Brown paper

Up Jack got and home did trot
As fast as he could caper
He went to bed
to mend his head
with vinegar and brown paper

I remember the smell of straw and animals. Background chatter and women crying. Laughing. Always laughing loud and at inappropriate moments. Panda called it 'pub laughing'. People were dying around me as I stumbled after Lauren. Shadowy characters, this was my dream.

I was dragged half-blind into a half-lit stone corridor that went down and down. The flicker of torches allowed the the odd glance to get my bearings. This was the underground connection between the amphitheatre and the main Roman villas in the the town. Smashed and rebuilt before Tiberius extended his rule into northern Africa. Somehow it made sense.

The key

The C-stream (or key-stream) was a loop, or a channel. Phrenologists packaged it as the collective unconscious. The dualists couldn’t get past the ghost in the machine. The vast majority struggled to think outside their gorgeous little bubbles at all. But a few enlightened individuals devised a model in the form of a mobius strip. A continuous, linear timeline that, when divided, intersected with itself at historical events.

Some had been using it for prehistoric holidays since time immemorial.