A field of corridor-units opened before Massimo Diap'leptico Rampposz; glanced out that eye behind, always behind - he was here - processing down the plane toward them. As blank, as destroyed, as purposefully unappealing as before.

A landscape of sculpted ugliness. Any landmark, any indication - accidental drop of natural beauty systematically removed/replaced by corridors.

After corridors, long rectangular corridor-tube blocks: television tubes, inside which they lived. Maybe something could be done in them. The dreamunits of Hortag.

Small figures below, yellow jackets congregating together; blue, grey, brown, aqua, toward the corridors that pulsed the same throbbing hue despite retaining their purposeful blandness. It was a feat despite the colours to retain that blankness/blandness, purposeful ugly vacuousness.

The sky was a ceiling inches and feet off their head. Inside was outside: outside was inside. No difference, except your trudging along between the corridors; governed by technology, of course, he now understood developed, all of it, like the fake food they subsisted upon, in Theust.

Hortag had one product, one industry, one natural resource to extract/commodify. Sell. It was the dreamunits. It was the inner worlds of the purposefully rendered clinically depressed, amassed below him. As Massimo approached the corridors.

He'd pulled himself out of it. By exposing - by understanding the dream. After her eyes a process had begun that would end with his understanding exactly what was real and exactly what was not, and if not exactly for those reasons... he'd barely even been wrong about that.

This was a talent that wasn't hard to pick out among a mass that had never realised any of it. Old Works had need of someone with this particular skill, talent, among those others in connection to the control he could yield perfectly over his own mind. Another associated gift. He knew what was real. But he'd timed it right; that rhythm was still in his cells: it was the six hours a day permitted to sleep, to dream - as they thought of it, of course - to live the nightmare that paid for their inner worlds of extractive narrative worth.

Everything 180 degrees reversed from reality. Of course. This was their life. This. Trudging between corridors; imbibing food processed literally from their own faeces and foetuses, via the alchemical baths of Theust. This re-consumption, this purposefully induced clinical depression - all this kind of vocabulary came from Theust - he'd been educated in that too, because it only worked the dream; the desperate existential need to.

If you induced this sex depression world that facilitated the dream. Your body could consistently accommodate those beautiful 18 daily hours of hard Rem - if you were rendered depressed beyond all imagination; if you're imagination itself was stimulated continually by the weird pulsing of the television tube beneath everything, the hormonal responses purposefully induced in you solely via the final unadulterated forms repeated at you, lonely, solitary-complete-separate hour after hour.

This was how you got 18 hours of hard rem out them. For whole lives. And the biological beside. The faeces they produced for their own food, boiled and refried in the alchemical baths of Theust, rendered again adequately, if merely in technical terms, digestible, once more; and the biological beside. The organs. All the new combinations. All of the...