The smell is ecstatic, overwhelming.

Advanced dog technique.

They'll bloom again tomorrow morning, so long as the sun is out.

An abrupt loss in hand-eye coordination -- in Ramses, who had the hands of a surgeon.

Overhead, something stirs. It has been waiting.

A Wachbann door. Double-skin boron-alloy, tungsten-carbide backing, sixty millimetre core. High-end prison-grade.

The classes may mingle during the day, but by evening they sort themselves back where they belong.

Up there, your heart beats twice as fast and half as hard.

RISE UP, YOU WRETCHED OF THE MOON. YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR FREEZE-DRIED RATIONS AND THE RECYCLED AIR IN YOUR LUNGS.

A preview of coming attractions.

All around, movement clings to structure. Sightlines, bottlenecks, exits. People move as water does around rocks. A map has begun to emerge.

We made it back. Off the shelf and back in the current. No forms, no cold offices. This is how it's supposed to be. Noise, people -- chances.

Parse the Bootleg Bazaar's ebbs and flows.

The remains of a community that was traded for a single shot at the sky.

It keeps them well-concealed, evidently. Sounds familiar.

Forget the frame. Look at the glass. Something's off about it. Enhance!

Diameter in relation to structure... a rough capacity of twelve-to-fifteen litres per second.

Circle the place. Sniff the crevices. Find its soft underbelly.

Outside, the murmur of water is all but gone.

Sequential logic applies. Operating the controls in a specific order will lower the water outside.

Push the buttons. No, wait, the lever! Whichever goes click-clack the loudest.

Next: switch, then lever.

Next: the switch.

First step confirmed. Sluice cycle initiated. Next: either switch or lever.

The switch feels right.

Best guess: toggle for a humidity sensor, or pressure relief for a bypass pipe. Ignore it -- it's irrelevant.

No haptic feedback, no audible change. Best ignore this one going forward.

This is it. Now hold down the red button.

The groan of shifting iron, muffled by masonry. Now, let the water flow.

Safety pins, refusing to yield yet.

That's the sound of being technically correct. Next: the lever.

A decent imitation of Cengiz Balik's style of free verse, but they could have gone harder with the adverbs.

Back when you were still the old CASCADE. Pre-failure, pre-disgrace, pre-despair.

Shades from another time move endlessly across the ancient wood, pickling it with nostalgia.

'It' rides into battle under polychrome banners, lance shining with the hopes of the people. 'It' wears a suit of steel. Women and homosexuals throw flowers at its feet.

No spiritual, chemical, or therapeutic substitute.

If there are parallel you-s out there, then life becomes merely probabilistic. You cease to be 'you' and become nothing but a point somewhere in a graph of what you might be, but never are.

A shadow existence, a purgatorial condition of unrealised possibility.

An operant should blend seamlessly into their environment, leave no trace.

YOUR ENEMIES WILL DEFINITELY SEE YOU COMING, THEY JUST WON'T BE ABLE TO MOVE FAST ENOUGH.

Twelve thousand years ago, the Paleolithic huntress stumbled onto this place much as you just stumbled onto the location in your mind.

Green so green it stings like lemon injected straight into the optic nerve.

Megatherium to the pygmy tree sloth of the weed you know.

Hold fast, guard yourself against those who would test you. This is the path that must be followed.

The art's been shit, though.

No more distance, no more pain...

OVERTHROW THE VALUE-FORM, EXCEPT IN STRATEGIC INDUSTRIES.

A sickly bureaucratic rainbow, the decaying remains of the Opera's collective memory.

That weight is called self-awareness. Without it you may float.

No more doubt. Just the bitter clarity of forever being the one it happened to.

Checks