Ahoy there, Awayers! Yes, that’s right, I’ve named you all, in a frankly transparent attempt to bring you into the fold and make you feel a part of this project.

I thought I’d give you all a little more insight into the story as it stands.

It is the near future and we land in a world where an unknown illness has been slowly wiping out humanity for the last five years or so. It seems to take around two years from infection before it stops your heart dead, but with no symptoms in the meantime at all. Electricity is intermittent, gas is non-existent, money has little value any more, as people want stuff and experiences instead. Most people drink too much and party non-stop, knowing that the end is coming soon, even if they don’t know exactly when.

We all expected the apocalypse. A mad, clamboring outpour of terror, looting, crime and excess: hospitals filled with screaming, wailing people, climbing over each other to find out if they were sick or not.

It’s funny how we’ve ended up calling it that: ‘being sick’. Because, we’re not. I feel completely and utterly normal, even though I’ve spent a fair bit of time trying to feel it, trying to feel the sickness in my veins. I just keep thinking, surely it must be doing something, surely I could feel it, growing and festering, waiting to get me. But if anything, I feel a little more energised, a little more focused, a little more sharp and, dare I say it, a little more alive than before. A completely healthy ticking time bomb.

It started with rumours, mostly on the internet, from people who were convinced something was up, but who couldn’t put a finger on it, couldn’t give a shape to what they thought they were seeing. They talked about unexplained deaths, about cover-ups, but they were dismissed as crazy conspiracy theorists, people set on seeing patterns in the everyday chaos of life.

Then, a leak: supposedly from a government source, of a document detailing “a spike in mortality rates with no obvious cause of death”. This caused some mild rumbles of concern, but there really wasn’t much to go on. Who were we supposed to ask about it, what was the threat we were supposed to be scared of and therefore avoiding? It wasn’t a thing, it was just a set of statistics, and surely sometimes the figures are wrong, or change, or have anomalies. That must happen, right?

Then came the media, with its nose to the ground, snuffling around for stories that fitted with this theory that “something was up”. The news started feeding us tales of mysterious deaths of healthy people in their twenties and thirties, people just dropping dead with no obvious cause. My father flickered across my mind as I watched, but I never thought it would turn out to be real, this thing. I thought it was a panic, a hysteria that had gripped us all, the power of the media outgrowing itself. Over time, the news stories bled together until there was one big, messy story: the Sickness.

The Sickness was killing people, the media knew this, but nobody knew what it was, or what it did to you, or how it was spreading, or what to do about it. At first, the government denied it even existed. They blamed the statisticians, told us the numbers were wrong, that there was no crisis, just a big misunderstanding. A general sense of hushed unease settled over everything but still, no one panicked. Instead, we shrugged our shoulders and went back to our lives, because what else could we do?

The world carried on as normal, but with the deaths becoming more noticeable, until three years ago.

Mum and I were watching TV, like we always did on a Sunday evening, with our pajamas on. I was twelve years old, just old enough to be aware of what was going on, but not old enough to feel it. Just as I was biting into a slice of buttery toast, the screen went black and all we were left with was a metallic hum. We sat and stared at the TV, unworried, waiting for it to come back on, assuming it was something standard and ordinary and fixable; but it didn’t come back on. After a few minutes, we turned it off at the wall, waited, then turned it back on; but still nothing.

We switched on the radio to find that none of the stations were broadcasting. The silence was unsettling. The lack of input unnerved me back then. I didn’t know what to do with the quiet.

We found ourselves opening the front door, wandering outside into the street and then other people started appearing in their doorways.

“Has your TV gone off?”

“I think it’s lost signal or something.”

“All the channels are off.”

“So’s the radio.”

“Maybe there’s a big storm coming in?”

We all felt it, the buzz in the air, the sensation of change, of impending doom. We huddled in a group in the road as the sun went down, hoping that if we stayed out there long enough, everything would just go back to normal.

Ahoy there, Awayers! Yes, that’s right, I’ve named you all, in a frankly transparent attempt to bring you into the fold and make you feel a part of this project.

I thought I’d give you all a little more insight into the story as it stands.

It is the near future and we land in a world where an unknown illness has been slowly wiping out humanity for the last five years or so. It seems to take around two years from infection before it stops your heart dead, but with no symptoms in the meantime at all. Electricity is intermittent, gas is non-existent, money has little value any more, as people want stuff and experiences instead. Most people drink too much and party non-stop, knowing that the end is coming soon, even if they don’t know exactly when.

We all expected the apocalypse. A mad, clamboring outpour of terror, looting, crime and excess: hospitals filled with screaming, wailing people, climbing over each other to find out if they were sick or not.

It’s funny how we’ve ended up calling it that: ‘being sick’. Because, we’re not. I feel completely and utterly normal, even though I’ve spent a fair bit of time trying to feel it, trying to feel the sickness in my veins. I just keep thinking, surely it must be doing something, surely I could feel it, growing and festering, waiting to get me. But if anything, I feel a little more energised, a little more focused, a little more sharp and, dare I say it, a little more alive than before. A completely healthy ticking time bomb.

It started with rumours, mostly on the internet, from people who were convinced something was up, but who couldn’t put a finger on it, couldn’t give a shape to what they thought they were seeing. They talked about unexplained deaths, about cover-ups, but they were dismissed as crazy conspiracy theorists, people set on seeing patterns in the everyday chaos of life.

Then, a leak: supposedly from a government source, of a document detailing “a spike in mortality rates with no obvious cause of death”. This caused some mild rumbles of concern, but there really wasn’t much to go on. Who were we supposed to ask about it, what was the threat we were supposed to be scared of and therefore avoiding? It wasn’t a thing, it was just a set of statistics, and surely sometimes the figures are wrong, or change, or have anomalies. That must happen, right?

Then came the media, with its nose to the ground, snuffling around for stories that fitted with this theory that “something was up”. The news started feeding us tales of mysterious deaths of healthy people in their twenties and thirties, people just dropping dead with no obvious cause. My father flickered across my mind as I watched, but I never thought it would turn out to be real, this thing. I thought it was a panic, a hysteria that had gripped us all, the power of the media outgrowing itself. Over time, the news stories bled together until there was one big, messy story: the Sickness.

The Sickness was killing people, the media knew this, but nobody knew what it was, or what it did to you, or how it was spreading, or what to do about it. At first, the government denied it even existed. They blamed the statisticians, told us the numbers were wrong, that there was no crisis, just a big misunderstanding. A general sense of hushed unease settled over everything but still, no one panicked. Instead, we shrugged our shoulders and went back to our lives, because what else could we do?

The world carried on as normal, but with the deaths becoming more noticeable, until three years ago.

Mum and I were watching TV, like we always did on a Sunday evening, with our pajamas on. I was twelve years old, just old enough to be aware of what was going on, but not old enough to feel it. Just as I was biting into a slice of buttery toast, the screen went black and all we were left with was a metallic hum. We sat and stared at the TV, unworried, waiting for it to come back on, assuming it was something standard and ordinary and fixable; but it didn’t come back on. After a few minutes, we turned it off at the wall, waited, then turned it back on; but still nothing.

We switched on the radio to find that none of the stations were broadcasting. The silence was unsettling. The lack of input unnerved me back then. I didn’t know what to do with the quiet.

We found ourselves opening the front door, wandering outside into the street and then other people started appearing in their doorways.

“Has your TV gone off?”

“I think it’s lost signal or something.”

“All the channels are off.”

“So’s the radio.”

“Maybe there’s a big storm coming in?”

We all felt it, the buzz in the air, the sensation of change, of impending doom. We huddled in a group in the road as the sun went down, hoping that if we stayed out there long enough, everything would just go back to normal.