Excerpt: Lost In Thought

There remain places in the universe where the greatest mythical creatures still roam, and the wildest fantasies play out to their extraordinary endings. Gathered remarkably closely together are hundreds, thousands, even millions of these places. The chemical exchanges across minute gaps between one group of cells and another, safely protected beneath layers of bone, skin and hair have been known to produce ideas ranging from the beautifully profound to the intensely exotic… and all varieties of mundane in between.
Of the approximately six and a half billion minds capable of producing such reactions, it takes only one to make a difference.

The window smashed.

Shannon was getting used to having to run away from the messes he made. These problems were not in the least bit intentional, at least, not on his part. They were, in fact, situations manufactured by the part of him he had tentatively named The Anarchist, and, when that part of him did not object, the name had stuck.
He had never bothered trying to explain the situation to anyone. From what he had read of basic psychology in certain books and articles, he had learnt that, in general, split personalities were viewed as a condition rather than a state of being, and people tended to be described as having them, as opposed to being them.
This being the case, Shannon had simply tried to get by as best he could, and dealt with the problems The Anarchist created as they arose, usually by running away from them very fast without looking back. Looking back firstly slowed him down, and secondly meant he actually got a good look at whatever it was The Anarchist had done, which, Shannon had discovered after a few mistakes, was not, on the whole, a good idea.
On this particular occasion, Shannon felt that looking back was very definitely and specifically not a good idea, and so he had carefully refrained from doing so. Unfortunately, neither had he been concentrating enough on where he was running to, and this, or rather his legs – or possibly (who could tell?) The Anarchist’s legs – had got him into trouble. They were stuck.
On the sixteenth floor of a monstrously modern office block.
Shannon gulped as he came dangerously close to a window and accidentally caught a glimpse of the view from it. The street was a long way down. The Anarchist laughed. Shannon quaked.
The Anarchist laughed again, this time in a worringly maniacal fashion as they heard their pursuers exiting the stairwell and passing along the corridor, throwing open office doors and checking the rooms as they went.
Shannon remained frozen by the window, though whether this was through fear of the authorities chasing them, or terror at the view from the window he was stuck by, he could not have said. In all likelihood, had anybody felt like having a conversation with him at that point, it would have been extremely one-sided, and the majority of Shannon’s responses would have fallen into the category of ‘silent’.
The Anarchist, Shannon realised, had also fallen silent. He wondered briefly if this was down to a desire to remain uncaught, but then he remembered that The Anarchist did not concern himself with such unimportant details, and left this kind of thinking to Shannon.
As it happened, The Anarchist left pretty much all the thinking to Shannon, which, in theory, worked well, as Shannon preferred to leave the doing to anybody except him, and The Anarchist was ideally positioned to do Shannon’s doing for him. Unfortunately, as is often the case, practice was only very distantly related to theory – some variety of second or third cousin, most likely with a few removals in there, too – and it transpired that The Anarchist did not do the sort of things Shannon, had he been inclined to do things, would have done. He certainly didn’t do anything of the things Shannon thought about doing, or even pay any attention at all to the solutions Shannon came up with for the problems The Anarchist’s actions created.
Essentially, Shannon was the thinker and The Anarchist was the doer, and they didn’t communicate particularly well.
Which was a shame, because as Shannon ran through the possible consequences of surrending himself to whichever authority burst through the door of his current hiding place first, The Anarchist didn’t consider any consequences at all.
He ran.
And jumped.

The window smashed.