It starts in a rocket. There are thousands of people buckling themselves into seats ready for flight, on dozens of floors connected by a single central vertical ladder that will eventually be our escape route. The older people are assigned to the bottom floors - the assumption is they will be slowest. However it also means they have the longest distance to climb.
We have been living in this rocket for years, because the world outside was poisoned. Now we are told we are being released after a short journey to somewhere beautiful. We can go outside and live in the air and grow things again.
My sister and I, assigned to a top floor because of our youth, are climbing down the stairs towards the bottom. I am convinced the entire evacuation is a scam. The rocket never feels like we are accelerating or decelerating and no one else seems to notice this departure from the physics of what should be happening.
As we descend the air seems thicker. The passengers are certainly greyer, more heavyset. I begin to have a slow-motion panic attack, imagining being stuck behind this slow moving mass. My strategy has been to take our time exiting the rocket so that we could perhaps assess from some downward trickling of reaction whether my fears are grounded.
I have no contacts within the small cadre of officers that run the rocket and issue the orders; my sense of the wrongness of the current plan is simply gut instinct - at least at first. Every little thing seems to support it, niggly little facts eating away at my faith in our leaders.
Why after years of dwindling supplies and restricted rations is it suddenly possible for us to take a short trip to paradise? I can't shake the much more likely scenario: we are nearly out of food and water. This is a plan to conserve what's left among the much smaller number of crew by "letting" us all out into the poisoned air.
The PA system barks; the exodus begins. People swarm up the ladder and disappear many floors above us, into whatever awaits. I hold my breath, hold my sister's hand. We have found nowhere to hide and I have begun to wonder if there is no safety inside the rocket after all. It has occurred to me that many of these senior citizens will not be able to make the long climb to the surface. Perhaps they plan to kill us either way - luring the able-bodied, fit-enough-to-fight outside into the lethal atmosphere and then sealing the slow inside, allowing us to slowly poison ourselves with our own exhalations.
There is a blank spot in my memory of what comes next, so I have no answer to that most basic question - what happened at the pivotal moment as each person emerged from the top of the rocket. Was it hope, crushed by reality or was it, incredibly, joy in the face of salvation, in promises come true.
In the next scenes I am in a museum; I can't tell if it is the future in which we survived, but it seems equally possible this is the prequel, and I am experiencing events in the past.
I am in an underwater museum. Works are shown on walls separated by a thin membrane of water and glass, under lit by soft floodlights. I am looking at a digital exhibit; the prolific artist's surreal photographs blink through in sequence, changeing every ten seconds.
The artist himself is standing next to the 18x24 digital frame, describing his technique. He is a friend, so I have already heard how he shoots at angles that allow him to give the illusion that the body part in focus - usually the head - has been severed from the body yet incredibly still lives. Though his pictures have no blood, they are effective and disturbing.
I am secretly afraid of him because I had a dream one night that when the angle of the shot isn't working, he resorts to actually dissecting his subject, and taking photographs in the moments before death. Either way the images seem evil and whether it is actual or simply effectively simulated horror seems to be a little beside the point.
I come away from the display with my stomach hurting from fear and sadness.
