Born in 2089, Theo finds himself reliving lives that span prehistoric times to those modern – he’s been a King, a fisherman; a man, a woman; a hunter, famer; a soldier, a priest. He’s lived more lives than we can comprehend, each shining a light on his own disintegrating world. Read an extract from this mind-bending novel below.

 Labyrinth
By Oliver Thomson
Published by Sparsile Books 

Let’s play the music and dance  

I. Berlin 

New York, Jan 17th, 2118 

I’m facing a crisis, probably of my own making. My career is extremely dull, but I need the money, so I put up with it. My love life is a contradiction in terms, disaster. Yesterday I zoomed Dr Jane, the shrink at my old college, and she instantly diagnosed early-onset metempsychosis. 

‘What’s that?’ I asked. ‘It sounds nasty.’ 

‘Well, it’s still quite rare,’ she replied. ‘Nothing to worry about. It was recognised quite recently by a group of research psychiatrists based at the Bronx University. They identified a kind of non-functional DNA, buried under the more recent functional DNA, which means that some people have memories about their ancestors, usually as dreams. Often they are quite detailed, as if the people actually inherit a mental picture from long-dead relatives. The ancient Greeks understood it perfectly well, Pythagoras in particular.’ 

‘In other words I dream too much,’ I said. It’s mostly about my ancestors who were much brighter than me and make me feel inadequate. I feel boringly average with a third-class degree in social media, reduced from a second because I failed the hacking practical. 

I asked Dr Jane what I should do about it all. 

‘I have several patients who practice yoga and they are quite good at controlling these dreams. So are some Australian aborigines. But the Bronx research group are looking for more guinea pigs to back up their research using a new bio implant, so they’re offering money to anyone like you who will report your dream memories. Why not give it a go? You could download the memories yourself and play them back; it might be therapeutic as well as financially useful. And find a good woman while you’re at it. Was there not a suitable woman in one of your dreams?’ 

I thought there was. It might even have been Dr Jane herself, for she was very attractive in some ways. Then she added, ‘From bits you mentioned earlier I gather there are a few mysteries in your past. Why not get those dreams in the right order, so that you have a proper family history, maybe even going back to the Stone Age?’ 

Brooklyn, New York, Jan 2nd, 2119 

I fear that I made no immediate effort to follow the doctor’s advice. After signing up for the program and receiving the implant, I set the recordings to download onto my comp, but never seemed to get the time to replay them. Apart from my work, the news had become my main obsession, but it has been more and more depressing. 

New York is once more the worst city for overdose deaths per thousand people. All the international space stations have been abandoned due the huge halo of satellite debris scattered round the globe. And today is the 400th anniversary of the first ever financial crash in the USA, when the banks dished out too much paper money, then suddenly panicked and stopped, causing all-round disaster and misery. It still keeps happening. The one bit of good news is that this year the average summer temperature has dropped to 47 degrees, so perhaps global warming has stopped at last. Yet there has been a spate of violent hurricanes including Hurricane Harry VII which left half of Texas under water And of course famine and wars continue in dozens of places all round the globe. To cheer us up the massive new cruise liner, the thorium-powered QE4, came up the Hudson to a rousing welcome from the fire tugs. 

But I realise that I haven’t introduced myself yet, so here goes. 

My name is Theo A. Thens. I was born in the year 2089 on floor 203 of the north condominium, where the lifts frequently broke down and most people just went up or down a few floors except on special occasions. Of those in employment most worked on e-pods, so they didn’t need to move around much. There was a frozen food shop on floor 198 which catered for most of our needs and an open exercise area on the floor above where we could also plant vegetables in tubs. 

Until I was fifteen I never went above floor 220, but when I did, it was to visit a poor cousin of my mother’s and I was shocked by the conditions up there. People had to go either up or down five floors to the shops and these offered a very limited choice. The ceilings in the rooms were even lower than in ours, and many of the apartments had no external window. For some this was a blessing, for the average summer temperature was then 48 degrees and the less sunlight the better. All coal and gas-burning heaters had been illegal for the last seventy years, but it had been too late to stop many of the effects of global warming. Several countries close to the equator had been reduced to empty desert and the children of redundant oil-workers had formed maniac gangs which roamed the country causing mischief. In our own building groups of youngsters wandered along the corridors spraying the walls with obscene pictures and unintelligible slogans from long-forgotten tribes. 

Eventually my father, Mino, developed quite an expertise in real meat trading on his e-pod and we were able to move to a three-storey block with a real lawn off Brooklyn, while I attended the Multi-media College. 

New York by this time had so many cable ducts and so few vehicles apart from roboids that most of the streets were left permanently dug up. Thus the cable repair people could spend all day fiddling with the tangle of disconnected drains, leaking water pipes, telecom tubes, redundant wires and satellite connectors until they found each fault, by which time they needed to start all over again. 

When I was eighteen my father announced that there was little future in real meat, as cattle breeding had been discontinued in most countries due to methane emissions, so I chose to go into timber trading instead. Not that I see or feel any actual wood. I just shift various types of plank around the world using my e-pod. Very occasionally I go to a dealers’ conference, which means three changes of roboid to the other end of the state. I now control three out-workers, so I have to put myself about a bit. 

To sum up I do now feel slightly important. I get a little bit of respect, but I haven’t fought in a war or invented anything. I’m still underachieving, so if my soul has transmigrated from someone else’s dead body, like Orpheus said, then it’s unlikely that I’m much of an improvement on the last owner. Unless of course its owner was a cockroach. As Dr Jane suggested, I think I will replay my dreams, at least the exciting ones. There was a shrink in Switzerland called Jung who said that you can remember things in dreams which you could never remember when you are awake. But I can, if I replay my recordings. 

I am a good hunter, one of the best in the tribe. We have always brought in enough meat and hides for the women and children. But the animals seem to be moving away. We have to run a long distance to find any. And the berries hardly ever seem to ripen. My legs are beginning to hurt. I need more to eat. I’m tired. There is a constant trickle of ice-cold water coming from the cave above my head and I cannot be bothered moving. 

Labyrinth by Oliver Thomson is published by Sparsile Books.