One

He slept.

 

Outside, the city was silent in the darkness. No trucks rambled down the highways carrying their wares. No construction crews worked the roads. No sirens pierced the night. Those noises might have been there but he was oblivious, asleep to all around him.

 

Robert White had slept through most of his life. Middle-aged and nondescript, he'd accomplished little in his years on this earth. He'd lived in the city all his life, or at least in the suburbs where he was raised. His childhood had been serene but something inside him lacked urgency, as if he had all of forever. When opportunities arose, he passed. When chances to improve his lot came his way, he dithered and eventually declined, letting other men seize the day.

 

Robert White walked in perpetual fear. Afraid to change, afraid to move, afraid what little he did have of a life would be taken away from him. Things will get better, he told himself. They have to get better eventually, he would think when another weekend came and went without incident.

 

Robert worked a perfectly boring job in a perfectly nondescript building. He was one of many worker drones, busy bees in a glass and steel hive. The work he did was unfulfilling, entering numbers and data into a computer. His cubicle had little to distinguish itself from other cubicles, other than where other workers had pictures of girlfriends, children, places they'd been to, Robert instead had cheat sheets and work-related posters. If the work didn't kill his soul, that cubicle had to.

 

But for now he slept, the only time he didn't feel that vague unease that life had already passed him by and it was too late for him to do anything about it. He had no girlfriends, didn't date. Oh, he'd had a couple of aborted attempts at relationships when he was younger, even gotten one or two women into his bed but his lovemaking was as pedantic as he was and the women left, the relationship crushed by it's own lack of inertia. Robert didn't mourn these things - it was just life as he knew it. As he lived it.

 

The night wore on and still he slept. Did he dream? If he did, he wouldn't remember the dreams. He never did. They were as elusive as happiness for him. He wished he could remember them; maybe he would be happy in them. Maybe women would find him irresistible, his bosses would recognize his intelligence (despite everything, Robert was a fairly bright man) and he wouldn't be caught in this flytrap of a life he found himself in.

 

The first rays of dawn began to peek out from the horizon. Still the city remained silent, as if holding its breath and awaiting something new. Nothing new ever happened to Robert. It would be the same thing all over again.

 

The alarm sounded its discordant din, jangling him into sudden wakefulness. With a sleepy groan, he rolled over from his sheets and sat up, rubbing his eyes and yawning. He rose, not noticing the soft carpet on the bottom of his feet or the cold bite of the morning air. Life wasn't something Robert White experienced; it was something that happened to him.

 

This day would be different. This day was special. As Robert White brushed his teeth, showered and dressed, his normal routine went unchanged but that would be the last normal thing he would experience today or any other day. His life, his future, his outlook were all about to undergo a remarkable transformation. Perhaps he didn't deserve one but he would receive one all the same.