All dark, a single vast night shaking over the Zone. Signs of life though: distant plastic yells, soft plops in the bay, an unseen ambulance whirring. In a room, cable on, time not passing, listening for the gods beyond the window. What am I in all this? Sitting here in the rolling hive? Something approaches, a light flickers outside and sinks to the earth. I pull the curtains again.

Down from the (un)heavens snakes continents, the twilight sky a bronze glass. The distant skyscrapers look like chairs for false gods from here where I gaze out with 900 faces at the hazy waves around the port, the only wound I have being the last bit of light falling over the side of the world. My brain’s certain this place is a door, shadows bent around its rim. I bring the garden of my past up to the threshold.

The "make sense" hatch waits inside your archaic, cryptic alien game brain. You're not a lunatic; the rush is more than just strange. (Unreal! Unreal!) In this Inter-City you do take on new traits every day, filled with arrhythmia and otherworldliness, and you always remember: "The metropolis stands to all to let themselves yet be conceived," a face, any face, once told you.