Id wakes from a nightmare, and takes the first steps on the path leading to his corruption and death.

Wake.
Still dark. My room is a velvet well, the night deepening where it pools on the floor, around the bed, and over me.
The com’s alarm sounds but I ignore it, still half submerged in a dream of panicked, drowning animals. Jilted, it begins to scream and whoop, forcing me out of bed with its cacophony.
In the wash-box, squinting and blinking, chrome nozzles wash and dry me while I piss into the grate. The com blinks malevolently as I dress; vibrates in my hand when I grab it and leave. Message waiting. Message waiting.
Pressure builds in the base of my skull.

Id emerges into the black hall chewing a half-handful of bitter tablets to try and dodge his approaching migraine. A line of fluorescents on the ceiling shudder to life as he steps forward, revealing the blistered linoleum floor and grimy blue walls. He reads the message on his com as he climbs the stairs; passes through the foyer - the old woman lying unconscious at her desk - and into the station. It is quiet so early: only a few pin-eyed commuters and a cleaner mar the white tile surfaces. The pill from the Lafcadio Centre has not arrived.
He exchanges a retinal scan for a number 4 ‘Cereal & Milk’ at the station’s vending-hole. The machine rejects him several times, failing to recognise his eye, heavy and red after days of sleep and painkillers. When it finally coughs up the food he stands on the crimson line that separates platform from tube, idly watching the forbidden space, eating slowly.
The wind of the approaching pill is on his face and in his hair when he spots a ball of tinfoil on the floor of the tube rolling slightly against the growing tide of air.
And suddenly a man is crouching in the tube, holding the scrunched foil as if he has bent to pick it up. Id cries out at this sudden, inexplicable appearance and drops the remains of his breakfast.
The man is old and strange, clothes cobbled and ripped, his head surmounted by a tangle of lank grey dreadlocks. He is sweating and his breath is loud and ragged. Apparently unsurprised at appearing from dead air like some demented magic trick, he looks up and sees the pill rushing down the tube toward him, electromagnetic forces casting a blue light beneath its body as it decelerates.
The old man remains calm. Looking up, he fixes his gaze on Id and runs over, extending a hand. Id hauls him from the tube, feeling the dry strength in the stranger’s arm. The man gains the platform, but accidentally drops the foil from which he seems to have sprung. It falls in front of the arriving pill, and is flattened.
“Fuck,” says the man, seemingly more in annoyance over the loss of his piece of rubbish than anything else. Id says nothing.
“Is this the City?” he asks, looking around. Id nods, but the stranger is still looking abstractedly about him, and misses the movement. When he receives no answer the man turns his gaze back on Id, black and hard. Id nods again, vigorously.
“Fuck,” says the man, this time with more feeling.
His gaze intensifies, and Id feels as if it will gobble him whole. “Have you been saved?”
“What?”
The old man laughs. “Good answer!” He slaps Id on the shoulder in an instant camaraderie. Id begins to smile, unsure what else to do, when the man’s good humour drains away, replaced by a haggard, hunted look. “They’re coming,” he says, leaning too close. “They’re after me, and you’ll hang too, unless you’re careful.”
Then he turns and slips from the station, head down. Id starts after him, but stops, remembering why he is out of bed.