“What was I just doing?” I said it out loud, though there was no one else there to hear me. I had just been somewhere else, I felt. I was close to some kind of understanding, something important. But what was it? I had the feeling that I was dead. That I had died many times before now.

I could remember a distant booming, like an explosion in slow motion, or was it the sea? I stared at the ceiling for a few thousand seconds. Who was I just talking to? Why couldn’t I remember? It is a very disconcerting thing to have lost a memory or blacked out or whatever it was that I just did.

It was Azami. I was talking to her online. Perhaps the chatlogs with her could help me fill in any gaps. I fired up my console, the lines in the display blazing against the back of my retina. I winced as I paged through looking for the last known conversation.

It was six minutes ago. I had been laying awake in my bed for longer than that. I felt my stomach drop as the bedroom door creaked. Someone else was in my apartment.