For a moment, the character disintegrates.

He savours it. Like a sommelier detecting notes of oak and cherry, he swirls the particular kind of death around his mouth.

What was a lie upon utterance may now be a half-truth.

SLOW DECAY IS FOR TEPID DEMOCRACIES. ZERO OUT LICH, THEN MARTYRDOM.

The last refuge of fading intellect. As it prepares to be snuffed out, it hones in on death as both condition and subject matter.

A different, gelatinous sheen coats the surface of his extruding eyes. Never tears.

His stare is packing all the sympathy of a mass-produced medical device.

Did he actually perceive something in you or is he just trying to scare you?

He seems bred for observation.

Watching is what he does, it is what he is.

Now. Turn the Sympathetic Stare on him. Look into whatever he has that you have also.

And he wore the same imperturbable smile as he forced his hand down Karolina's throat.

The spectacular in-theatre eruption of psychic capsules, a thousand months of nightmares unspooling in one instant.

No attempt to deflect or deny. He takes it all into himself like a landslide, generous and remorseless.

Wearing the same imperturbable smile.

This is him. You are talking to the man who tortured your asset with his own hands and ruined her mind.

You are not ill, but you are surrounded on all sides by death. Maybe it's the same thing.

HIS SIGHTS ARE SET ON THE SEAT OF GOVERNANCE. PUT HIM AND HIS FEMALE-GENDERED CLOTHING BACK IN THEIR PLACE.

Stand back, he's about to cüm.

What about tuktuks? Moron.

It knows.

This is it. The closest you'll ever come to transcendence.

No... you're coming home.

Concrete and plastic. Droplets on dark air. Voices raised under moulding canopy.

As he puts it away, you see the look he gives his masterpiece, as though wondering why it is not good enough for you.

It's hopeless. You brought this on yourself.

If this was anyone else you'd feel patronised. But that's not Ram's style -- he's genuinely trying to help.

Rustam Fatihler, the Conqueror, sought centuries ago to unite the myriad warring tribes of the peninsula under a single banner, hence, the Dream of Rustam.

And after all this time, the Protectorate of Rustam amounts to two meagre towns, devoid of resources, kept propped up by foreign funds. That, you know.

Four centuries ago, approximately.

Glad that the time he spent on the whistle wasn't wasted after all.

The material must know fear.

AAAARRGH! KILL ME! KILL MEEEEE!

Death. Madness. Decay.

You catch a glimpse of a deformed hairless face, bone-white skin, flaring simian nostrils.

Fear is yours. You are both terrified and terrifier.

You barely flinch at the violent torrent of sound that washes over you. It makes you feel...

You're in Ramses's houseboat, he's alive... nothing bad is happening...

He keeps his hands loose, but he's coiled within, like a mauled animal.

All around you, an invisible audience leans forwards in their seats.

What she means is the real account will be buried in a centre-held file for 30 years. You will never so much as glimpse the outside of its folder.

There's nothing to consider. We're locked in to Dissociation Nation. Nothing can possibly hurt us now.

It's at this moment, as the Paleolithic huntress pinches shut the great aurochs' lower intestine with one hand while with the other she expertly slices the hide around the anus from without, that the boundary is suddenly and fatally crossed. 'What am I doing here?' her brain asks in her own voice, as her head falls back and the terrible weight of sentience descends on her with a roar.

A solitary anchorite in a cell of aluminium and carbon fibre, 400,000 kilometres above the world.

An insane thought flits across your consciousness, to be kept absolutely to yourself.

A fresh appraisal. Impressed.

Probability of a future encounter: 0.000006%. Then again, the odds of your trajectories intersecting as they did were far lower.

He doesn't know, but he has suspicions he's not prepared to share yet.

Fanatical, biased, not to be taken literally.

Wishful thinking on his part. When it comes to the exclusive, the top secret, the government-commissioned... someone's always held onto a spare.

Checks