernails.

Codewords and slogans — it was what he lived for. His fingers slid across the keyboard as if in an anti-gravity ballet. He had been straight edge for the longest time and then he had spectacularly fallen off the wagon, doing pretty much everything that could be ingested into one’s body without killing you, and a few that would if taken in sufficient doses. A big fat spliff hung from his bottom lip like a prehensile tail, and it served a similar purpose: helping him with balance. He was trying to hack the mainframe of Gene Heretic — a designer gene-hack outfit that he suspected of aiding The Sand. The owner definitely had the hallmarks of one of their suited stiffs and some of the strange flow of currency around this place stank. Sure, it had always been a suspicious operation but it had got more so of late. Clancy was no nihilist as people made the mistake of thinking when they looked at him; he was no anarchist in the typical sense either — he saw anarchy as a return to a time of personal responsibility. His idea of anarchy could be the thing to save the world as far as he was concerned — it surely had to be better than the slavery which seemed to be impending. And what were the governments doing? Bartering people in an effort to save some small elite who would obviously topple when all the other rows of dominoes had fallen. This was not a situation where you could make deals — you either stood together with your fellow man or you perished; selling someone out was selling yourself out, it was as simple as that. It didn’t matter how much the politicians lathered on public relations crap — when the shit hit the fan if you weren’t wearing some kind of protective clothing you were going to get covered.

He booted up a cyclical attack program and watched as it prodded the mainframe’s defences. You could tell that this one was going to take a while. He turned up the stereo and smiled as Purple Haze ripped through the room and rode his high like a surfer on a gnarly wave. Sure he was a punk but a bit of Jimi never hurt anyone — besides, no rules right?

Covered from head to toe in gelatinous goop — this specimen had folded in through some crevasse in the universal mind that intersected with a viral universe where an apparently contradictory set of manifold consciousnesses nested within the form of one being. It had been hard to pin it down psychically and even harder to ease it into the Coma-mesh. Harold spat a mouthful of ectoplasm at the wall and watched as it hung there like snot, faintly luminescent with some trace radiation coming off it and making the Geiger counters tick.

He walked around the rest of the house to check for any more possible entrance points but apart from a few cold spots there was nothing like the fissure that he had just closed. He was the shock trooper — they would send in clean-up squads once he gave them the all-clear. He hated giving somewhere like this the all-clear because it was sensitive and it had power running through it — it had been built here for just that purpose and just because you dealt with one small manifestation it didn’t meant that you had dealt with the problem. It was like buying a cancer patient a wig and expecting it all to be better just because it looked like they had hair.

Some people might think of Harold as a ghost himself. He was still missing the eye that they depicted him with an arrow embedded in on the Bayeux Tapestry. He couldn’t explain why he had manifested with exactly the same consciousness; he had heard that total recall was an oddity, and it was odd enough to be reincarnated in the first place, wasn’t it? Well, not if you believed in a lot of the eastern philosophies. He didn’t, despite having died and come back. He believed that there was a reason for everything and he just had to work out what his was.

He had teamed up with this group because it seemed to him that they were doing something worthwhile. He had stumbled into it — some might use the word serendipity and others might use fate. He had been brought back for some reason and he had met the head of this organisation for some reason. He seemed to have some skill with the work which had surprised him at first because he had never done anything like it before. He supposed the whole process of crossing over and coming back had somehow sensitised him. How come it had taken so long? Did your reincarnation happen independent of time? Did you wait in the wings until a pre-ordained moment? At some point he expected that answers would be forthcoming. He was patient — a change in attitude for sure.

He knew that they were keeping an eye on him; that once they had found a way of confirming that he was who he said was (a technology he was unsure of) they suspected that he might have trouble readjusting to his new environment. He reasoned with them that whatever force had dragged him through time to this point was hardly likely to have left him psychologically unprepared to withstand whatever attendant strains might trouble him. They had no answers to that but then as far as they were concerned they didn’t need to. He was living free at their say-so. The dynamic of the relationship had shifted since that first meeting when they had just viewed him as a talented psychic; back then he was anonymous, and now he was a science experiment. They saw he had talent and they saw that he had some kind of purpose in the larger scheme of things — when they worked out what that purpose was they would either start to feel more comfortable around him or he knew that they might take him out of play. All he knew was that he wasn’t about to roll over and die again just because some bureaucrats thought that was the best course of action.

Driftbaby woke, eyelids fluttering to seduce the dawn, radio alarm talking in someone else’s voice saying end of the world is nigh. Aniseed re-stirs. Today is going to be humid with minimal cloud cover, pollen count high, pollution count double yesterday. She popped the ACE tablet in her mouth and waited for it to heat and burst — who could step outside the door without some kind of Anti-Cancer Engine running? The Nano-memo put a pane up in her left eye and engaged the base ganglion to get her body moving towards the shower, which was clicking through its preparation series to be ready. She stepped in and the energy wave slid over smoothness and into creases cleaning everything and refreshing her tired body. What was it tonight? Three hours? She’d always made it by on that in the past but how much longer could she burn that proverbial candle at both ends?

She exited the shower, punched in the kind of thing she wanted to wear on the wardrobe’s screen and went to get a stimulant-bathed breakfast. Caffeine and speed — the only way to start the day. Everything tasted metallic this morning but she could feel the thin tissue of webs that had clogged her mind tearing apart and releasing some of the light that had become trapped. Everyday was a battle against becoming like one the zombies that infected this place — she chose insomnia over slavery in the service of The Sand.

She was strapped into her flip suit, which employed revolutionary tech to redirect whatever was aimed at it including, depending on the privacy setting, people’s voices and any kinetic energy generated by them trying to move towards her. She looked in the mirror and sharpened her smile. Time to make a connection.

Heron had been a doctor once but got struck off after running an illegal gene-hacking business on the side. He still had all the contacts and there were enough people in high places that required his services for him not to be bothered by anyone questioning the legality of his practices any more. Driftbaby had been his secretary for a brief time when she had tried to go straight and do the proverbial proper job thing. She still remembered how he had laughed when her face lit up in a smile at the revelation that he was not as legitimate as most people. She had always felt uncomfortable around him because she thought he was so straight-laced and that had evaporated instantaneously.

The rain came unexpectedly — no forecast, no satellite imagery, nothing.  Most of the roads in the area were impassable and some of the homes of the citizens there were under threat. Freak weather conditions is what everyone chose to call it, afraid to say that it might not be natural — afraid of the ramifications in saying that it might be under the control of something or someone  — that this weather was attacking them. It was an idea that no one wished to have and if it even vaguely stirred in them they would push it back down under the waters of denial until it drowned. This was what passed for thinking in this neck of the woods — it had always worked in the past so there was no reason to believe that it would not work now. O’Connor did not believe it was working.

O’Connor was not respected by a single one of his contemporaries and his elders looked at him as if he were the product of some ill advised union between woman and devil; the youths looked at him as a freak and let their contempt surge at him at every opportunity. He had put forth proposals for dealing with the problem; proposals which he had arrived at through careful study of their foe. The fact that no one admitted that there was a foe meant that they could not even give the slightest credence to theories of how to deal with it.

‘It’s just bad weather, O’Connor and it will pass — all your messing is going to do is serve to make things worse than what they already are.’

O’Connor looked over at Brady and sighed — one man spoke and a whole town nodded like the zombies they had become. Fear could strip men of almost all that made them human while simultaneously making them seem to some more human than they had ever been. Their powers of reason had abandoned them but the emotions which boiled in eyes, although somewhat animal and primal, were also human. It frustrated him beyond belief that these people could not think outside of the box which they daily had to fix up. There was no way that they could maintain their illusions without some small amount of effort — the events which occurred around here were the kind that only an idiot could deny and he knew that, despite appearances, none of these people were idiots.

It had started with bad sleep problems — almost every single person reporting to their doctor with nightmares — night terrors that would result in sweat-saturated sheets and people waking up screaming like they were being attacked by a murderer. There was a common theme to each of the dreams, someone coming in the night to steal away their souls, and instead of this being seen as the sign of some common threat it was seen to indicate that all of them were suffering some form of mass hysteria. This didn’t result in every one being medicated — instead it was put down to something being in the water, something being in the air; it was a phase that would pass.

Insomnia become a common theme of conversation as did sleep apnoea , narcolepsy, catalepsy and other maladies which anyone had barely heard of before. O’Connor could not believe that people were not more questioning, that they did not get more suspicious when all these things seemed to add up to something — when they seemed to suggest something unnatural and therefore something that was being orchestrated. Sure, he was what you might call a conspiracy theorist but he also believed in the principal of Occam’s Razor. This was the kind of place where conspiracy theorists were dismissed as nut jobs and if you mentioned Occam’s Razor you would have half a dozen people standing at the checkout in the local pharmacy trying to purchase one.

Dying in your sleep is something that a lot of people express a wish to do — if they must go then that seems the most painless option to go for. Well, this started to change when the first bodies turned up with their sleeping faces twisted in terror, their bodies constricted and almost trying to turn in on themselves. These people had been driven out of their sanity and everyone knew that it had happened to them in their sleep. One of these deaths could have been passed off as the freak occurrence everyone kept talking about, two deaths of a similar ilk even, three you started to wonder, four something must surely be nagging at you — when it climbs into double figures without a by-your-leave then you should be shit scared and wondering what the hell is going on. A place populated by human ostriches seems to have a limitless capacity for denial though. The gestalt personality definitely equalled more than the sum of its parts — was it some kind of bravery or grim determination that allowed them to look into the eyes of horror and turn back around and say that they had seen nothing?

O’Connor wanted to take the proverbial bull by the horns — he wanted to start fighting back. Surely there had to be somebody out there that would listen to him — there had to be somebody that was on his side with at least an ounce of common sense. Why was it that whenever  he asked a question they thought that pat responses were going to pacify, when all they did was serve as signs that the problem was much worse than even he had thought?

He started researching anywhere that had similar problems and was staggered by the frequency of situations that mirrored his own — if there was this much trouble out there surely there must be someone that was trying to tackle it. The authorities seemed uninterested: every time that he had approached them he had been dismissed out of hand as either stupid or as a troublemaker.

Thin fingers with nicotine yellow nails extracted the fob watch from the pocket on its long shiny silver chain; he pulled the winder so it clicked once and then twice. It was a strange artefact, appearing as it did both ancient and somehow born of future dreams. It was not so much an anachronism as extemporaneous. This watch had the full date including the year in a little window and anyone that knew about the working of such timepieces might be given to wonder where exactly the mechanism stored the necessary materials to make this possible. If you had asked the owner he would have broken the cover of his placid poker face and offered you a wry smile; he would have tapped the side of his nose and said Curiosity killed the cat, Alice told me.

He was a born observer so perhaps this was the perfect job for him — watchman at the four corners of the dreamtime. The fissure that ran through the trunk of the great ash at the centre of this psychic lattice where the world was born was where the enemy had first sallied forth. He had watched their distorted forms download like ink being dropped into water; forms coalescing out of dark clouds of matter. Vaguely humanoid shapes appeared to emit vast waves of energy that licked across the surface and penetrated the substance of every living thing that came within their reach. The message had shot out from his head into the waiting world at the instant he had seen it, waking up those who might be able to save the day. He had seen things like this before — not exactly like this, but he had an idea of what must be done. Warriors must be gathered to stand against the oncoming tide.

They called him Bates but he had gone by many other names — the simplicity of this one suited him for the moment and as soon as it had outlived its usefulness he would shed it like another skin.