EDGE OF DAY

CHAPTER ONE

AUTHOR NOTE: Thanks for taking a look at my new book. Please don't hesitate to tell me if you spot any errors, something doesn't make sense or you think I should cut/ expand/ explain things more. Your feedback is really appreciated (and will be taken into consideration when I'm revising.) Hope you enjoy the story.  I'll be posting a new chapter every Friday. And just incase you missed it, there is going to be some mild swearing, so if you're really sensitive or opposed feel free to stop reading. 

CHAPTER ONE

Day leaned against the stainless steel kitchen counter. The window of her third-floor apartment overlooked a café with pink and white awnings, giant stone plant pots, and assorted chairs mismatched with high tables.

She watched a woman in heels run across the Manhattan street, signalling a cab. A delivery truck pulled up, and a cyclist passed. Two young men pushed open the coffee shop door and suddenly froze.

The cars and the cab, the delivery truck and the cyclist, everything halted. The world outside the window flicked like it had been given a hard shake, and then it was back to normal.

"Download ready," the house computer said from the built-in wall speakers.

"Play," Day answered.

The street dissolved, and an arresting man in his early twenties appeared behind the hologram window. His penetrating blue eyes stared out as though he was really looking at her.

Day tapped the control panel, testing background images—a snowy landscape, the French Alps, then space. She left the celestial cosmos, and the man's face glowed from inside it like a deity from a lost ancient civilisation. His deep voice echoed around the kitchen. Day warmed her hands on her mug and took a sip of tea.

"The world," he said, "is smoke and mirrors. Everything you see is energy. Every single object is vibrating energy that your brain forms into a solid-looking reality."

She walked from the kitchen down a narrow corridor. The voice inside the walls followed, sensors picking up her movements. She stood for a moment in blackness at the edge of her art studio, the smell of oil paint and glue clawing the insides of her nostrils.

"Your state of mind," the young man continued, "your thoughts, and your feelings, shape the world you see. There is no inside and outside, no subjective and objective, no internal and external world. They are two sides of a coin. One doesn't exist without the other."

Day pressed the light switch and the whole studio lit up like a stage set. It was big, and most of the room was consumed by an enormous glass casing. Inside the glass house were suspended trees. The forest of floating trunks had no branches and did not reach the ground.

She walked over to the glass casing and pressed her hand to the release panel. The voice in the walls and the floor followed. The glass house door clicked open and Day stepped inside the headless and bottomless forest.

The man's speech continued though Day was only half listening. "Quantum physics proved there was no observed without an observer over a century ago. Yet people still refuse to grasp what this means. The world doesn't exist without you to observe it. Your observation brings it into being."

She brushed her hand across a tree trunk, and moved from one tree to the next. The bark of the trunks felt thick and viscous, but the interiors were hollow, otherwise they'd be too heavy for the anti-gravity thrusters to hold them up.

She sighed. "What was I thinking?"

The ceiling shuddered with the sound of someone crossing the landing above.