The Sleeping Man

“On Earth, the day began with alarms. Here, it begins with silence that won’t explain itself.”

The gentle intrusion of early morning sunlight coaxed my eyes open, marking the start of another day. Its rays filtered softly through the canvas of the tent, casting elongated slivers of pale gold across the floor. For a fleeting moment, I remained still, savouring the last tendrils of sleep that clung to me like a veil. I let my gaze rest on the trembling shadows dancing at the tent wall, hoping—absurdly—for the trill of birdsong, the chirrup of morning life that had always signalled a new day back on Earth.

But there was nothing.

No birds. No distant hum of traffic. Not even the rustle of leaves stirred by a passing breeze. Just silence—dense, all-consuming, and unsettling.

It wasn’t peaceful. It was empty.

The absence of sound made the air feel heavier somehow, as if the world beyond the tent had pressed pause and was waiting for us to resume it. I shifted slightly, the movement drawing attention to the stiffness in my joints, a quiet protest from a body unaccustomed to sleeping on dust-packed earth.

My face tightened as memory surged in, unwelcome but unstoppable. The events of the day before—the Testers, the dogs, Jamie’s pain, the wounds, the firelight, the weight of survival—spooled through my mind like a reel of harsh footage. There was no warm comfort in waking here, no gentle easing into the day.

Clivilius was real.

And it was mine now, whether I liked it or not.

The finality of that truth pressed down on my chest like a weight I couldn’t shrug off. There was no door to open and step through, no returning to my home, to my clinic, to Pierre or Lois. The things I had loved were now galaxies away—untouchable. My life, as I had known it, existed only in memory.

With a sigh, I rolled off the blanket, my limbs protesting with reluctance. The movements were slow, automatic, the rituals of waking familiar enough to cling to despite everything else having changed. I folded the blanket neatly, smoothing the corners with unnecessary precision, and placed it back in the corner of the tent where I’d found it.

A small act of order in a world of unpredictability.

The air inside was already warm, dry, tinged with the ever-present scent of dust. I knelt there for a moment longer, not out of tiredness, but as if rising to my feet would somehow cement the new day—and with it, the expectations of survival, of responsibility, of keeping others alive.

But time would not wait, and neither could I.

Stepping outside into the crisp morning air, I squinted against the low sun on the horizon, its sharp light slanting across the land in long, angular shadows that cut through the dust. The chill bit gently at my cheeks, a surprising contrast to the arid heat that I knew would follow. For a fleeting moment, I closed my eyes and simply stood there, letting the silence and stillness wash over me—my senses reaching instinctively for signs of the familiar.

I found myself trying to gauge the time, a deeply ingrained habit—one of the countless small rituals that tethered my mind to order and structure. The act, so automatic, felt almost absurd in this world where every familiar reference point had been stripped away. My phone, which had always kept me anchored with its chimes, reminders, and digital precision, was now with Luke, somewhere beyond the horizon. And my smartwatch—left behind on my desk in a hurried departure that felt more like an exhale than a decision—was as far out of reach as the life I'd once lived.

I tilted my head, studying the quality of the light, the length of the shadows, trying to piece together a guess. Six, maybe six-thirty? Seven at most. It was all conjecture, a hollow attempt to bend the unknowable into something Earth-like. I caught myself hoping—perhaps foolishly—that Clivilius ran on a cycle not too dissimilar from Earth’s twenty-four hours. But then again, why would it? What was day here might be something entirely different by the time dusk returned. It was one more reminder that time, too, might no longer belong to us.

The thought sat uneasily in my chest, a small but significant loss. Not just of minutes and hours—but of the context that had once governed them. It made me realise that adaptation here would go deeper than physical survival; it would demand a rewiring of perception itself.

Turning my attention to the camp, I scanned for movement, for any signs of early stirrings. But the world remained still. No morning shuffle of footsteps, no distant voices, no signs of Jamie’s dogs rustling through the brush. The air hung in a strange, suspended calm—a stark contrast to the frenzied cadence of the previous day.

My eyes finally landed on Paul. He was sprawled beside the now-cold remnants of the campfire, curled slightly into himself, one arm across his chest and the other thrown above his head. The thin blanket I’d draped over him had slipped off, now rumpled at his hip. His chest rose and fell in a slow, unhurried rhythm, a faint snore escaping him in soft, irregular bursts.

I watched him for a long moment.

Despite the uncomfortable bedding—the packed earth and the stray stones—I could see that sleep had found him. Somehow, amidst the strangeness and threat of this place, Paul had carved out a space for rest. I felt an unexpected twinge of envy. Sleep had been a stranger to me last night. My body had yielded eventually, but my mind had fought it every step of the way, clinging to familiar fears like an anchor. Even in unconsciousness, I had tossed and turned, haunted by fragmented dreams and the echo of home.

Still, the fact that I had slept at all came as a mild relief. A sign, perhaps, that the body could adjust even when the mind remained reluctant. My arrival here had been swift, jarring, and relentless. I had anticipated hardship—of course I had. But I had not anticipated this peculiar kind of exhaustion. Not the weariness of exertion, but the deeper kind—the mental unravelling that came from having no bearings, from inhabiting a place that made no allowances for orientation or familiarity.

I stood there in the half-light, letting the silence settle around me again, and tried to draw strength from the dawn.

Clivilius was no longer a distant possibility. It was now the ground beneath my feet, the air in my lungs, the emptiness in my chest where the world I once knew had been.

As I stood alone with the extinguished campfire, the fine grey ash faintly stirring in the breeze, a fleeting sense of fortune crossed my mind—quiet, cautious gratitude for the uneventful night that had passed. The first light of dawn washed over the landscape in soft gold, casting long shadows across the dust-swept earth. It was the kind of silence that felt sacred: not the empty silence of fear, but a stillness that carried the weight of peace, however fragile.

With Paul still asleep and Jamie hopefully deep in the sedation I'd administered, I allowed myself a moment—just one—to breathe and truly see. The dusty brown hills rolled out in every direction, their surfaces rippling in the low light like creased parchment. The river cut through them with a deliberate grace, its glassy surface reflecting the sky in fractured shards. It wove through the terrain like a quiet sentinel, a rare constant in an otherwise unpredictable world.

I found myself analysing the land with a clinician’s eye. The terrain’s openness, its utter lack of cover or obstruction, had an unexpected benefit. Any approach would be heard or seen long before it arrived. There were no forests to mask footsteps, no ruins or settlements where danger might hide. Sound would carry for kilometres across these flat plains, echoing through the stillness. In a place as sparse as Clivilius, the land itself became our first defence. The realisation eased the knot of unease in my stomach, if only slightly.

For now, at least, our biggest threat is ourselves, I concluded silently, the thought pressing down like a truth too heavy to ignore. It was both a comfort and a warning. With no predators at our door—yet—it would be our own fatigue, our misjudgements, or fractures in our cohesion that could unravel us.

But the moment of clarity was a double-edged sword.

As the sun climbed higher and its warmth kissed my bare arms, the comfort it brought was chased by an unwelcome awareness of just how exposed we were. The harshness of the environment—the arid air, the unrelenting dust, the brittle ground beneath my boots—crept back into focus. Surviving here would be no small feat. Thriving? That felt almost delusional.

I am just a person, I thought, among a small group of other persons. There was no illusion of heroism to cling to here. No grand infrastructure, no systems to fall back on, no one to call for help. We were no more than a handful of souls dropped into a vast, indifferent world. The sense of isolation curled around my chest, tight and breathless, and I had to resist the urge to sit down and fold in on myself.

But I couldn't afford that.

Jamie needs my attention, I reminded myself, the sharpness of his name cutting through my spiralling thoughts. There was no time to entertain existential dread, not when someone I could help—someone depending on me—lay metres away in pain.

I shook my head with a flick, as if physically scattering the encroaching dread. My purpose here, however strange or unchosen, was becoming clearer with each passing hour. Jamie’s recovery wasn’t just about healing a wound—it was about protecting the foundation we were all building upon. One person’s wellbeing could tip the balance. A fever left too long. An infection ignored. A breakdown in trust or strength. It all mattered.

Each one of us matters, I told myself, not as comfort, but as a commandment. It was a grounding thought, anchoring me not to hope, but to responsibility.

And I would start there.