Let it go. This is as far as you'll get on this.

By HOLOCENE's logic, you bear none of the blame for what happened. Everything you did was an expression of institutional logic.

LUDICROUS! THIS ISOLATIONIST POLICY HE'S PURSUING HAS UNSHACKLED HIS MIND.

After a certain point the logic of betrayal becomes its own motive.

REACTIONARY THEORISING. HE SHOULD DIRECT THIS DOORSTOP-SIZED CRITIQUE INWARD AT HIS NEXT IDEOLOGICAL STRUGGLE SESSION.

PSEUDO-INTELLECTUALISM. SILO-SELF-EXILE WAS THE APPROPRIATE COURSE OF ACTION.

HOLOCENE has never once lied to you. As far as you know, at least.

Hold on. Monoaxial... Hermetic... this is literally just him. Your old bandmate's gone and tried his hand at a solo career.

In a dark basement in Novessa, a female controller in her mid-thirties stifles an inexplicable urge to push a palm into her face.

Surely there's a lift to get out of this silo. Not the stairs every time... Surely...

At least we have a building with working electricity.

A trace of concern that you've pre-achieved the very thing he was attempting to do when you found him.

Suicide mission. House always wins.

As were you. A bullet knocked you down, the communists dragged you clear.

Spring's thin edge, a promise yet to be delivered on. Trembles of blossom on the tree branches lining People's Square. A woman in a blue cardigan pauses at a wooden stall stacked with old books.

Sometimes he recites them to himself, when the darkness feels total enough.

WORST OF ALL. THE SO-CALLED 'REFORMED' COMMUNIST. GULAG.

He's weighing it up against his current living situation.

Tasting a strange syntax.

IT'S ALL SUPERBLOC, BABY.

You are pre-entombed.

Everyone else here is actively avoiding him.

The gaps in his remembrance are more detailed than most people's actual memories.

Behind his gaze, he is cast in iron. You are being entrusted with this.

You would be well within your right to leave him down here.

You are reminded of certain religious teachers of your childhood, who wore traditional silk raiments all year round.

They frequently lost fingers to frostbite in the Mircean winter, and wore their absence like trophies.

A gäng of ten million hearts beating as one.

THE WORLD WILL STOP FOR THE VERY THOUGHT OF US

TAKE ME TO THE PEOPLE'S SQUARE CARNATIONS IN YOUR HAIR AT LEAST YOU GET TO KEEP YOUR NAME

A broad-set man surveys his cards through double-lensed spectacles, whispering to himself as he draws. Agents of the Weeping Eye sit heads bowed around him, waiting for the word of god.

A little impressed, a little disturbed.

He's leaning against the wall for support, pressing his mouth to the receiver. He stirs the dark water with the tip of his foot.

THE EPOCHAL STRUGGLE, THE TRIUMPH OF DIALECTICS OVER HISTORY ITSELF. YOU'RE WELCOME, HUMANITY.

An operant of the cosmic plane.

In the storefront of a one-hour photo shop, a middle-aged woman watches as the fax machine ingests a sheet of paper, then thoughtfully regurgitates it. A moment later a second paper comes out, warm from the machine's laser stylus. She compares the two pages with deep suspicion.

His seething anger appears genuine. No false notes in his voice.

We contain mültitüdes.

There could be yet another angle here. It may be TAXMAN was planning to sell out his new friend at first opportunity.

Wait. A discrepancy, like a false note.

Nothing but the empty space he once deformed.

Underneath his speechifying you detect a melancholic tinge, a shadow on the mirror's surface.

Twenty stories below the surface of Novessa, the double-time click-clack of practical heels down a long hallway. On the desk of a high ranking Opera official, an amber light blinks.

Amidst the violent buzz of fluctuating electrical signals you sense the presence of nearby power lines, servomotors, and radio emitters.

However, due to a loophole in the city code, the canals aren't technically a part of Portofiro.

That's not true. There's one.

Encoded by a frenzied hand.

'Two fucking guns, is she serious?'

'She remembered me.'

Checks