ARCHIVE 001 · CHAPTER 03
THE AWAKENING
After an interval that feels like nothing, Graham opens his eyes.
Warming is wrong.
Consciousness returns.
For Graham there has been no twenty years, no generations, no accumulating fortune. The interval has no measurable duration because he has experienced none of it.
Awareness rebuilds itself slowly: sensation, confusion, fragments of memory, then the recognition that he is alive.
His first assumption is simple.
He finally slept.
But the room is wrong.
He reaches instinctively toward where his watch ought to be and touches a smooth surface unlike anything he remembers.
His body is weak. His skin is dry and yellowed. Strange apparatus is attached to his arm.
He discovers that he is lying not in an ordinary bed but inside a transparent structure, surrounded by unfamiliar materials and delicate machinery.
Beyond it stretches a vast and elegant apartment.
Graham has no idea where he is.
Hunger gives him something immediate to understand.
He struggles from the strange bed, misjudges his strength and braces himself against the transparent enclosure. The material bends and then disappears with the suddenness of a burst bubble.
He staggers into the room.
A drink from the table restores some strength.
Only then does another problem occur to him: he is naked.
He finds a long black robe and wraps himself in it.
The figure that will become a legend begins his return to the world dressed almost by accident.
Sounds come from beyond the room.
Footsteps. Voices. A persistent mechanical vibration. And beneath all of it, something much larger — the noise of a crowd.
Graham moves toward the open archway.
His legs barely support him.
Blue and purple pillars lead toward a distant balcony overlooking a space so large that Graham cannot immediately understand its scale.
Three richly dressed men stand there with their backs to him.
Beyond them thousands of voices rise from below.
The men are discussing the Sleeper.
To them he is an object of public expectation, almost a phrase rather than a person.
One laughs at the familiar promise: when the Sleeper wakes.
Then he turns.
He sees Graham standing behind them.
The laughter ends.
One by one the others turn as well.
Their expressions move from surprise to fear and finally to awe.
The impossible thing has happened.
The Sleeper is awake.
Graham does not have time to ask what any of it means.
His strength fails.
He collapses before them.
Outside, the crowd continues roaring.
Wells delays the actual date reveal. Graham wakes physically before he understands historically where he is. That makes the future arrive first as architecture, materials, clothing and sound — comprehension comes later.