You live in a prosperous city. You have big plans for tonight—and plenty is planned for the rest of your life too. Forget it: the very cosmos has interfered with your life, and now you have no future. More precisely, you do have one, but it’s a sad one, and most likely a short one. Only a few minutes are allotted to the unluckiest; the agony of others may stretch on for days and months. The place where you’ve ended up is the perfect trap, where even a wild animal won’t survive. You can fight for your life, you can lose your human shape—you can do anything, but you’ll only gain a little more time.
Or take the risk: give up on your pathetic attempts to stretch out the time you’ve been given and try to find an exit.