I awoke at the wheel of a running car. My hands were white-knuckled and slick with sweat. The car seemed to be a VW Beetle. I looked around, looking for guidance but there was none to be had.
Ahead of me was a tall grey building, with a small plaque by the door that was too far away to read. One of my feet was pressing the accelerator, the other the clutch. The engine screamed in pain. I think I was supposed to drive into the building, which would almost certainly be fatal – the Beetle had nothing in the way of safety mechanisms.
But why? I struggled to recall how I got here. I tried to move my feet but they were like lead, like the bottom half of my body belonged to someone else. To my dismay, I lifted off the clutch and the car bolted forward.
“SHIT!” I screamed as the building approached. A woman in a suit opened the door, looked terrified and scurried back inside. The impact was inevitable, and almost reassuring when it came. The hard steering wheel crushed my ribs as my head pierced the windscreen then everything went black.
I inhaled sharply and opened my eyes. I was in a nightclub, on a leather sofa, A girl opposite me with pink hair smirked at me over the lid of a laptop.
“Well done, Paul,” she said. “Just another 99 to go.”