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Awake Mode. Full hunter-gatherer consciousness.

At least, he thought he was awake, but he could never be quite sure of anything these days. He lay very still, fear shorting through him as the nightmare receded, trying to make coherence out of his surroundings. The same nightmare he had night after night, and it felt so damned real - except what the hell was reality these days? Life was confusing, one seamless time-space continuum of complete muddle. He stared blankly at the pixels on the pillow beside him.

Hundreds of them. Thousands. Millions in fact, all needing assembling to make a coherent image of his wife. He always compressed her when he went to sleep (to save storage space on his hard disk - or brain as he still preferred to call it) but it was a hassle making sense of her again, like having to do a fiendish jigsaw puzzle every morning and do it in a ludicrously brief fragment of time. Sod it, how much smaller could time get? It had already gone from a picosecond to a nanosecond to an attosecond. An attosecond was to one second what one what one second was from now back to the Big Bang...and he had to assemble the puzzle in just one tiny fraction of that.

'Morning, darling,' Susan said with a sleepy smile, as the jumble of pixels rearranged themselves into a solid image of his wife, tangles of brown hair across her face. Struth, she looked so lifelike, Henry thought, just the way he always remembered her - but so she should be. He leaned across to kiss her. There was nothing there, of course, but he still kissed her every morning and she reciprocated with a tantalising pout and an expression that was dangerously close to a smirk, as if she had some secret she was keeping from him. She giggled exactly the way she did every morning, and said, 'Oh darling, I wish, I wish!'

He watched her get out of bed, and felt a sudden prick of lust as she arched her naked body, tossed her hair, strode to the bathroom. The door slammed shut. God, they hadn't made love since - since - ? He trawled his memory racks - no, banks - no, cells, yes, brain cells - wetware they called it - but could not remember when they had last made love. He couldn't even remember when he had last remembered making love. The muddle was definitely worsening.

Brain Overload Stress Syndrome. It had become the Western world's most common illness. The brain filled up, could not cope with new input, creating a sense of panic and confusion. Henry had been suffering from BOSS for some while now. The symptoms were so clear to him he hadn't even bothered going to the doctor for confirmation: There was just too much bloody bandwidth in the world.

He sat up in alarm. I cannot make love to my wife because she does not exist, or rather she exists only in my memory. I am the sole reality. Then he said what he always said when he needed to reassure himself:

Cogito, ergo sum.

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