The remote viewers! Spoon-bending vöyeurs!

Better for everyone that you just take him at his word. The alternative... well, there's a recently vacated room at the bottom of a silo, if you're interested.

You have more pressing things to worry about than this. Better for the assignment that you just believe him and move on.

Standard Operant Bureau procedure: once burned, an asset is not to be revived except under exceptional circumstances.

Void is exactly what it is. The body is weight, presence -- the mind is conjecture, absence.

The air charges as he recites each name.

Like a ritual.

Comical, yes, but also horrifying. The last place you would suspect.

SURVIVAL IS SECONDARY. ANONYMOUS MARTYRDOM, ETERNAL.

The freckles and splatter patterns of blood droplets are indistinguishable from one another on the face of a tram driver pinned under rubble. The steel beams that have crushed her legs are the only thing keeping her blood inside her body. Even an inch of motion, and the arteries gush...

The toys always seem to die horribly.

So what, we partake in 'interpretive masturbation'? We think not.

You sense the weight of the structure above you, the inverted tower hanging over your head.

You'd take a week of the Weeping Eye fiddling with you over five years down here.

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.

I COMMAND YOU TO DETONATE, LITTLE BOMBCHKA.

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.

Break into the mailbox.

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.

Checks