Flatulent Freddy's Fantastic Fugue? [or maybe just the heat]

"..rantrantrantrantra..."
#cough. a discreet one.
"Right, then, Hwhat do you think you're up to, young man? (woman, specie of indeterminate nature, collective consciousness or hive mind, I think I covered everything, phew.)"

The young man in question, insofar as it is possible to tell within the shadows underneath his hoodie and the general work of malnutrition, stopped rocking back and forth in the dingy corner muttering to himself and looked up.
"You forgot the undead, the transequoias, the metrop-troglodytes and Lady Agatha.", he said, mildly reproachfully.

"Hrumph, well...", said the drill sergeant bashfully, as much as it was possible for a man built like a craggy mountain to look sheepish, "undead, hwhat? always come back to bite at yer."

"That's considered boorish these days, don't you know?", said the probably-a-young-lad standing up and dusting off shapeless coveralls. His arms were bandaged all the way up to his elbows in strips of cloth that looked as dirty as the environs. "Haven't you kept up with your sensitivity training, old soul?"

"Hrmph..that sort of thing was never meant for me..", said the drill sergeant, and sneezed with enough force to shake the building, give a flock of placid sheep in a neighbouring country nervous dysentry and cause a flock of roosting pigeons to seriously reevaluate their life choices. "Are we going or hwhat?"

"Won't it feel good to be connected to the network again, kernel?", asked the sergeant cheerfully, in the manner of sergeants everywhere, handing the other a discreet looking rectangle the dimensions of a thick card, with a small wire extending from a corner.

"Not really... I rather enjoyed this excursion into autotropic hallucinations.", said the other. It was hard to tell if it was sarcasm or not.

As they both walked out of the desolate building, stepping over abandoned sleeping bags and rations of ramen, the sargeant shrugged with a movement that resembled spry glaciers shifting along mountain ridges. "Yer just kiddin', aren't you, kernel? What was it like?"

The smaller figure stopped briefly, as if thinking about it. The kernel seemed undecided. "I don't know quite how to put it. For a while, I was in a family. It wasn't a great one, it wasn't a bad one, as families go. We had pets, I had an interesting job doing research at a local university. We fought, we danced, we fell ill from time to time and scrambled to pay the rent. It was...surprisingly comfortable."

"The bit where it really got interesting was when I gradually stopped being in touch with my core reality to such an extent that this seemed to be my life, the complete extent of it. MY aspirations were limited to what my next research project would be, or where we would go for dinner. My joys were simple jokes on the internet and the occasional book, my sorrows were an argument with my partner or a setback in my work."

"That sounds..."

"Hang on, let me finish. Eventually it got to a place where I was comfortable. I woke up from a drowse on a saturday afternoon with her head on my shoulder, slightly full from a heavy lunch, and I was there. Completely there. I had no subtextual processes running. I was gradually drifting apart from my friends, with whom I'd been having a rather good time, I'd stopped browsing for new things to do, or places to go to, or things to learn. I'd stopped writing, and drawing, and finding things that amused me. My head was filled with a fog, a comfortable fog, but despite being aware of it I couldn't shake it off. In there, my mind likened it to being at home, a primordial sense of comfort that it was trained in a sort of Pavlovian way to respond to. If not thinking about things makes you comfortable, my amygdala sends up to my prefrontal cortex, then continue doing so. Don't you feel satisfied right now?"

"And that's what woke you up?"

"Yep. That was it for me. But I can understand why so many fell prey to it. It almost had me going right up until there. To be honest, I don't feel all present even now. Some part of me is still there, playing chess on my phone, or cooking dinner, and for a moment I think I saw what other people strive for all their lives."

The sergeant pondered over it for a little bit. Everyone, he thought, strove for happiness. For satisfaction. That's why they did what they did, whether it be solving problems, or saving money, or working towards a promotion, or sending a speeding vehicle careening off a cliff's edge. If you built a drug that offered you that, with enough emotional variety to keep the sense of contentment from getting baselined, how did anyone realise it, let alone combat it? He looked at the kernel through new eyes, and wondered, what does a person who does not strive for satisfaction want?

Life used to be so bloody good, ye ken?
Its almost over, the song's almost over, and yer wastin' 'time o'er the backspace key!
Oh, bugrit' all.
And just like that, there's a new song. One that you don't recognise. One that you'll hae to live with.
Sleep's still sleep. Sleep's nice. 

- and so it goes. 

Well, its today, is it?

Wee Wayne Calhoun sat in one of the eaves near the gibbet and scribbled in his notebook. He chewed on the edge of his pencil as he thought hard about the things he wrote. He always did. The sun was a vaguely bright spot among the damp clouds, and Wayne had to stop and shake his fingers vigorously every so often to keep the damp out of them.

An observant passerby might have seen a scrawny kid with a dog-eared notebook half-hidden behind the scraggly vines with a look of bemused concentration, the look of a kid working out the world with his notebook, understanding one thing at a time. Often wrong, but hey, the day was young. And nobody had pulled him out and clipped him over the ear for wasting time yet.

Ezekiel had been waiting for a while. Brushing off a nonexistent speck from his coat, he stepped off the roof and into a nondescript alley.

Eventually Wayne finished his train of thought, and taking out a much abused leaf from his pocket, he marked his place in the book and tucked it within the recesses of his jacket. Looking to see if anybody was around, he jumped out of his not-really-a-hiding place, and started on the alleyways back. Looking at the telltale sun he hurried up, shoulders hunched and chin down against the wind.

Rushing along without really paying attention to the familiar surroundings, Wayne collided again't someone as he rounded a corner. For a moment a portion his brain told him that it was someone surprisingly heavy for a body so apparently thin, but it was overshadowed by the much bigger portion that screamed 'its a bloody posh bugger. oh, you're screwed now.' For the cut of the stranger's coat was unmistakably fine, especially to one trained in observation on the streets.

In blatant contradiction of both poshness and buggeredness, however, the stranger offered a hand to help Wayne up. Surprised, Wayne looked up, to see a pair of twinkling black eyes, framed by pieces of glass impossibly held together by a structure of twisted wire, under white, almost nonexistent eyebrows.

'What's going on? I ane't done nothin.', said Wayne. After the perfunctory, 'm'sorry, lor'.'

'Well', said the stranger brightly. 'I seem to be uninjured, and you seem to have all your pieces about you, so I guess that's all fine. Now, what day is it?' He fumbled for a watch in the recesses of his coat, and came out with a contraption that seemed to fit that description. 'Hm. Today, is it? Ah, well, that could work. I don't normally do this..', he said, looking in all probability like someone who normally did this, 'Young man, could you spare me a moment of your time?'