There's nothing wrong with your eyes.

Kneeling on a stranger's rug, small body wrapped in a towel.

He's had to fix his former colleague's mess more than once.

A whole room of this tiny houseboat is dedicated to a person who never visits.

A shrine that only he maintains.

He sympathizes with any organism that can survive under bleakly hostile conditions.

Humming in subdermal tones. Crackles in the ear canal. Jag of noise. Soothing whisper.

He was the one holding the clipboard.

He's never felt such freedom.

You've neatly slotted yourself into the 'drug-seeking behaviour' category in his eyes.

That little jump he gave when you walked in the door -- you're the first visitor he's had in a while.

Those little arguments made his day.

TEMPO DEL SUR: I heard some stuff over in Cicatriz F. It got me seeing pictures, Hersh. This thing, when it hits... new world order.

They are already untangling themselves from each other.

Marco would have been fathoms beneath Tempo's sphere of awareness.

The most loyal -- to the corps more than the people. Gäng over all.

He'd be eyeing the top shelf liquor, daring it to try.

In herself, she means. In her own mind.

Set her free. Why should she sacrifice her second chance for yours?

You first among their number, for reasons you could never quite put your finger on.

You didn't hear the word 'no' in there.

A barrage of words -- none of them an outright refusal.

Summits of derision, mesas of lust, valleys of tedium and miscommunication, ever-enchanted with an opaque mist of technicolour neurochemicals.

... Jacket?

Staring you down. Hasn't blinked in some time.

And yet you can't help but feel a sense of desperation clinging to it.

Holiday memories of your mother, struggling with an antenna, trying to access foreign cartoons -- through the static, glimpses of a shaggy, vintage vagina.

Squelching one person into another.

Wrong vessel!

You get the distinct sense she's about to confide something to you. But at the cusp, she retracts the words and puts others in their place.

Your heart begins to thunder.

Right when they were about to make it big.

This time when he sat down, the other him was already slumped over the table, bleeding across it.

We're currently two friends down -- we could use one too.

'And you tell her -- if we pull this one off, all will be forgiven!'

A glancing flash of a person overlayed upon another -- like a stencil nudged off its overlay.

Sudden, intense déjà vu curtains your mind.

'And you tell her -- if we pull this one off, all will be forgiven!'

On the second floor of a failing photo outlet, a pair of green eyes widen, catch a glimpse of the impossible, then cloud back over.

So much more 'not' than anyone else. No funeral, no salute, vanished from the world with a muttered incantation and a phantom hand.

MUCH LIKE THE CLASSIC FASCIST DILEMMA -- THEIR ENEMY MUST BE BOTH STRONG AND WEAK AT THE SAME TIME!

Translation: At the back of another life somewhere.

As if they might be waiting just outside it.

Trying to shrug off the shrill taunts, kicks against toilet stall doors and scribbled lines on cracked walls that take root as undeniable truth.

She looks at you like this is the most salient point in the world.

The shadow of a passing aero-tram flashes across the girl's face like a zoetrope as she glances up.

You.

REVOLUTION IS AGELESS! THE TINY WORKSHOPS OF THE CHILDREN'S LABOUR COMMUNE PRODUCE THE FINEST SK-53 ASSAULT RIFLES IN THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLICS.

A geometrically precise matrix of cocaine.

There are words to be traced in the loops of her cigarette light -- if only you could read the language.

Checks