Phase 1 - Disorientation
I came to sitting upright, the way you might wake from a dreamless sleep — suddenly, with no memory of closing your eyes. Beneath me was a hard wooden bench. Around me were people.
Dozens of them, maybe more. Strangers, all of them. They sat in rows along the platform, some staring at the ground, others gazing out at nothing in particular. The air smelled faintly of iron and damp stone. The ceiling above was high and arched, the kind you'd find in old European terminals, though nothing about this place felt familiar. Nothing about it felt like anywhere I had ever been.
Where am I?
The last thing I could pull from memory was my office — the window, the sudden white light that swallowed the glass whole, a brightness that wasn't the sun. I had been reaching for my coffee. I remembered that much. And today, of all days, was the meeting with the Southeast Asian board representative. Months of preparation. Today was supposed to matter.
Instead, I was here.
I turned to the woman sitting beside me. She was middle-aged,well-dressed, her hands folded tightly in her lap as though holding herself together.
"Excuse me," I said. "Do you know where we are?"
She turned and looked at me. Just for a moment — a brief, hollow look. Then she faced forward again, and I realized her cheeks were wet. She had been crying before I spoke, and she continued crying after, as if I hadn't said a word at all.
I looked ahead. In the row in front of us, a boy sat alone. He couldn't have been older than seven or eight, his legs too short to reach the floor, swinging slightly above the ground. I leaned forward.
"Hey," I said gently. "Do you know where we are?"
He turned around. His eyes were dry but searching, moving past me, scanning the platform behind us.
"Where's mom and dad?" he said.
Not an answer. A question of his own, asked with the quiet certainty of someone who already feared the worst. I didn't know what to say to him, so I said nothing.
I straightened up and let my eyes move down the platform. That was when I noticed the conductors. There were two of them, standing near the far end of the platform beside a set of iron doors. Their uniforms were white trimmed with yellow — clean, almost luminous against the grey of the station. They stood perfectly still, neither speaking nor gesturing, watching the crowd with unreadable expressions.
I need to ask them.
I placed my hands on the bench and made to stand. I couldn't.
Not the way a limb falls asleep, not a cramp or a stiffness — I simply could not rise. My body remained seated, paralyzed. I tried again. Nothing. I looked down at my hands, my legs, searching for some explanation that wasn't there.
Around me, no one seemed to notice. The woman beside me wept in silence. The boy stared toward the doors. The conductors at the end of the platform had not moved.
I sat very still, and all I can do is think.
