He had sat through the morning, wondering over the weather outside, disguised by the turned blinds and fluorescent lights. Pain would occasionally visit the marks in his fingertips where fine paper had sliced them deep, the immaculate cuts masking the damage done. Earlier, he had danced outside stealing pictures from the world around, and the artificial and the mechanical and the mundane had seemed somehow pretty, and the thirty minutes of his day spent in the outside made him long for more during the next four hours trapped within. Now, he was reduced to undoing the work he had already done for occupation, or asking for new work, which meant tasks that could not be performed as he drifted towards other worlds, never quite close enough to be swallowed by them, or letting himself dream, and risking being discovered in a place not allowed by The Procedure.

And so he waits, and watches the time slide slowly by, the sudden change of the digital clock from one minute to the next emphasising the drudgery of it all. He waits for five o’clock, when he will once again be free, and although tomorrow the routine will inevitably run again, and The Procedure will take its hold, today he has the evening, and the night time; today he has The Future, and tomorrow he will know he has it still.