Nutrition/stimulants: Tea Start time: 1.01 a.m.

End time: 1.18 a.m.

The corpse is very old. He has wrapped his arms around me and they are cool and floppy. His eyes are wide open, unseeing, and his blackish tongue droops out of his dry mouth.

I suck in air with a ragged squeak. I shoot out of that bed so fast that I guess I actually push off the dead body to get leverage, because it topples to the floor as I back away from the bed in panic. I grope around me for anything I can use for a weapon. My hand lights on a fire extinguisher and I brandish it defensively. It turns into a hatchet.

I have to get out of here. I have to change the setting. Make something happen to save me.

Wait. Think, Charlie. We had a plan.

I remember now. I’m here for a reason. I have to learn everything I can from the setting. It’s definitely not anywhere I’ve ever been, in a dream or otherwise. I’m not even sure this is really a hospital, because the room looks more like a hotel room except for the bed. If it’s a hospital, it’s a posh one. There are enormous windows looking out on . . . ? Where are we?

I see the building opposite through the window and my earring rapidly cross-references it against my street maps.

We are in the London Clinic. The big room right over the front door.

OK, that’s something. This person has set their dream in an expensive private hospital. But why are they pretending to be a corpse?

The body is definitely dead. But it gets up off the floor and walks around stiffly, with home-made-horror-movie squishy cracking noises. Now it is blocking the door.

‘You again!’ the corpse says, folding its arms with an unreal shuffling sound. ‘Not dead yet.’

I don’t know which one of us it’s referring to.

‘When is it going to start working?’ the corpse says.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘The medicine, the damned medicine. Isn’t that why I’m here? So you can rebuild the dead networks? Aren’t you going to monkey around in my circuits or something? Why else would you be carrying that toolbox?’

I look at the axe in my hands and sure enough, it’s become big red metal workman’s toolbox. The kind that probably contains a full set of socket spanners. What on earth is the corpse talking about?

‘So go on and fix me, then. I’m not dead yet.’

Then it turns to the door, opens it and walks out.

‘Hey! Where are you going?’

‘To find my target and kill them, of course.’

‘Why would you do a thing like that?’