I breathe in deeply; the air has a slight scent that I can just pick out. A taint amidst the overwhelming sensory battery of null space. I start to unravel the white light, one colour at a time; start to filter out the white noise, frequency by frequency. It is not a perfect technique, after half an hour there is still a flickering in my vision and a hum in my ears but I can function; can see and hear beyond myself.

The effort has exhausted me, muscles quiver - oxygen starved; I am dripping with sweat and a sharp pain is beating its way through from the back of my skull. I fold over onto the featureless floor and lie there, panting. Slowly, my heart rate falls and sensations return.

I can just make out two doors in front of me, as white and featureless as the floor I am lying on. I know that one of them leads back into my apartment. I know too that there are guards with guns somewhere but I cannot remember where. I must be careful to avoid them.

I twist and wriggle until one of the doors comes close, into my field of vision. I can just see blue light underneath it, dissipating as it hits the white expanse surrounding me. I can smell the faint acrid taint from earlier, seeming to emanate from the other side of this door.

My decision made, I drag myself up the door frame, lights exploding in my skull with the effort, clouding my vision for a short while. Slapping my wrist against the scanner I fall through the door and hit the floor on the other side. The door begins to close and, knowing it will not stop for me, I wrench my feet out of the opening, leaving a shoe behind to jam the mechanism.

The meter begins to bleep an alarm but I ignore it, focussing instead on my surroundings. I can see very little, the blue light I had seen under the door engulfs this place completely in thick, fog-like swathes. Arms out in front of me, I stumble forwards into the blueness, feeling for anything concrete.

The floor feels smooth at first, becoming rougher as I walk further away from the door. Rough enough to turn an ankle on. As the blue swirls around me, deepening in colour, obscuring my view until I can hardly see, I sink to my knees.

I begin to crawl, slowly, realising I now have no idea where the white door is, the blue gloom obscuring everything. Suddenly I come across a pool where blue light mingles with white, lifting the gloom a little. A big space; I cannot see where the dense blue begins again.

In the distance I can make out a group of dense structures, glowing faintly purple. I sit on the edge of the clearing and watch them pulse slowly in patterns that seem to swirl and change yet remain somehow constant, unchanging to the casual eye. As I watch the pulsing seems to quicken and I can, I think, make out flashes of orange threading through the pattern. The orange draws me in as if it is coming closer to me, slowly, second by second. But when I look down at my feet, it is I who am moving, inexorably, towards it.