Simon was 32 years old, 182 cm tall with mousy brown hair and a thin scraggly beard. His brown eyes always appeared enlarged by the thick, steel-rimmed spectacles he always wore. He was once married to Julie, his college sweetheart, a year his junior and rather similar in appearance, and they had brought a little boy, Thomas, and a little girl, Jessica, into the world. But Julie had become increasingly perturbed by Simon's obsession with his work and had taken the then three year old Thomas and one-and-a-half year old Jessica from their small, two bedroomed flat in Euston to her parent's in Ruislip two years previously and he had hardly heard from her since, only the odd reminder letter from her lawyer that he had to pay his child support fees. Simon missed his kids dearly, and Julie for that matter, and he never had any intention to skip a payment, but the fact was he was rather obsessed with his work and often forgot to sleep and eat, let alone take care of such abstract issues as finances. A further result of this neglect was he had been evicted from his flat and had taken to sleeping in the small quarters the University provided him in the same building as he worked.
Simon was a professor of quantum physics at the University College London, though he rarely gave lectures as his particular field of expertise was rather cutting edge and obscure and few people had ever heard of it, let alone begun to truly understand it and wish to learn more. For the last ten months he had been part of an international team of such specialists as himself concerned with proving a recent, somewhat unbelievable discovery that, if proven, could shake the scientific community to its roots and irrevocably change the human understanding of its universe. It was here that Simon was beavering away, alone having let his assistants go home at 7, at 10.32pm on Wednesday 25th July 2012, the moment that a giant, 50 Megaton Nuclear warhead fired accidentally by a drunken Russian nightwatchman at a supposedly disarmed facility in Uzhur hit the Houses of Parliament in Westminster.
Only, Simon couldn't remember any of that when he woke up.
When he first opened his eyes he wasn't sure that he had; it took him a moment to recognise that he was covered by a large piece of the plastic covering of his neutrino gun, though to him it was just a large, not too heavy thing laying on top of him. He couldn't remember what plastic was, let alone neutrinos and how or why one might shoot them at anything thus requiring a gun. As he struggled to his feet his mind was racing with questions, as though he was becoming conscious for the very first time. Each of his senses was overloaded with impressions which brought their own questions as he tried to decipher the meaning of everything he was experiencing. He could see light coming from a collapsed stairwell (though to him it just looked like a convenient thing to climb up, he had no name for it) and instinctively he went towards the source of the light. After a short but debris-ridden climb up just one-and-a-half levels the already overwhelmed Simon emerged onto a scene that knocked him to the ground in confoundment.
In every direction, as far as he could see, a perfectly smooth crater stretched seemingly beyond the horizon, gradually sloping upwards at the edges to create a feeling of complete isolation. Littered only occasionally with rubble and rocks, if Simon had any memories at all he might have likened it to Death Valley in Nevada, or the the Makgadikgadi salt pans in Botswana, but he didn't. All he knew was that is was mind-bogglingly massive, and something deep inside him told him that somehow this wasn't a normal state of affairs.
After calming himself and catching his breath he felt an extremely uncomfortable scratching sensation in his throat and something compelled him to try and find some water. He slowly began to walk forwards, with no sense of direction or even a particular goal as along with his lack of memory he was in a massive, perfectly round crater that looked exactly the same in every direction and gave him no clues as to what lay beyond its outer ridge. So he went forwards. While he could walk instinctively it wasn't a normal or comfortable experience for him and it took him some time to master it again, so by the time he'd travelled not even one kilometre already two hours had passed and his thirst had become unbearable. His reeling senses had calmed down now and were focussed mainly on the terrible scratching in his throat, while the unending questions were beginning to settle down to just a few, more important and pressing concerns; instead of wondering why he existed he was asking why there was nothing else existing, why he was the only moving thing for miles around. Instead of questioning how he knew that he needed to find some water he was wondering why there was absolutely no sign of any water any where around him. He had a strange sense of what could be described as a nostalgic want when he contemplated the vastness of the open space that he was in; the horizon that it provided and the feeling of ineffectualness that that provoked reminded him of something that he used to miss, when he could actually remember what he missed, even though at the time he didn't really know that he missed it. Having not left London for seven years, in fact barely leaving the tiny part of London that he lived and worked in and having no occasion to visit any building with more than six storeys, he had not seen the horizon in all that time. So now, as he stumbled through the massive crater that once was the cluttered streets of Soho, even without a workable memory, he appreciated this natural thing that so many miss without realising and even more take for granted.
He didn't get much further. Even as he was ruminating about his new horizon his hair and teeth began to fall out and soon he became overcome by a feeling of absolute exhaustion. Unable to walk any further he sat down against a broken piece of the British Museum's façade and died a peaceful, innocent death.
