Simply put, Aren could adapt to anything faster than he could think. It was as if all his thinking was instantaneously fed to both, his conscious and unconscious, but while the former still digested the information, the latter had added context and solution.

It was just like if you would look outside window and your vision would get filled with temperature readings, UV levels, wind strength, time of day, the direction of sun movement, list of friends that are free this very moment, matrix of friend’s overlapping interests, income projections, and then summarised in a shortlist of “awesome things you should do right now”, where awesomeness could also include “working like a champ” and “quitting your job”.

And job Aren quit, on this 10 degrees celsius, cats and dogs raining excuse for a day with no friend around to talk to, because his unconscious had brought up compelling points on why it wasn’t fiscally beneficial anymore.

He composed a short resignation email to his boss, hit the send button and sat, waiting for the spinner to go away. The spinner wouldn’t go away, however, and so it seemed that Aren had lost the internet connection. He turned on tethering on his phone but found that there was no internet on the phone, either. He forwarded the letter to his printer and then noticed that printer wasn’t online either. He attempted to start the printer, and the machine gave out a pop, followed by a stream of fumes, followed by catching fire. Aren yanked the printer’s power plug out of the wall and poured water from the flower vase on the fire. Then he procured the slightly damp paper sheets from the belly of the printer, and having selected the driest of the stack, went fishing for a pen.

The ink ran out at “concern” of “To whomever it may concern” of his letter and he switched over to pencil, that broke upon touching the surface of the sheet. Aren mentally struck out “writing in blood” from his shortlist, grabbed his jacket and headed out.

As Aren got outside, he realised that something must be off, as despite the heavy rain, the street was unusually crowded. People were standing, unmoving, and Aren threw a look upwards as that’s where the people seemed to be staring, mouths agape. A skyscraper sized, vertically oriented flying saucer hung in the middle of the sky, with twenty story building tall, gun-looking protrusions poking out of it in all directions. Aren sighed and, for change, his subconscious offered him a “10,000 awesome things to do during an alien invasion” shortlist.