Beware, CASCADE. You have seen how easily you can be shelved. As soon as your assignment is over, all bets are off.

Beware, CASCADE. You have seen how easily you can be shelved. As soon as your assignment is over, all bets are off.

I won't go back. Never again.

Already their fingers are hovering over the 'storage' button, but now you won't be caught off-guard.

Not enough slots.

I don't think they would do that to me again.

Failure to learn from past experience only leaves you wide open to fresh abuses.

Can you smell that, CASCADE?

Sweetish, faintly burning. The odour of leaking refrigerant.

An intrusion from the past, with the augmented feeling of reality that olfactory information lends to memory.

What is it?

The call of Satellite Facility B. A vast honeycomb of windowless, hexagonal rooms, in a satellite facility 20 kilometres outside Novessa.

The Freezer. Where the Opera kept me.

In administrative limbo, with the burn-outs and fuck-ups.

For five years you wandered like a discarnate entity around those mazes of unlabelled discs, vacuum-sealed bags, and folders in a vertiginous array of colours -- ochre, pomegranate, olive and beige.

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

I had no idea what I was doing there.

The lack of direction was of course part of the design -- the Freezer is not simply a storage facility, it is a test chamber.

Every few days you encountered another poor soul between the shelves -- a man or woman with a haunted, wan expression, or else some hideous permanent injury.

I averted my eyes, pretended not to notice them.

There was nothing to separate you from those unfortunates, only the whim of your controllers.

You might've remained forever, had the occasion not arisen to unfreeze you.

It was worse than hell.

You were lucky. If your controllers thought you a traitor they'd have declared you a null entity and had you shot. If they'd believed you a true incompetent you would've been sent to the lunar cadmium mines.

I knew they'd come for me eventually.

A self-flattering delusion, but one that was borne out, in this instance.

You don't know the size of the maze. It's endless...

I don't want to think about that place.

And yet there it is, permanently frozen in your thoughts, never entirely out of mind...

No thanks, I'm kind of living in the moment for now.

Hence, intrusion.