Lami held the vial in his palm and rolled it back and forth with his index finger. It was a small tube sealed at both ends, obviously metal, yet you could see right through it. Another odd thing: holding it up to his ear, there was a sound like an orchestra tuning up.

Quantum. “Q” the dealer had called the drug, spitting the name out onto the alleyway.

Yes, Lami was stalling now. He knew this was going to be pretty intense, all the grID chatter said it was. Still, Jarma was there in the room. She’d agreed to come over and keep an eye on things, just in case. She’d brought a book.

Lami unscrewed the cap to reveal a glass vial that fitted exactly inside the metal tube. He’ d been told what to do: break the top of the vial and immediately snort the contents up your nose. He knew there weren’t any ‘contents’ in the normal sense. This stuff wasn’t really there. Some kind of subatomic shit.

“OK, let’s do this!” he said with bravado.

Jarma briefly looked up from her book then went back to reading. She and Lami used to have a thing but, well… she’d met this cool robot designer and… still, Lami was a nice guy. She owed him.

Lami snapped the glass top, snorted, and almost immediately wished he hadn’t.

Lami was nowhere. Literally nowhere. There was nothing. He was nothing. Almost. He could feel parts of his body, but they kept diminishing and drifting away. It took a lot of effort to bring them back and sometimes when they came back, they weren’t his. Everywhere was darkness. Stinking, rotting darkness. He ‘saw’ things simply because they were there. Or not. He tried hard to think, but there were too many of him, or maybe none. There were others too. Creatures, if you could call them that. All sizes. Immense gelatinous things that Lami was just a speck on. And smaller, indescribably horrible things pressing in on him, entering him. Silently screaming, he fought back, but it was useless. He was useless – a piece of non-existent debris caught in a putrefying black tornado. Sometimes the creatures violated him, hurting him terribly, but mostly they had no interest in him at all. Time was a joke with no punchline. Lami knew in his soul this would last forever; horror, pain and emptiness with no end, with no death to save him. He moved like a cracked snail through endless empty existences, trying to find some place of rest. Eons passed, then passed again for good measure. Occasionally, it all went backwards. In one of his lifetimes, Lami noticed a soft sheen on the surface of darkness. Dark Lami became fascinated by the sheen, but also terrified by it. He so wanted to touch it. Smell it. Enter it. Unite with it. The eons passed, and the sheen coagulated into blobs of something. The blobs got bigger. It was all happening fast, faster, too fast, as Lami was sucked into something he had forgotten could ever possibly exist.

Light.

Jarma had watched Lami snort the contents of the bottle and settle back on the couch with his eyes closed. She had just managed to read half a sentence, when her ex-boyfriend suddenly jumped up and stood staring wildly at nothing, shrieking like a crushed bird.

“Shit, that was quick!” she said casually. “Did it do anything?”