Adlai was awash with alcohol and memories. He looked up at the bartender and finally managed to force some words through his lips.

“Do you remember how you got here?”

The world altered, and he was in another room, another time. He was in a seat, in a theatre, whispering across the aisle to the only other normal looking guy in there. Perhaps that was being generous. The man was extremely short, greasy and shifty, with fast, intelligent eyes. Adlai liked him immediately.

“Isn’t this location supposed to remain a secret?”

“Yes. No, that’s not what I mean though, I mean do you remember how we all ended up like this? Stuck in a room, whispering plans to each other?”

The man looked him over and smiled slightly.

“We’re here to stop the rot. Even you can’t do it on your own.”

Adlai leant back then and frowned. So they knew him here as well. He used to think fame was a good thing, now he knew better.

He was right though, he couldn’t do it on his own. He needed these freaks.

He looked around the room and his frown only got deeper. Alien shapes surrounded him, multi-limbed beasts and horrors, designed for maximum impact, each one of them posturing and straining to impress, to guarantee themselves a place of power.

Kids.

The older ones were no better. Hunched shapes, whispering to each other, bent over like drunks in a bar. Gloomy, secretive and suspicious. They’d all changed, and they all knew why. The growth of the Grid had altered them all.

The physical connection to the landscape. Why blame the Grid though? Perhaps it was just a marker, a symptom, a tumour growing as the cancer inside took hold, a sign post, a depth marker on the highway showing how far under we’d gone. A warning.

A tombstone.

He looked out the window at the darkness and the pouring rain. How had they come to this? Conspiring in the corner. Perhaps it would be better to forget it all and start over.

Then she walked in the room and everyone else faded.