“Are you God?” I asked. Nothing he had said had made any sense to me.
“Yes. No. Not really,” he said. “Not as you mean it, anyway.”
And then the world lurched and I found myself coming to work again that morning, poured myself a cup of tea, had the longest, strangest bout of déjà vu I’ve ever had. Twenty minutes, where I knew everything that anyone was going to do or say. And then it went, and time passed properly once more, every second following every other second just like they’re meant to.
And the hours passed, and the days, and the years.
I lost my job in the carpet company and got a new job bookkeeping for a company that sold business machines. I got married to a girl called Sandra I met at the swimming baths and we had a couple of kids, both normal sized, and I thought I had the sort of marriage that could survive anything, but I hadn’t, so she went away and she took the kiddies with her. I was in my late twenties, and it was 1986, and I got a job in a little shop on Tottenham Court Road selling computers, and I turned out to be good at it.
I liked computers.
I liked the way they worked. It was an exciting time. I remember our first shipment of ATs, some of them with 40-megabyte hard drives… Well, I was impressed easily back then.
I still lived in Edgware, commuted to work on the Northern Line. I was on the tube one evening, going home—we’d just gone through Euston and half the passengers had got off—and I was looking at the other people in the carriage over the top of the Evening Standard and wondering who they were, who they really were, inside: the thin, black girl writing earnestly in her notebook, the little old lady with the green velvet hat on, the girl with the dog, the bearded man with the turban…
The tube stopped in the tunnel.
That was what I thought happened, anyway: I thought the tube had stopped. Everything went very quiet.
And then we went through Euston, and half the passengers got off.
And then we went through Euston, and half the passengers got off. And I was looking at the other passengers and wondering who they really were inside when the train stopped in the tunnel, and everything went very quiet.
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.