The endpoint of EMTERR's core psycho-philosophy: turning Want into Need.

Your arm is extended. You hold a gun at the end of it. The gun is pointing at your own back.

This is nothing, we wanted to take it. Do it again. Fäce this time.

As if waiting to be caught.

You are intruding on something far more intimate than an exchange of intelligence.

This is choreography, not trust.

Her body chases his a centimetre as he pulls away.

Dark apparatuses designed to steal your fingerprints.

He seems nice, just wave at him as you go by.

HEY, HEY, WANT TO KNOW A LITTLE STATE SECRET?

Ultimate solidarity with PSEUDOPOD. You can feel what he felt as the disc ripped his mind clean.

SALUTATIONS GLORY.

IT'S ALL SUPERBLOC, BABY.

His face contorted in fury, caught mid-scream, disintegrating in strips of light.

No more natural gravity to grip on to.

The body of a teen girl slumps against the window, kept upright by a huge piece of shrapnel wedged into her skull.

A hundred metres beneath you, an old fisherman raises his hand to his eyes. A strange shadow scares away the fish.

Your dear friend Tempo, dead twice on your watch.

THE PEOPLE'S WINGS WILL CARRY HIM HOME.

You lean against the tram's movement, managing to maintain your balance.

Here it comes.

You hear her stare too: So do I just fucking stand here like a Collateral Cunt or...?

A single tear of blood as the metal ricochets around his skull.

He means this as a compliment.

What would they notice? Another unremarkable tram, making its daily commute? Or might they sense, on some cardinal level, the contamination you've untethered, the frightful hazard more primitive nations would have marked with rings of salt and paper seals?

Your heart cracks. For your new friend and the old one within her.

This is enough. We can tank the rest.

Own goal in the dying minutes.

Impenetrable. The bag might be constricting the flow of blood to his head.

He's recited this story many times. The telling never gets any easier.

No point in attempting to refute him. His worldview is a perpetual motion device, where denial only becomes further proof of your compromise.

Pump him up, really get him going. His feverish delusions can't be dispelled, only magnified.

A strange axis of symmetry reveals itself. Two strange figures, unrelated, yet connected by an invisible filament, what you do here necessarily affects the other.

Silence diluted only by the hiss of a spinning disc. Jaws slacken, never to close again.

Appears to be a Dolceola F33 hand grenade. Designed for anti-personnel use in close-quarters.

Deep in the shadows past the cut-out holes, you glimpse a wet sheen in the blackness. Eyes widening in fear.

As he flaps his arms, little gusts of stale urine and sweat cause your nose to wrinkle.

You've got this. Play it cool. Act like you've been here before.

It strikes you, a few moments late, that you really shouldn't be showing your face on live television.

A barely-perceptible edge to the way he says 'that name'.

He watches, like his father taught him to do, a trick to keep him occupied. On the lookout for sinister bodies.

Fight. Kill. Live.

Awaiting your signal.

Recall the case of Operant DUTY, who was tortured so effectively by the Weeping Eye that he began to reveal the secrets of his captors.

He respects the idea of this love even if he would despise its reality.

As it was with Operant AXIS, captured in La Cupola in 75 and then dragged behind the resurfacing machine at every Luzian ice hockey game until he finally succumbed in 78.

A distance grows between you as his mind wanders into the past.

The golden shade, the screaming boy beaten by his fellows...

Drawn by the malice in his master's voice.

Checks