Twenty-Four Sixty-Two

And now, a tale well calculated to keep you in, suspense. I only asked the place and time enough to give some small meaning to the meaningless, and point to having lived. Listen now to 2462, starring Lawson Zirby, and written especially for suspense by George Bamber.

I woke up on the floor shivering. All my clothes were gone. It was like a nightmare. A nightmare I had dreamed many times before, and dreaded coming true. At first I thought I'd awaken in my own room, that somebody had taken all my furniture as well as my clothes.

But then I realized it wasn't so much a room, as it was a cube. An empty, sterile cube with luminescent walls that hummed with a soft blue-green light. I jumped up then and threw myself against the walls trying to find a way out and there was none. No door, no window, not even a ventilation tube. I banged on the walls and

screamed but no one answered me. Nothing but the smooth plastic blue green walls that hummed with the electric current in them that gave them light and air. I slumped back down to the soft foam plastic floor of myself, afraid to admit to myself where I was, and squeezed my eyes tight against the walls because I was afraid I was going to cry. Just then, the

wall in front of me slid back on its tracks, and in the pale light of the corridor, I could see a large, shambling man in prison coveralls with a nine-digit number tattooed on his forehead.

What do you want? Follow me. He turned his back on me and stepped on the moving conveyor in the corridor. I stumbled after him because I was afraid to be alone. I had to know what was happening.