And there it is - one morning you wake, or don't wake, to find that all matter has inverted itself.

Organic materials, living things, have turned inanimate, artificial, subject only to weathering, no longer subject to growth.

All human-made objects gain sentience, train carriages and skirting boards and snow mobiles and air conditioning units at the top of ten storey buildings and the supporting walls and concrete foundations of those buildings and windscreen wipers and riot gear and corrugated fences around shipyards, all moving and talking to one another, trying to find a common tongue with which to explain themselves, to work out how they came to be there, much like we did whilst we had our chance, but we're not here any more.

The buildings in the city discover that they're too tightly packed. They gallop out into the countryside to find more space. The cutlery in the drawer doesn't like being bunched up in the dark, goes running round the garden, and the garden wall stares at the iron flowers and the granite trees and the silicon beetles, talking to the weathervane and the bird bath and the hedge strimmer in an infant language, trying to work out whether it's better to stay there or to explore.