The mud was becoming too much for the horse. Axton could hear the driver getting nervous.

He knocked on the trap door on the ceiling, ‘I can proceed on foot!’ he called.

‘Are you sure, sir?’

The rain had given way to a dense fog, which washed away all colour from the dark landscape of the marshes. It felt like it was past midnight, yet it probably wasn’t even six o’clock.

Axton paid the driver and set off, his feet sinking into the mud, much more than he had envisaged. As he glanced back towards the hansom, he shuddered while its silhouette faded into the mist.

The woman Axton was going to visit risked puerperal pyrexia. Concentrating on the procedures, he felt the weight of his leather bag in his hand. He had left his London study as fast as he could, with all the necessary tools, and more.

The storm began raging again. The sideways rain whipped his face. He cursed himself for letting the hansom go. He couldn’t tell if he was on the road any more. He had no bearings. A cold feeling crept up his spine.

Fear and frustration blended into an icy mask, clinging to his wet face. Nowadays, you could get a message through to Newfoundland in two minutes, huge ships were unloading electrical cables under the oceans, but getting to Clapton Hill was an ordeal.

The thunder echoed in his head, sending his thoughts in a whirlwind. How could he still have to wade, half buried inside the ground, drenched and frozen in a globalized world of iron, steel and machines? How could everything be so projected into the future, yet so backward at the same time?

A tiny speck of light appeared in the distance. Axton squinted and eventually made out a figure, staggering in the distance, holding a torch, its flame sweeping in all directions, disappearing and reappearing in the gale.

A technological world, yet we are animals. Beasts. The way we come to this world. Through excruciating pain. And often accompanied by death. We have overcome distances, we have the telegraph, but we still die like animals. He frowned.

At that moment a pale, wide-eyed face emerged from the raging storm. A limping old man agitated his arms and ushered the doctor to follow him.

‘The baby is born already!’ he said, his hoarse voice covered by the screaming wind.

‘How is the mother?’ the doctor shouted. But there was no answer, the man was already several feet ahead, making a huge effort, as their boots sank deeper into the ground at every step.

As the two advanced for what seemed hours in the storm, Axton recalled opening rib cages, cutting through skin, hammering bones. A butcher, he thought. That is what I am. The divine construction of the human body, enclosing the horror of its insides, a hellish mixture of flesh and bones, entangled in a web of infinite tiny ducts, soaked in flaming red blood. I carve my way through it like a meat merchant.

The woman was almost unconscious, but Axton swiftly acknowledged she was not in danger. She was kept warm, her brother and daughter next to her, the old man who had come to meet him, tending the fireplace.

Axton’s mind was a perfect storm, an ocean of swarming thoughts, eyes frozen into a cold stare, trying to pierce through the desolation before him. The contradictions of a world he was beginning to refuse to accept.

‘The shed…’ the old man said, his voice almost imperceptible. All stayed silent.

Axton crossed the stables and reached the shed, where the baby had been settled next to an old metal stove.

As he moved toward it he could hear the wheezing, rasping breaths. The small blob of rags stirred.

The man leaned forward and looked into the eyes of the baby. Its eyes, black like coal, like its long beard, looked up at him. A skin scarred by hundreds of years of perseverance. There was an ancient wisdom in those eyes.

Its face lit up, a smile making its way slowly through the wrinkles, a familiar expression of delight, of recognition.

Then the baby in the rags opened its mouth and spoke, in a low, ancient voice.

‘You have no idea how far technology will go,’ it said. ‘You have no idea.

‘The body that you see has come back many times, transformed. And you cannot imagine what it means to be conscious while your own spinal cord reforges itself, while you feel each vertebra reinventing itself.

‘All while your memories, like crystals, gradually fall back into their timeline.

‘Believe me, I suffered, how I suffered. You cannot imagine the pain. The muffled sounds of the world outside. Not knowing until the last moment, whether I would reemerge in the time and place I hoped for, or if the body could bear me once again.

‘You see, humankind will ultimately be detached from the physical, the essence of time transformed, and nature bent beyond recognition.

‘Humans will free themselves of the bonds of nature, and to overcome overpopulation, will encapsulate their existence within a framework devoid of the laws of physics.

‘Eventually they will find a way to tune into the wavelengths which ignite life itself, synchronizing the instant of death with the spark of life.

‘And so will it be that no new humans will be born, for it will be those that are alive that will repeat their lives again and again for eternity. And they will die and be reborn throughout the ages, moving back and forth through time, bringing linear time itself to an end, an endless closed loop in its stead.

‘And one day the sole desire left will be to reach back to the origin. To confront the moment in which it all began.

‘I came back here to gaze straight into the eyes of he who started all of this,’ the baby said. ‘He who was responsible for draining existence itself of all purpose.

‘To try to remember why.’

It stared into Axton’s eyes, black as coal, clearly its own, only one thousand years younger.