Chapter Five: “Mark Denton Citizenship Test” 28. 10. 2016

There is a particular palpable silence when two people both begin to suspect the other's sanity. Unfortunately for Darren he lacked the luxury of appealing to common sense when “common” seemed to be entirely redefined for miles around him. The silver-haired and eyed woman tapped her foot impatiently, clearly adverse to wasting time and money on the frightening electronic box surrounding them. A “mod” called “personal space” was how she described it but to Darren it could only be perceived as sorcery and the breaking point of this unsettling unfamiliar environment he had stumbled into.

“Well?”

“I'm not taking my clothes off.”

“Why not?”

“Because I'm in the middle of the street, you're a complete stranger and I don't even know how it would help in working out my identity.” Darren scratches his head at such a case where he even has to explain why this request is weird and intrusive. The woman removes her long black coat.

“Would it help if I did it too?”

“Hm?-No!” Darren hesitated for perhaps a second too long. “Can you not just believe I'm not a hospital escapee? I mean, how do I know you're not the crazy person?”

“What would it matter to you if I was? You approached me.” There is another lengthy silence between them. Darren considers his options but all appear limited or unappealing. Despite her abrasiveness and possible sexual predator conviction, this woman was still the most normal-looking person around.

What kind of sense would he glean trying to talk to the rainbow-suited dog-brained businessman? Or the metallic-nippled invincible-beard gang leader? He had to persevere with this. Besides it was probably all a terrible fever dream or hallucination from hitting his head in the factory. He would probably wake up soon and everything would be back to normal...Dull, dreary normality...

“Okay fine, I'm doing it, just tell me how it's going to help.” Darren begins clumsily removing his work uniform shirt. Originally grey but stained with enough fudge to as appear brown patterned, he notices that he has long since lost his apron with no recollection of when exactly. This strikes Darren as another irregularity in detail consistent with dreaming helping cement the idea in his mind.

Glancing back at the misty white forcefield, the circus-clothed citizens walk on by briskly and indifferent to Darren fidgeting awkwardly before a strange woman in only his boxers.

“Why have you stopped?” Darren glares at the woman in disbelief.

“You're joking right?” The woman shakes her head in a patronising fashion, she taps the pebbles at the side of her head and the visor flicks around her eyeline again.

Darren continues telling himself it's just a dream despite his repeated pinching and mental gymnastics to wake himself up all proving fruitless. He takes a deep breath and yanks down his boxers trying to mask his embarrassment with misplaced authoritative interrogation.

“Well? Find the answer you're looking for?” The woman's expression is one of confusion as she eyes him up and down. Darren was bracing himself for amusement, disgust, anger and pity but was not prepared to see his naked body outright confusing someone.

“You're naked.” This being the paltry conclusion to a deeply intrusive and unexplained demand sets the spark to Darren's temper.

“What the fuck? You just told me-Of course I bloody am it...What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“What's wrong with you?”

“Wh...Y, you can't just say that to a naked guy! Are you trying to demolish my self-esteem?”

“I'm not talking about clothes naked, I mean you've got no mods or implants or anything.”

“...Well no, I mean I've had a few fillings but-”

“If you were in hospital they'd have marked you or attached a bracelet. People can shift them around but they can't take them off without the codes from the nurses...So...I guess you're like some backwards, technophobe villager although even they get mods for like diseases and stuff.”

“Okay, I don't really get what you're saying but can I put my clothes back on now?” The woman seems to have become less prickly, faced with something apparently she can't understand for a change.

“Yeah, go for it.” Her voice is distant and indifferent. Darren scrambles to get dressed as quickly as possible. The woman flicks her visor on and off several times before coming to some kind of decision. Darren stands for a while adjusting himself and trying to look like he didn't just gracelessly debase himself at a random woman's request. He checks through the forcefield again but beyond the misty wall, not a soul seems aware of their conversation or their movements within the box.

“Look, you seemed really uncomfortable with the whole naked thing so I feel like I owe you.” Darren decides to ignore the implication anyone else would be fine with stripping bare in the street but notes that the pity he expected has finally arrived. “If you're lost or brained or whatever's going on I can help you find a hospital or something if you want.”

“Wait, I thought we got past this?”

“No I don't mean the prison terminal, I don't think you're shit-circuited anymore but if you dunno where you are maybe you injured yourself.” Darren struggles to decipher the woman's bizarre language. Does she think hospitals have terminals like airports? Is there an insanely huge hospital here that has to be detailed by terminals? She also seems to think a psychiatric ward is akin to a prison.

“I kind of thought I'd have woken up by now to be honest.”

“Unless you're blitzing on some kind of biomod, which is impossible now I've seen you naked, you're not dreaming.” Darren furrows his brow, bombarded with yet more new words and starting to lose confidence in his comforting resignation that this is a semi-lucid dream or the hallucinogenic death throes of excess fudge poisoning.

Marginally more sympathetic, the woman takes a step towards Darren and switches off her visor. “Normally I'd just Ping you my profile but I guess if you're all retro we can just shake hands. My name's Myriad.” Darren sighs, feeling stressed by this new world but is grateful for even an imitation of something familiar. He shakes the woman's hand and forces a smile, her fragmented silver eyes seem to pierce through his own as though he were transparent, or perhaps he just still feels vulnerable having been naked moments before.

“I'm Darren, nice to eventually meet you Miriam.” Darren exhales trying to lighten the mood with a joke but his new acquaintance seems less than impressed.

“Not Miriam, Myriad. Myriad Bethlehem.”

“You're name is...I, okay never mind for now.” Myriad crosses her arms and again gives Darren the cold analytical squint.

“You really must be from some ultra-stiff little bubble bush.”

“If the half of that I understood means what I think, I didn't think Droyslden or Manchester were particularly remote until now. I mean the factory where I worked is literally just over there.”

“The chocolate factory?”

“Yeah.”

Myriad goes silent and contemplative again. Darren is grateful to have reached some kind of placated parley with her but can't help feeling a less secretive and private person would have explained a lot more to him, both quicker and easier.

“Why is that so strange?” Darren asks. Myriad flicks her visor on for a few seconds. If you look closely you can see images and words appearing reflected backwards on the immaterial screen but before Darren can pinpoint much the visor flicks back off.

“Where exactly is the factory?” Again, she seems physically averse to providing a straight answer.

“A few streets back that way.” Darren points down the streets he came from, his finger clipping through the forcefield and probably appearing quite strange to passers-by as a disembodied index finger...Then again, given his sights here so far maybe that's entirely normal.

“This is why I'm thinking you're brained or spinning on some drug date. There's no factory back there and proper chocolate doesn't exist anymore.”

Darren's eyebrows crash into a mass hair pile up on the road to his forehead. Quite exhausted by the relentless barrage of weird today has thrown at him, Darren can only blink in baffled disarray and disbelief at the statement. Myriad watches him closely as this revelation unfolds. Neither of them notice the “Personal Space” forcefield flickering around them.

“The only thing beyond the city in that direction are fields and an old restricted archaeology site that you wouldn't be able to even get near.”

Darren looks to the floor and is silent for a long time. He puts his hands in his pockets and exhales several times. He chuckles to himself in a pitch dangerously close to hysterical. Myriad takes a step back and fixes her sight on him carefully.

“Darren?”

“I, er...Your visor thingy. I noticed something on it the last time it was on.”

“Oh my Bridge? Only my nan calls it a visor.”

“Heh, well I think I spotted the time down in the corner there. Just after half nine is it?”

“The...” Myriad freezes with a realisation. Apparently the same realisation that is breaking Darren's mind apart in front of her.

“It's not the time is it?”

Darren finally looks up with a demented half-grin as though he can't decide if he should be happy or angry. His eyes slightly better reflect the distraught cognitive combustion imploding and rupturing within his consciousness.

Myriad had considered the possibility long before it dawned on Darren but unlike Darren who had no other explanation, Myriad never entertained more than a shred of the idea being at all plausible. Upon witnessing Darren's conflicted internal collapse though even her intensely sceptical barriers are lowered somewhat by how genuine his mental breakdown appears to be.

Before either of them can reach a word to puncture the searing silent atmosphere of confusion, someone else reaches through the Personal Space and grabs Darren's arm. Suddenly and violently, he is dragged through the supposedly private conversation area and out onto the street...

Chapter Four: “Chocolate Coma” 21. 10. 2016

“Excuse me? Could you spare a moment to-” A sharp slap to the face was Darren's reply knocking him staggering off the footpath. His brain rattled around in his skull as he tried to get his bearings noticing the woman hadn't even slowed her brisk walking pace and continued down the path as though swatting a fly away from her.

Mildly aggrieved but mostly puzzled Darren jogged back up to her and alongside noticing the profoundly glazed look in her unblinking eyes, the pupils seemed to be split into sections. Still wholly intact and functioning but as though the eye had been shattered and glued back together. The colour of both her iris and her long hair were a metallic silver and Darren momentarily questioned the possibility he was talking to a robot. Apart from these oddities she was round faced with sharp small eyes and Darren felt she was surprisingly attractive for someone who had just hit him in the face.

“Sorry, I just need-” Another swift and hard slap rippled across Darren's cheek. He recovered more quickly this time but was losing his temper at the repeated random assaults. He jogged ahead of her again but kept at an arm's length away.

“Look, I get you're busy but-” Her arm swung at him again but only swiped through the air between them. Darren hesitates and exhales in frustration at the persistence of her attacks. “But I'm really lost here, I was in an accident and I dunn-” Having lost track of the woman's intense walking speed or perhaps she closed the distance Darren stumbles into the wall beside them after another clout across his jaw.

Darren immediately stamps back into her view having lost all patience with his attempts at civility. “What the hell is your probl-” Darren trips backwards trying to not fall off the footpath again. He hears the woman audibly exhale in frustration and her eyebrows narrow. Darren staggers back onto the footpath and stops moving. “Will you stop slapping me for fuck's sake?”

The woman pauses inches from colliding with Darren but doesn't raise her arm again. She looks Darren up and down with a confused almost disbelieving expression. She remains planted to the ground but slowly leans to the left staring at him with an analytical squint. Darren watches her equally puzzled as she rights herself and takes a step to the side of him.

“I er, was hoping you could give me some directions.” Darren curls his lips together at the side of his mouth, rather unsettled by the situation but still distinctly annoyed as well. The woman taps the small black pebbles at her temples and the visor somehow vanishes.

“I thought you were a charity advert!” She speaks as though genuinely surprised but her tone is decidedly non-apologetic. Her voice sounds hoarse and gravelly as though from talking too much or too little.

“What?” Darren is only increasingly miffed by her opening statement in the long list of today's events that make no logical sense.

“Why didn't you ping me?”

“What?”

“If you wanted to talk, why didn't you just ping from across the street?” Darren takes a step back and is bumped into by a businessman rushing past. He also doesn't apologise Darren notes.

“I don't know what you're saying. What is a ping?”

“Oh fuck off cuntfamily, everyone knows what ping is.” Darren's eyes widen at the blindingly excessive vitriol in her retort.

“You don't have to be rude, I told you I'm really lost here, wherever here is.”

“Mark Denton.”

“Huh?”

“Mark Denton.”

“No I said where. Where is this?”

“Mark Denton”

“N-Wha...Is English not your first language?”

“Why does that matter?”

“Wha, What do you mean why does that matter? It matters as to whether you can understand what I'm saying.”

“But if I couldn't, I'd just translate it so it's irrelevant.”

“Oh well sorry, we're not all bilingual translation experts.”

“Yeah we are.”

Darren takes a deep breath and tries to compose himself despite being more baffled and aggravated than when he was lost in the pipes. He stares at the woman silently who stares back at him until they are both jostled by another group of hurried pedestrians.

“Look do you actually need something or are you just spongeclouding?” Darren blinks aggressively.

“I dunno if this is a prank or something but yeah I am actually lost and need directions to a phone or train station or something.”

“Pff! what kind of plastic tumour are you?”

“Excuse me?”

“How can anyone need directions to a train station? Just follow the road ya skull fracture.”

“TERRRAAAINN STAYSHUN. TRAYNE! SINCE WHEN DO TRAINS GO ON THE ROAD?”

“Okay we're dead now.” This phrase seemingly signalling the end to the conversation as the woman begins swiftly walking away down the path again. Darren glares at her but his humility is barged back into him by a muscular man pushing past him.

Darren glances up at the man who seems to be suffering from some kind of skull deformity as the bone pushes against the skin of his face. It almost seems to glow and gives a chilling impression even from an angle. Darren nervously scans the streets for another potential good Samaritan. A businessman in a rainbow-coloured suit crawls along the ground panting like a dog, two women on a nearby bench openly pleasure each other with objects looking like egg whisks and another bald man whizzes past on the advanced Heely things before turning and nonchalantly slamming face-first into a brick wall. Unflinching he slowly sinks into the brickwork and is swallowed up by the building. Darren runs to catch back up with the leaving woman.

“Okay look, I think maybe I'm hallucinating or I'm concussed or something but I need some help and what you're saying doesn't make any sense.”

“I'm not giving you any money.”

“I don't want...Oh shit! Do you think I'm homeless is that it?” The woman scoffs. “No I'm serious, just tell me what city this is, are we near Droylsden?”

“I already told you we're at Mark Denton”

“So what, the city is called Mark Denton?”

“Yes! Fuck my skull! Where the hell are you from?”

“Er, Droylsden, just outside Manchester. I work...worked in a chocolate factory there and got pulled into one of the vats, I only just crawled out of the bloody pipes over there.”

The woman stops abruptly and looks deeply into Darren's eyes with a terrifying unseen conviction. Darren tries to maintain eye contact but the focus of the glare is more than a little frightening and yet another group of bustling people soon knock him off his feet. As he regains his balance, he notices the woman has switched her visor back on and makes some swift hand gestures, flicking and pointing and clenching her fists.

She turns back to Darren and grabs his arm, dragging him over to the side of the footpath.
“Okay fine, five minutes for whatever toxic shit you're peddling.” They reach the side of the path by a small cutaway between the buildings left for a pitifully tiny patch of artificial flowers and trees. It's here that Darren stiffens like a pigeon's neck, rapidly and fearfully glancing at all the corners of his eyesight as a cloudy white electronic wall suddenly fizzles into existence and shoots out from the bottom of the pavement to several feet above their heads in a miniature hut shape that in a matter of seconds completely surrounded them. Darren cries out in shock and fear.

“WAEGH!”

The woman looks rather pitifully at Darren who slowly stands back up after ducking for cover crouched to the floor. He stares at the encapsulating walls like they're about to collapse on them or slam together and crush them.

“W-what the flying fuck just happened?”

“Really?”

“Where the hell am I that this can happen?”

“In my personal space.”

“Oh sorry.” Darren instinctively backs away from the woman before pausing and shaking his head. “Wait what?”

The woman sighs and rests against the wall of the floral area.

“Is Trollsden some backwards Luddite community then that you don't know what any of this stuff is?” Darren glances back at the woman but is more interested in the shimmering white forcefield surrounding them. He tentatively puts a hand to it only for it to faze straight through with no texture to grip or feel.

“What is this thing?” Darren looks back at the woman flushed with disbelief, confusion and uncertainty. The woman frowns and rolls her eyes looking to the side, tapping her foot in frustration but also slightly embarrassed and awkward.

“It's a mod right? You make a small section of a public area temporarily private for conversations or whatever. I'd say you must have seen the adverts but clearly they don't even have showers where you're from.” Darren tries to inconspicuously smell his armpit.

“I've put five minutes on the clock but this costs me so don't wank around...And don't go screaming your tits off again I've only got seventy five decibels soundproofing.”

Darren tries to formulate a sentence but is too petrified of his surroundings to control his thoughts. He'd thought this a weird new metropolitan city, a cult gathering or some hidden camera prank scenario but now he was seeing impossible magic forcefields and all the smaller oddities of the place and its people became terrifyingly alien and isolating to him. The woman takes on a slightly different expression. Not enough to be called sympathy but perhaps a lowering of expected intellectual capacity.

“Did you actually come from a chocolate factory or was it a hospital?” Darren realises that this new line of thinking could quickly end with him in whatever bizarre slick building counted for a mental asylum here. He needed to say something clever and convincing that would immediately dissuade the woman of the notion that he was mentally impaired and had escaped from hospital.

“...I'm definitely not a crazy person...”

“Uh-huh.”

“No, I'm really not, honestly it must be fudge poisoning or something.”

“Oh yeah or Dragon Cancer or Fairy Thrush.”

“I'm not making this up! It's everything else I'm seeing that seems made up. Please can't you trust me on this?”

“No.”

“Why not? What can I do to convince you?” The woman sighs again. 

“Fine. Take off all your clothes.” Darren stops talking immediately...

Chapter Three: “The Temporary In Contemporary” 16. 10. 2016

Darren didn't much look at the buildings before him as he clomped through the preceding fields trying to kick and scrape the caked-in mud and fudge from his shoes. Behind him lay farming fields as far as the eye could see although the shapes looked a little strange for crops like wheat. 

Being caught without his mobile phone was an uncomfortably exposing feeling and he wondered if many places even had payphones any more. He would have to get all his keys cut again as well. Safely on the preferred side of survival, the mundanity of everyday life rushed back depressingly quickly. He thought about if Martin could be bothered to try and get him fired over this, despite it being the fault of the machinery or whoever turned it on.

It was a unique type of fear that dominated Darren's life up unto today. Nothing as exciting as sheer panic but a quiet humdrum anxiousness about a hundred little things that would likely stress, inconvenience or embarrass him. He often wished for something truly calamitous to happen just for the change of pace, all the while knowing he would immediately regret it were it to ever actually occur.

As he approached the shining pavements and roadsides of the unknown city he took a closer look at the people milling around aimlessly outside their houses. Wherever he was it seemed very metropolitan with almost every person smartly attired and constantly addressing a new kind of smartphone. Darren even saw a man with two, instinctively tapping away on both of them with a single thumb each whilst staring off into the middle distance.

Even the people without phones wore incredibly sophisticated clothes albeit more eccentric and garish but Darren never followed fashion so he had no idea what was “in” at any given time. A lot of these people were in a far greater hurry, striding down the streets purposefully and to the full extent of their legs as though every footstep cost them money. Most were equipped with odd new kinds of Bluetooth headsets, except there was no visible branding on the small black rectangles and they seemed to stick to the temples rather than clip onto your ear.

As Darren stepped off the roadside he felt a strange pulsing warmth underneath his foot. He lifted it immediately and the sensation faded away. He took a few steps forward across the road and the current of heat seemed to dissipate towards the pathway. Finally he noticed the towering, reflective and smoothly designed buildings populating the city and on top of everything else these unsettled him the most.

He might not know about fashion but in terms of media and tech he was a shameless consumerist whore with the best of them and yet he recognised none of the large glowing names indented on the faces of the buildings. From the products visible on the ground floor these were clearly shops selling some kind of technology but he recognised neither the products or the companies.

Inside the nearest shop he saw complex metallic tangles of pipes with pistons in the middle oscillating, presumably through battery power although no screws, panels or different sections could be clearly identified. There were cylindrical cubicles that people stepped into at the far corner of the shop. Looking like incredibly polished toilet stalls but fitted with curved video screens on the doors playing some kind of vibrant video Darren couldn't distinguish the details of.

Most customers in the shop seemed interested in a huge wall of small different coloured tubes. Every spectrum of every shade seemed to be available and customers would pick them up and stare at the tube in their palm for a uselessly long time. The only perceptible change being some of the tubes would blink or change colour slightly.

Fearing some kind of cylinder-based apocalypse Darren glanced around for a different shaped product but what he found was no less disquieting. Disturbing animatronic masks lay on another table twitching and forming grotesque expressions as though they'd just been peeled straight from someone's writhing face. The level of realistic detail made them quite horrifying, especially when children picked up and wore the faces of scowling or madly grinning adults.

Where exactly was this place? Darren had never really left the Greater Manchester area before but he was pretty sure this was an unusually significant cultural difference. He walked further into the city down what he now realised were metal footpaths rather than concrete or stone. He noticed more and more of the headset wearers but now some of them had a form of visor wrapping around their face extending from the black shapes on the sides of their head.

Was this the Google Glass thing he'd heard about? Darren wandered closer to the bustling crowds but couldn't see the actual “Glass” or plastic of the visor and there was no hint of the computer part besides the black shapes which themselves, upon further inspection, seemed too small to power such a device. 

Even apparently customisable to your own fashion tastes, Darren saw purple, blue, pink, red, striped, patterned and logo adorned variants in rectangular, oval and even gaudy star shapes, all affixed to the sides of people's heads and somehow projecting this curved screen a few centimetres from their eyes.

Perhaps it was some big opening event for one of these unheard of companies and everyone got free samples. Those are some expensive looking free samples though and everyone seems almost subconsciously familiar with all their functions. Unwilling to again let his thoughts continuously counter one another to no avail, he decided he'd have to ask someone. Primarily for directions but if he could also learn what all these bizarre new gadgets were that would be nice too.

He looked for a normal-looking pedestrian amongst the intimidating new fashionistas with braces connecting their trousers to themselves and digital shirts that seemed to play entire films across the fabric. The former latched the top of their trousers to the bottom leaving a huge gap in between exposing the knee and a solid few inches either side of it. The latter were not entirely new concepts but Darren had never seen them without a bulky computer tablet underneath and never spread seamlessly across the front, back, sides, shoulders and even collar of the shirt.

A girl strutted past in what looked to be a steroid-abusing-Viking-sized brown and white woolly coat that covered everything except her rear, cleavage and face which were all but naked besides some coloured string. Another man appeared to be wearing little more than a flesh coloured slingshot that wrapped around one arm, his genitals and terrifyingly far up his arse.

Others stood up straight and glided along the pavement without much more than a flick of their feet on what Darren assumed to be advanced Heelys. An elderly woman wore what Darren recognised to be a Onesie but it was smothered in branding of some fictional character he had never seen. A group of teenagers jostled Darren as they passed and he noticed one of them wearing 70's style flared trousers. Another wore a shirt that seemed to have rigid shelves jutting out from its fabric on which the guy had put cans of drink and electronics.

One of the teens had somehow acquired the beard of a thirty year old lumberjack wizard and wore dungarees that seemed clipped straight onto the hair of the beard without discomfort. Beneath the fuzz and sharp purple denim he was shirtless apart from what looked like metallic bionic replacements for his nipples.

Darren eventually found a relatively normal or at least familiarly dressed individual on the footpath opposite him. She wore a long black coat with a matching knee-length business skirt as though she had just stepped out of an office. Her footwear however was akin to bowling shoes but made of metal and detailed with a pattern of silver aesthetically rusting away to black further to the soles.

The other less office-usual fashion included blue leggings and a white buttoned shirt that would look like normal office attire were it not for the large printed image of a Chinese ceremonial dragon and a futuristic aeroplane about to collide vertically in the air.

Still, she was practically T-shirt and jeans in comparison to everyone else and Darren felt steadily more uncomfortable around the unfamiliar practices in this off-beat “free-thinking” city. Putting on his best “approachable friendly guy” expression Darren crossed the warm but empty road and waved at the passer-by, stepping just ahead of them to ask for help...

Chapter Two: “Pipe Dream”. 11. 10. 2016

“What a boring way to die.” As Darren succumbed to the sticky sweet tomb this was his predominant thought. Upon recovering from the impact to his head, he had tried to swim, wade, dig and climb through the thick fudge mass that had enveloped him but aside from it being an unforgivingly heavy and inflexible substance, Darren, nor likely anyone had any experience escaping from within chocolate...Except maybe the air in Marlon Brando's lungs.

With no way of physically escaping and no one noticing his fall or the moving machinery, Darren appeared entirely lost to the unusual but still somehow peculiarly drab fate of drowning in fudge. He almost wished the swirling fan blades had cut him up but when he regained consciousness he had already sunk beneath them into the surprisingly deep vat of delicious death. Darren could no longer see the surface or the fan blades and the muffled sounds of the latter were fading quickly as his ears clogged with gooey cocoa slop.

Pretty soon he would run out of breath and inhaling gallons of viscous liquid chocolate could actually be really painful but so far Darren had felt oddly calm and resigned to the whole unfortunate experience. It almost seemed fitting for his dead-end existence to be snuffed out without a whimper by the very trappings of his lacklustre life...Or maybe he was just delirious from hitting his head.

The aforementioned death overtook him with an unexpected urgency. Whilst much of the matter seemed to just stick to him and flow only slightly from the movement produced by the fans above, once he finally gasped for air the mixture rushed down his throat and seemed to immediately flood him from the inside out. The following suffocating seisure was like someone grabbing a fistful of your internal organs and twisting you but no sooner did the crippling pain overtake him did Darren feel his mind slipping into darkness. It was as though the fudge had clamped a giant sticky mitten over his brain and was pushing him both physically and psychologically into a featureless umber abyss.

Only for him to wake up, his eyelids juddering open like a malfunctioning garage door. He wasn't immediately sure if he had, in fact woken up dead but it seemed unlikely that heaven or hell held the appearance of a dusty old factory pipe with a sepia overlay. The prospect of him having survived more chocolate intake than a brain-damaged charity challenged diabetic David Blaine was also an unbelievable eventuality, yet here he was staring at the inside of a pipe somewhere below his section and the vat previously full to the brim with fudge mixture.

At least that was his best guess for his whereabouts. The acute ache in all his limbs and organs struck him as a symptom of death better suited to before his blackout. If he was actually still dying and had for some reason regained consciousness just long enough to see an inquisitive rat nibble at his fingernails, that would be a particularly cruel move by life even for someone as unlucky as he, Darren pondered.

With considerable effort Darren tried to sweep his arms forward, unclear of what bent or possibly broken shape exactly they were in. The stinging ache felt like it throbbed from the very core of his bones but to his surprise, unlike in the midst of the vat, he could cut a swathe through the far less rigid substance surrounding him. As cognitive function slowly returned it struck him that his hand was partially outside of the fudgey coffin, hence the rat's interest in his alarmingly long fingernails.

The block encasing him must have thinned over time for him to even be seeing through it and to the uninviting interior of the pipe. Darren tried to move his legs and with a painful strain the mixture stretched and eventually snapped off his thighs. Oddly the rat did not seem dissuaded by his meal writhing around in front of him. Darren considered that his face or at least his mouth must be clear of the fudge for him to be breathing.

He dragged his arms further forward into eyesight and to his relief they weren't mangled by whatever machinery lurked further down the pipes. He finally wiped away the globs of now lime yellow fudge mixture from his eyes and face. As he summoned the strength to heave himself up off the floor of the pipe, several other rats suddenly scurried from behind him and away down the length of pipe.

It took several minutes to fully wipe the rotten old yellowed fudge clumps from his person with Darren finding the amount ingested must have eventually been digested somehow. He awkwardly clambered around in the pipe until he was facing the opposite direction. Above him was a towering cylindrical steel chamber where presumably he had flowed in from when mixture was still being pumped through it. This brought forward a pertinent question, why had the mixture stopped flowing?

In the five years Darren had worked there, the factory had never ceased production for a single day. Any maintenance was always under a rampant whip cracking Martin Hackett who would ensure any problems were fixed within the day even if it meant using employee's heads as hammers and their jaws as wrenches.

So Darren considered, had he only been unconscious for a few hours? Was a torrent of toffee about to come raining down upon him and engulf him again? If this was the case, how had the fudge blanket over him turned a pukeish yellow tinge that he had also never seen in his long working relationship with the stuff?

There was also no residue of chocolate of any kind lining the pipes or the large chamber behind him suggesting the inner workings of the factory had lain dormant for some time. If that was the case however shouldn't he have long since starved to death? Even if the excess fudge in his stomach acted as a stockpile, like for a fattened up rodent in hibernation, he could have only subsisted on this for maybe a week at most.

With every passing second more questions stampeded into Darren's head and almost none of them could be coupled with a plausible answer. Failing to rationalise his fortuitous survival he decides to start progressing towards an exit but after reaching a split at the end of the initial pipe he is disheartened to see nothing but more grey rusty pipe stretching off to either side.

No hint of daylight or even the artificial decades-old blinking light strips of the factory interior are present to help Darren make an escape. As he crawls randomly through the dingy dark pipes it occurs to him that he can hear no hint of machinery whirring or clanking in the distance, no footsteps or muffled chatter of people, absolutely no noise at all besides his own breathing and thudding cramped footsteps.

With no other stimuli Darren latches onto the rats as his guide, hoping they would be returning to a nest outside of the piping. He reflects that he knows practically nothing about rats and their habitat but perhaps it makes sense that a cold steel cylinder would be inferior to a ditch or river bank for them. Darren sighs at his blind guesswork and equally unknown route of travel. He taps his elongated fingernails against the metal beneath him.

He used to think that time became nebulous in the long monotonous shifts at work but he found crawling through identical pipes one after another ultimately surpassed it. He began trying to distinguish the rats from each other to determine whether he was seeing the same ones and potentially going in circles.

“The Colonel” had the longest whiskers of the group and were he a man Darren imagined a huge bushy moustache hanging from the sides of his face. “Van Gogh” had lost part of his ear in some kind of altercation, “Hairy Lee” was quite simply the rat with the longest fur and inversely “Short Rat and Sides” had the shortest and also appeared to be quite smaller than the others. Darren prepared the name “Ratterbox” for the most vocal of the group but this was difficult to pinpoint to a single individual. A seemingly paranoid rat that kept very close to the ground, almost slithering along with its tail always kept stuck to the floor was about to be dubbed “Sticky Rat Plastic” when it dawned upon Darren that he was probably losing his mind inside the never-ending labyrinth of pipework.

Exasperated, Darren collapses onto his back, staring at the top of his current imprisoning metal tube. Would he now die traversing these infernal pipes forever? How were they continuing on for so long? Darren had never researched the architecture of the factory because...well, who would? But he felt that even if these pipes were to lead outside of the city to some sewage plant or more likely an inconspicuous ditch, it was taking far too long to get there.

He wished he had his watch with him but the hygiene regulations commanded all jewellery remain in the communal lockers, where any immoral dickweed could steal them but as long as your wrist doesn't sweat near the fudge, that's the most important thing. Darren wondered if anyone had even noticed his disappearance. Were his barely acquainted colleagues bothered enough to be searching for him? Or had it been so long that his family and the police would now be involved?

His eyes slowly fluttered open to see the top of the pipe again. Darren sits up with a jolt and smacks his head on the ceiling as The Colonel and Sticky Rat Plastic scamper away from somewhere under or behind him. He was shocked at having fallen asleep but evidently the pipes had not come back into use nor had any search party located and rescued him. Rubbing the bruise on his scalp and trying to stretch his aching back in the cramped space, Darren wearily returns to scuffling through the pipes.

An indeterminable number of hours and pipes later and a short sharp breeze suddenly pricks Darren's senses into focus. The promise of the outside world blasts adrenaline through his body and he clambers forward as quickly as possible towards the fresh air. Never before having been so overjoyed to see a muddy ditch and a gloomy overcast sky, upon turning the final corner Darren hurls himself forward towards the relatively blinding light and pulls himself out of the pipe to bellyflop onto a murky shallow puddle below.

Slightly winded by the fall Darren flounders around gasping like a beached fish for a few moments before dragging himself up the bank and taking in his surroundings. The unfamiliar ditch appears nowhere near the factory and he is likely on the outskirts of the city. He rolls onto his stomach and sees a scattering of tall buildings in the distance amidst what looks like another neighbouring city or district. Amongst the many things Darren didn't excel at, Geography was one of them so he couldn't recall the name of the city before him, nor where it would be in relation to his home or the factory.

Regardless Darren pushes himself up and to his feet, stretching his back, arms and legs fully with an audible crack. He takes a step forward but hesitates. He glances behind him as if to give a wistful farewell glance to his only companions for the last who-knows-how-long. Perhaps a flicker of Hairy Lee's tail or a faint goodbye squeak from whichever one Ratterbox was...But alas, none of his friends were waiting at the end of the pipe to send him off because they were just rats and have no concept of friendship plus would have happily eaten Darren alive had he only stayed still long enough...