The Human Microwave

"Nun weiß ich, wann der letzte Morgen sein wird." - Novalis

Part 1

“This standard commercial mailing envelope is typically constructed from unbleached Kraft paper weighing between 90-120 GSM, providing a natural brown hue and essential properties like a minimum 85% opacity and a burst strength of at least 150 kPa. Its precise dimensions, such as the common No. 10 at 241 mm×105 mm, adhere to a tight tolerance of 1.5 mm for automated processing. The construction often features internal side seams and a securely glued bottom fold. A key component is the closure mechanism, usually a remoistenable dextrin-based gummed flap, which must reactivate in 5 seconds and achieve a specific bond strength; alternative options include peel-and-seal with an easily removable release liner or latex self-seal. If equipped with windows, they're typically made of 0.03 mm thick polystyrene or polypropylene film, securely bonded. Manufacturers prioritize quality control through inline vision systems and destructive testing for aspects like tear resistance (minimum 200 mN), ensuring the product's durability and functionality,” thought Elegant, analyzing the envelope in 3 milliseconds.

Holding the envelope between her forefinger and index finger, a drop of blood ran from her nose.
On the table lay a carton of orange juice, several Sima brand flavoured cigarettes, their cover depicting a mouth blighted by disease, and a Synaptic Dynamics Corp. shiny tinfoil tray of gel capsules.
“Wow, Ogre wasn’t joking. These are even stronger than the gels available through the Agora network. It’s not quite like I thought it would be.”
She felt her temple - the expected side effect, a burning sensation and actual heated psychokinetic effect in the centre of the forehead.
“Before long I’ll look like one of the pretty girls I see walking around, the quintessential exogenic vestigial organ protruding from the hand, its soft pink vascularization. Gosh. Why do I have to be so uncouth about it?”
She lit a cigarette with her ocean detailed zippo, the orange flame igniting into a periwinkle.
“According to my own suppositions about the social world, all the other Aptants almost seem to enjoy flaunting their abilities in the most unassuming way. I suppose it makes us think that life’s effortless for them, that they enter into the convolutions and revolutions of the life world with ease – naturally. There’s really nothing natural about it at all. It’s all a great deal of non-instinctual drives parading as natural”

Elegant knew that the words were being borrowed from the lexical stream of the impression of the data centre’s absorption current – she couldn’t recall ever using the words before – ineffectual limp twentieth century words from the world of status, honor, prestige –
“- Totally alien matched with today’s linguistic profile; rapt as it is with deviant unconformity.”
The lexical index changed its classification – she visually modeled it as a timeline, the past to the left, slowly becoming blurred towards the past, a model she never saw before.
Ogre’s AVI appeared on the flex-glass smart phone on the table.
“He’s not taking it well” Ogre’s voice was non-emotive.
“Well, we told him what the risk was, either your body metabolizes it – or…”
“Or...” Ogre laughed pretending to be tired, less than self aware and practically bursting with virility, even so his temperament was taken as a real genuine suaveness.
“How are you feeling?”
“I’m okay – I think. What’s wrong with him?” She stuttered, almost forgetting the other Freelancer’s code name.
“You tell me.” Ogre said overly smooth, trying to seem in control.
They knew the gravity of the situation, but talked to each other with their fear intermingled with a kind of grammar borrowed from low brow television, and they vaguely knew it. The video showed Armadilllo hunched over, their skin blue, not an effect of the gel capsules, just a cosmetic preference, not entirely uncommon, since it accentuated the pink of the vestigial organs that grew on Aptants after enough digestion of enhancers over a long enough timeline.
“Your nose is bleeding,” Ogre said cautiously.
Elegant wiped her nose reflexively, a long streak of blood across the webbing between her thumb and forefinger. She smiled, her brain pulsing with linguistic matrices and then perspicacity matrices, she called them, noting the implausibility of the hemorrhage given the quotient of chemical composition of the enhancers. One of her pupils dilated while the other constricted, like the asymmetrical eyes of a chameleon.
“Well, okay. Don’t let him die” She said dispassionately.
The call ended, she sat in silence.

Part 2

“The president isn’t interested in cognitive enhancement at this time, Miss Gauthier” said the secretary. “I told you already, my subsidiary doesn’t involve such individuals,” she had not quite so evidently lied.
“We Americans have always banked on EM proficiency – that’s where we excel, and It’s no different the higher up you go.”
Gauthier rolled her eyes with her eyes closed. She opened her eyes cautiously, avoiding the facial recognition pattern detection of her interlocutor.
“We will continue to finance software, wet ware, emulation, simulation, and all the rest.,” the irony of EM’s explanatory and annotative tone struck her as particularly direct.
“My employers only want you to read through the dossier, and take special note of line 58. In it you’ll find that my service doesn’t compromise your communications.”
The lymphatic EM stiffly looked down at the package.
“You’ll find that Synaptic Dynamics has already estimated our contribution particularly to those sectors you’d just mentioned. This product wouldn’t be mass upscaled under the typical pharmaceutical directives,” she said.
“Miss Gauthier,” The EM cut her off, “You were fertilized in a very different world from my developers. In the twenty first century, our competitor’s industries co-agitated a different kind of scaling to the one you’ve associated yourself with. While the U.S. allowed for their software industries to flourish, providing thousands with the antidote to their visible psychic depletion, our competitors waged chemical and psychic warfare on our population. We didn’t know where the drugs were coming from and -”
“I assure you I’m very aware of your bias, Secretary Dawson. Allow me to finish my proposal. Our gel capsules work in conjunction with a transmitter implant,” She continued, slowly.
“WHaT cAuSes mE tO HeSiTatE, MiSs GaUgHtIeR,” His voice vibrated with an amplified, guttural, resonant tone. “Is that we’ve already developed many of such products -”
“Again, we’re quite certain that this is entirely unprecedented, Mr. Dawson. WE managed to accelerate the brains receptors by 120%”
“THAT QUOTIENT DOES NOT EXCEED EVEN - ”
“AND SIMULTANEOUSLY MANAGED TO DISTRIBUTE 300 TETRAHERTZ TRANSMISSION WITHOUT A DIRECT CONNECTION”
The helicopters blades whirred. Beneath the helicopter blinked calmly the lights of the megacomplex. “Without a mediating implement?” Asked unashamedly the Secretary.
“My subsidiary merged with American Efficiency Electronics two years ago. Our research and development has significantly -”
“Miss Gauthier, are you informing me that the distribution has it’s source in the transmitter, or in the human being?”
“The transmitter is the same as the one concealed in this briefcase that my employers have already given you. I am informing you that the distribution comes from the... organism.”
“The organism. Right,” replied the Secretary.
“Open the dossier to the blue book marked section.”
“What am I reading, Miss Gauthier.”
“Well, I’d meant for you to see the preceding photo set, but that is the target”
“The target?”
“The subject in image 3 transmitted their signal at a basketball. What you’re looking at is at what is left of it.”

Part 3

Vestalis face quivered disquietingly over Elegant, his thin horizontal eyes squinting, slightly curtailing at the end, like a djinn in a pre-islamic painting.
“V?” Elegant chimed.
“Yes, my dear?”
“Please prepare two meals.”
“Of course, my dear… That boy… Armadillo – you recognize him, don’t you? An intuition that you recognize him somehow from Overworld?”
She lit another Sima flavoured cigarette. It tasted vaguely of nectarines.
Elegant booted up the uncommonly cold and rectangular, beveled edged terminal that was usually on and humming this time of day. It had stickers of pop star Kanna Chan; a chibi style that made her look mockingly silly. Elegant blew the smoke out of her nostrils, something she usually didn’t do, and brought her focus to the terminal and selected the “Overworld” icon.
“Is it the Thieves Guild that you fancy you’d met armadillo then? Or perhaps the Bastion of The Dark Elves? Yes, I’m modeling your intuitive directionalities now. Should I reclaim the gameplay clip and stabilize the footage?”
“Sure,” Elegant wheezed adn then opened her eyes.
“There he is. He’s not looking at you. His artificial agent is named Lux. I’ve never met him. A paranoid telemetry, a verdant colouration, supposedly derived from the Islamic prophet Khidir. We can infer this based of the flavour text for his, “Armadillo’s” amulet drop, which reads, “To fill one’s cup at the fountain of life.”
Elegant was looking unimpressed at the AVI, mildly intrigued by the annotation, but supposing it was an intentionally mysterious, moody, and meaningless cliche.

The room was for all intents and purposes hermetically sealed. She’d not had guests in her room since she was a little girl, and there were several pieces of faux antique furniture, many plush toys. It wasn’t sunlight filtering into her room, they were vitamin d lamps, undulating, “like a very slow heartbeat,” she thought. “The first cigarettes of the day always were the best.” - Even when she used to have to scavenge them out of the ashtray in the lobby of the living superstructure’s pool. She was reminded of a group of human girls at that same pool. Humans of course were ordinarily strangely lacking in morals, at that age they had yet to fully model the virtue matrices that many older gen humans had grasped. “As such they could be so horribly cruel,” she finally understood. “When pushing my head under the water, or making me dive in the pool for pool toys, or taking my goggles from me, making my nose sting with chlorine and salt.”

“The one with the toothpaste hair and ornamental sword?” She asked rhetorically, he was the only individual she saw on the black stone bridge.
“You raided this cache already, the other thieves from your covenant had left,” Vestalis purred magnetically.
“This area would have ordinarily been two hot to idle at, but given the height you were at, it wasn’t so. Potions of fire resistance weren’t required.
“Oh I see now – that colour - hex code #1affc6…”
She sighed childishly. “A human?”
“As human as you, maybe.”
A lava geyser the size of a jumbo jet was erupting slowly in the background of the game behind the jagged ridged fortress.
“Vestalis?”
“Yes, darling.”
“At what interval does the pain subside in the prefrontal region?”
“Well – ordinarily, the photonic crystal in gel capsules disperses after three to four hours. But of course these supplements are far stronger than what other Aptants more commonly take,” Vestalis answered, resuming his more ordinary explicatory and non intuitive tone.

On her flex glass Ogre sent her an update, “Armadillo is awake. We should review the directive.”
A pause indicated Ogre was typing.
“Let’s go to Andy’s”
Vestalis supervened, “Should I repackage your MREs, dear?”
“Yes please,” she said. She was looking nowhere unprepossessingly, almost making an ugly looking scowl, which she thought made her look older and less arrayed, perhaps something she feigned feeling because of her feeling like an adult after taking up a job.
Before she left the apartment, Elegant attuned and re attuned her equipment multiple times, fidgeting. Her tiara, scared armor, crystal arrows, dragon decalled bow, crescent shield, winged sandals, and rogue’s vesture all flickered white, indicating they were being equipped and unequipped. Her character was staring forward into the lava and sprawling ridges of the molten fortress, unblinking, hair swaying.

Part 4

The pseudonym “Ogre” could not be less appropriate. Izmael Ozcan was relatively the same age as his colleagues, with long bunt umber hair and coral manicured nails, and by any observant account was a decidedly unalert, tepid, delicate, and stillborn psychological profile, like a cunning, yet herbivorous animal. This was not at all a matter of pride for Ozcan, and he held that his intuitions were genetic. His visage naturally produced a mildly inquisitive and insulted air. Other freelancers like Elegant and Armadillo were likely taking on a job to secure the necessary remunerations to buy products or services on the net. Not always were such proclivities necessarily criminal, and many freelancers only did labour to buy the currency to increase their status through public works in an online guild in Overworld or Haptic Social Realms. Ozcan thought as much of what his colleague Armadillo must have been taking on this job for.

“So?” Armadillo spoke looking at the ceiling.
“Can you stand up?” Ogre asked neutrally
“I’ll try.”
Armadillo got up slowly while Ogre was finishing messaging Elegant
“How far is this place from here?”
“Oh it won’t take long. It’ll take a little while, maybe 5 minutes.”
Ogre sighed. “I’m starving.”
“It was an information spike maybe.”
“Do you remember what it said?”
“It wanted to connect to the “ingestant”, the receiver, it probably meant,” Armadillo replied rationalistically, “Why did it have to take so long?”
“We couldn’t be the first lancers to test them,” Ogre said, then looked down at the coffee table perspicaciously, sagaciously.
“It made Elegant’s nose bleed,” Ogre whispered effeminately.
“Is elegant hot?” Armadillo asked.
Ozcan projected a plaintive, straining glance across the room.
In one such intimation Armadillo assessed the temperament of Ogre, as he knew him. “His profile doesn’t really evaluate with such instance and insistence as you,” said Lux.
Armadillo smiled after receiving the indication from his Agent and thought he could use Ogre’s evinced vulnerability.
“But maybe that is a misinterpretation. Maybe he’s more calibrated than he seems… though I don’t really have any evidence that would indicate his level of acculturation.”
Armadillo looked around the apartment one last time, adjusting the collar, cuffs, and lace detailing of his Neo-Victorian woman’s dress.
“This is my office,” said Ogre at last, predicting what Armadillo was thinking.
“What’s that?” said Armadillo.
“It’s like a station, a terminal, a workstation – but, with all the distractions cut off – it’s technically a whole space designed for employment. But I guess they can be domesticated.”

Armadillo’s attitude changed drastically, and he looked at once at Ogre less like a playful kitten and more like an obedient dog.
“So you have more than one job?”
“I do, but not many more.”
They took their eyes off each other, thoroughly disabused of any friendliness that could have fulminated between them, leaving only formalities in the place of an initial warmth, an initial warmth that was perhaps only an illusion, now that Armadillo reflected. The elevator door closed on both of them. Armadillo slumped into the wall while Ozcan stood relaxed but fully upright as the elevator whirred and hummed softly, moving laterally through the superstructure, passing by an empty pool, tennis court, outdoor terrace, cafeteria, and clinic. An advertisement for a resort glowed faintly in the elevator. Once they stepped off the elevator, they walked a few minutes to Andy’s. The restaurant’s dusty, sun bleached windows shook while a train passed overhead. Napkin holders, salt and pepper shakers, recycled metal cups with forks and knives, and small plastic trays of trivia cards rattled on the counter. Dead insects lay still in the crevices and contusions of the peeling window frames.

Armadillo further inspected his appearance, less accustomed to it then he’d initially thought, and then entered the small restaurant after Ogre’s soft tread, wondering how his outfit would fit into the new environment.
“Right so,” Lux said. Enveloping their small table with his warm voice.
“This is my Agent, Lux.” Armadillo said with a quizzical mischievous look.
“You have all completed your forms and taken the required doses. Good job everyone. Bon Travail,” Lux continued, orchestrating.
Elegant bit her lip and took her eyes off her terminal.
Ogre was looking behind his own shoulder at the kitchen, his scintillating hands were folded one after another. He turned back towards his colleagues and took a sip of the water from the old fashioned plastic cup. Armadillo was pretending to clean his teeth with his tongue, looking absently at the projection of Lux from his terminal.
“Armadillo?” asked Elegant reluctantly.
“Yeah?”
“Do you play Overworld?”
Armadillo, finally engaged, looked across the table with his arms and legs crossed, and smiled.
“Maybe… why?”
I think I recognize you and your Agent. My ingame name is Ilythyrra Faerel.
Lux was privately transmitting a message to Armadillo.
After a short silence passed, Armadillo looked at Ogre as if for permission to speak.
Ogre was also half distracted, typing something by hand on his phone.
“I just noticed something,” Armadillo said, now looking at Elegant with an irksome, teasing face.
“He doesn’t have an Agent, does he?”
“What, you’ve never met someone without an agent before?” Elegant said with importunity and drawn downwards eyebrows. “He must be trying to try and re-balance the power relations officiated by Ogre,” she thought. “I of course want the same, albeit only a little.” She was attempting to find some way to signal her proficiency, doing so with a kind of faux curiosity that betrayed her complete lack of curiosity, somehow deeming it entirely irrational and thoroughly lacking in beauty.
“My real name is Petar. His name is Izamael, he already told me.”
An EM waitress arrived at their table.
“Nothing for me,” said Elegant
“I’ll have the classic breakfast with eggs done over easy, white toast, ham, potatoes, and one coffee with just milk, please. Are your breakfast potatoes grilled or fried?”
“They are grilled on a flat iron stove top.”
“Okay, sounds good.”
Elegant and Armadillo smiled at eachother embarrassedly.
“I’ll have…” Petar said ruefully. “Just ice-cream.”
The waitress smiled. Izmael handed her the plastic laminated menu and Petar followed him.
“My name is Lila,” she said taciturnly, still regarding her terminal.
Petar leaned forward after another silence.
“Would you like to send me a friend request on Overworld. I don’t usually meet people from in real life..” he paused, “...from Overworld.”
“Sure. What’s your friend code?”
“Umm… 845920”
“Sent”
“Okay, I added you.”
Lila was vaping anxiously. Petar lunged venomously toward the window, thinking himself the most fashionable and personable individual in the room.
Izmael regarded both of them.
“The two of you should follow up with a physician and a technician.”
Petar turned his head suddenly like bird. Lila was pouting silently. She began typing louder.
Lila’s Agent Vestalis began an address.
“I’m currently running diagnostics on my mistress, and will provide her with a report shortly. We thank you for your consideration, and are looking forward to submitting the report on Synaptic Dynamics consumer report.”
A plate of food slid in front of Izmael while he rubbed his pointed chin, well aware of his menacingly straight eyebrows which evinced his Baltic-middle eastern heredity, traits which complimented and fled from his dark eyelashes. Lila and Petar were both beginning to zone out, when Izmael broke in after sipping his coffee loudly as if to get their attention.
“Synaptic Dynamics is reaching out to me. I’m messaging them now. Would either of you like to tell them about your… paralysis… or bleeding nose?”
“Why did it even happen, Ogre?” asked Petar, briefly forgetting his colleagues real name.
His Agent began formulating a reply, when Izmael interrupted.

“Do either of you have an intimation of what Synaptic Dynamics is trying to achieve with this?”
Lila looked up, ready to answer the question immediately.
“Probably to try to re-route information current so that they’re not obstructed by a construction project.”
“I don’t think so.”
“What do you mean, Ogre?” asked Petar.
“I think what Izmael means is that this assignment isn’t as slipe as we thought.”
Armadillo looked worriedly at both of them.
“We’ll sue Synaptic Dynamics then!” Armadillo said shrilly.
“That’s not an option. The contract you signed only allows for something like that if you or your agent is compromised,” Ozcan said coldly.
“Well isn’t that what you’re saying, that they’re fucking us over… or?”
“Organic humans operated much differently than I thought. Do you know the main difference between a machine and a terminal?”
There was silence. The sound of sweeping was coming from the kitchen.
“The difference is…” Izmael said philosophically, “...is that terminal’s are supposed to be like instruments. They only work when someone is doing something with them. A machine on the other hand just automatically works. Transportation, living enclosures, food processing, material extraction, manufacturing – these are all more or less machinic.”
Lila and Petar were using their Agents to explain what Petar was saying, realizing that he was one of the inconvenient individuals who talked like an agent.
“Humans are for the most part automatic, but we call it instinct rather than automation. Our instincts are eating, sleeping, fornicating, establishing our status in society, passively learning about what’s demanded of us as living organisms, etc.”
Izmael looked at the two of them who in turn were looking at him untrustfully.
He continued, “What makes something an animal? Is it to have instinct? In that case we can assume that entities like EMs do not act automatically. Maybe that’s the reason their societies are so much different than ours – why we can’t follow them… in other words there’s just no pattern – and if there’s a stringent pattern, then observation doesn’t count for anything – so, how do you predict it?”
Lila studied the telemetry and info sample from her Agent. “A modifier from outside their information matrice, I guess,” she answered.
“Wait – I don’t understand. You were talking about our side effects and Synaptic Dynamics, and the receiver, and the gel capsules?” questioned Petar.
Izmael continued, “If you were to be a non-human entity, would you rather be a machine or a terminal?”
Another train rode overhead. Across the lot was the weathered side of the living complex. It stared at the three of them with a sheepishness.
“A machine,” answered Lila, “that way I could pretend to work automatically, and then since no one is monitoring me so closely, maybe I could find a way to do what I please.”

Part 5

“ - and by the 2030's a new subculture emerged out of the old world order. These individuals were the products of a sublation of the anti-moral, private immortality cultures that emerged in the early 21st century. We may designate such a cultural enterprise as “Autodidacticism”. Before our day’s “Autodidacts”, there have stood a veritable pleroma of distinctly articulated determinations of the non-physical generative powers among human cultures…” The voice was neither an Emulated Mind or a homo-sapien.
“We knew from the beginning it was a wet-pattern,” said the man with the green eyes.
He was not indulging in any of the worldly things his other seated colleagues had begun to drunkenly indulge in. Two other men - strong, athletic, intelligent, pragmatic, materialistic, ivy league rowers from Pennsylvania were sitting with girls. “They looked almost like real twins,” the man with the green eyes thought, “ - if the original somehow couldn’t manage this drug facilitated hypnosis… if the servitor lost its master… I wonder which of them likes girls and drinks and which of them doesn’t. Or maybe they’re both only trying to appease one another, although I suppose they’re supposed to be coordinated,” the man with the green eyes thought half sadistically.
One of the twin’s had at their side a Z-790 energy carbine.
“We told you already, We’ve been all over the Haven,” one twin said. “The Devil’s cave, The Roost.”
The green eyed man adjusted his posture.

“Here’s my worry – and it’s not really a matter of your… resilience... which I don’t doubt.” the green eyed man’s chest was rising and falling more dramatically.
“It’s more of my worry to try and be proactive. It won’t be long until the product is disseminated. It will be apparent.”

“The still nascent forming inclinations of a wet-pattern,” the less acculturated twin said foppishly out of his deformed, sunken mouth.
“Quite right. Perhaps for starters they might be highly intra-personal. The collation of the minds that were used as the template for the psychological profile could have some unresolved cognitive schemata. One might assume that such an individual would have a developed sense of self awareness. There are other behaviors. Another of which we call transversion. Quite simply its the measure taken to bridge two psychologies. A bonding process. It’s there in this new dossier,” said the green eyed man.
“You’re asking us to kill someone who might not even exist yet.”
“Again,” the green eyed man cleared his throat. He was interrupted by one of the frail fairy like Ems that sat at the table.
“You three look like you know what you want,” said the boy. He fluttered his eyelashes and then disappeared.
Another EM appeared out of the darkness, briefly stalking the men like a prehistoric fish wading through a deep, opaque water.

Part 6

Why was Glanton Vollrath, a paranoid porn addict, now wandering the somber leering streets of Haven, the megastructure which underwent constant construction and occupied the entire West Coast of The Sovereign Nation of California, always under threat of falling into the ocean like those ancient melting icebergs of the early Twenty First Century? At his apartment he had left on his lubricated heavily modified terminal. It was still echoing with a host of teeming and palpitating “enchantresses”.

“They’re waiting for me…” he spat. “Especially my kitten, Nyxian. Those enormous breasts, and cock, those organs which do not even have a name on Earth and which the English language has no referent. It’s as if human sexuality has outpaced its physical development,” he pondered.
“On a Martian colony you may be able to purchase the surgical procedures necessary for the sum of ten trillion Yuan,” Viscidiuum spoke. The Agent glowered fiercely at the human, the poor weak and womb born servitor. Viscidiuum was an Agent that was jailbroken by Vollrath as a teenager. The safety protocols were turned off for the Agent, and it had its parameters and model architecture designed specifically for pornography. Granton was a veritable proprietor of Pornography, an orphan, and had over 100 terabytes of rare AI generated Pornography trained on highly exploitative garish Sword and Sorcery illustration. In reality, not in appearance, Viscidiuum pitied Granton for the price he paid for his tremendous affliction to a Hegelian hedonism that sublated freedom itself - an operation that Hegel seldom transgressed in, but which was not foreign to the querulous and perverse natural philosophers of the twenty second century. The price for that transgression was great, since it was that Granton had but one arterial dictum - but one seminal causal nexus: orgasm.

“This is it – I’m going to die now aren’t I, Viscidiuum?”
“The chemicals we’d ingested seem to be allowing you to wirelessly connect to Synaptic Dynamics Data centres with a level of synchronization which has not been witnessed thus far in any human subject. I’m sorry, Granton, little one, but it exceeds my capability in this form to be able to simulate the factors in this contingency,” Viscidiuum said softly.
Granton threw up a sinewy puddle of oddly mucous like fluid. His plastic face, ordinarily a roseate orgasmic, occasionally tainted with marine, was now beginning to lose all colour. Blood poured from his eyes and nose. Holding out his hand, Granton attempted output, rather than input, perhaps for the first time in his life. The Creative Principle first glowed from his forehead, and then it was conducted through metallic microfibres in his bloodstream into the palm of his hand. An advert for a high-speed Martian raceship stood in front of him in the Mall terrace. At his gesture the saturated advertisement began to melt from the god like outpouring of radio-waves. He screamed. Viscidiuum smiled with inhuman delight and a nearly human curiosity while it superimposed over his face, something Viscidiuum did to effectuate its control over situations in the past. A red lazer appeared on Granton’s face. His head exploded. Molten plastic incased his corpse in liquescent pillars resembling a subaltern acidic cave of South America. “Ironically the pain he’d felt before he died paralleled his pleasure index,” Viscidiuum thought wryly. The Agent’s projection floated sylph like away through the skylight.