I'm standing in a dingy apartment that has the same layout as the house I grew up in. The first floor had a narrow kitchen that exited on to a living room.  This apartment belongs to a Chinese man, and he's showing me his operation. I politely walk alongside him as he explains all the broadcast and routing gear stacked against the far wall.

The man runs a high-tech brothel. His second in command - a guy who looks like John Leguizamo - shows me the rest of the operation as the Chinese guy leaves to attend to something. The sky outside is the color of grey static, and a constant high-pitched ringing noise pervades the room.

The 'lieutenant' pours me a drink, and tells me to make myself at home. I sit down on a sofa, watching a live feed of random interfaces - mostly Asian women having sex with guys through some kind of body mapping tele-presence. The guy sits on the arm of the sofa, and leans toward me. 'You wanna try?' I feel really uncomfortable, but also intrigued. It's virtual reality after all, and lacking any memory of where I came from, or where I was going - it seemed like a good idea.

I connect up, and experience a welcome/warmup that transitions into something more elaborate. The high-pitched ringing is getting louder, drowning out all other sounds - I yank the VR helmet and electrodes off my head, interrupting the broadcast.  Leguizamo-guy spits out his drink, and shouts 'Oh, shit, that's not good.', looking at one of the monitors. Since I was connected directly into the core system, my disconnect caused a hiccup in the VR data was handled - and displayed.
 
The telepresence feed streams from somewhere in Asia, with an actual woman starting the process. However, once the sequence is initiated -- the avatar/appearance remains the same, but the person controlling the motions shunts to Russia, where a man takes over.

I realize then how the Chinese guy makes his money, and why there's no much routing hardware in this place. By paying a smaller number of women, and passing off the control to lower paid men in Russia, my host made his money.

I just glance at the screens, and back to Leguizamo-guy, looking for an explanation. He shrugs, and says ' Hey, it's all virtual, right?', downs his drink and leaves the room. One of the Chinese man's  daughters enters the room to bring me some tea, then goes to work fixing the hardware malfunction I caused. I just sit there, listening to the high-pitched ringing noise as my tea goes cold.

An Orwellian world, dominated by surveillance. The State control is absolute - no privacy, and no religion are permitted on this planet. This is an arm of a multi-universal governing body. 

Across multiple versions of Earth, it expands. Destabilizing from within, then slowly replacing political figures over time. It's conquest is not one of military victory, but one of the mind. A slow, methodical conversion over generations.

In worlds without religion, the only threat to their control is belief in something more. Empirical proof of an afterlife, of heaven and hell. Incursions by demons threaten to destroy this control with evidence of hell. The Home Office employs individuals to contain these incursions, and their threat of belief.


A creature, not unlike a Cenobite stalks the night. It moves with a eerie grace. It wears a white leather full length skirt, but a bare torso. It's skin is a whitish pink, covered in horns, ridges, and and thin, reedy spikes emerging from it's back. It appears human, but a ghastly parody thereof. It leaves a warehouse containing two large cubes - gateways between dimensions, but also timelines. Levithian's influence expands, but the demons motivation isn't grounded in politics, or control. It's death and pain. 

A man watches this creature cross a parking lot. It's late at night, and all surveillance is temporarily suspended in this area. Anyone else coming in contact with an entity is flagged for later execution. The demon calmly walks across toward the treeline, but pauses. It changes direction and approaches a bag of candy on the ground by a tree. As it picks up the bag, a trap is triggered, launching a razor thin blade from the tree, bisecting the creature's torso.

It's head still intact, it stumbles backward. The man races forward, holding a garrote tightly between both hands. Avoiding the long spikes, it pins the creature to the ground. It speaks --  "How?" It asks. Struggles to press the garrote across the creature's jaw, he says "It was all over the house in your last victim's place. You're a creature of habit." He jams the razor right to the ground, decapitating the creature. 

* * *

I’m getting work in northern Canada somewhere, possibly out west. The weather is dark and cold. I take a bus for hours, and finally arrive at a gas station/bus stop. I enter, and the place is a ghost town.

I go into the shop, as I'm hungry and want to buy something to eat while I wait - there's nothing to buy here. I walk past racks of post cards and small key chains, to find an empty convenience store with no shelves - only an older native man running a lotto desk. He doesn't make eye contact.

I'm boarding with someone in this town, and they drive me to the hour where I'll be staying: a 2 story cabin, four rooms across, with a large central room downstairs. It seems familiar, but I can't place from where.

Tired, I go upstairs to unpack and get to bed. I enter a room, and I'm horrified. Nailed to the wall are upside down pair of dolls feet. The chipped paint underneath show where the rest of the sculpture was attached to the wall, but it was removed long ago. The shape mimics an upside down cross - yet only the feet remain.I run to another room, and discover the same thing, but recreated with a Barbie dolls' feet and legs hanging from the wall of an empty room. There's a lot of water damage in this room, and some in the dimly lit hallway.

This horrifies me on a level outside of the dream - I remember a dream from my childhood where I was in a cabin, perhaps at camp, and found these dolls nailed to the wall in an inverted St. Peter on the cross way.

I run down stairs, and into the family that's boarding me. They are dressed in some kind of KKK-esk ceremonial garb, with two women bent over, prepared for some kind of sex ritual. I scared of what's happening here, so far away from everything, late at night in a strange city. I run for the door, but one of the brothers in this family tries to stop me - I club him with a nearby lamp, and make it outside to the front lawn. I feel disoriented, swirling vertigo as I stumble and crawl across the dew-damp lawn. The sun’s coming up, and there are wet cardboard boxes strewn around the lawn. One of the girls from the family is outside, and trying to explain to me it was a big joke - the brother, sister and friends staying at the cabin were just trying to freak me out. I can't understand why - and why the weirdly religious, quasi sexual angle? The woman just shrugs.

*  *  *

I'm tearing lined pages out of a spiral bound notebook, and trying to trim the edge with scissors. I'm late for something, and realize I haven't had a chance to shower or dress properly. I rush to a cafe, but it's the middle of the night. The air has a quiet stillness, with everything in shades of grey. There's nothing around for miles. I walk down a dirt road lined with trees on one side, and an open field bordered by a fence on the other. As the road ends at a house, I realize there's a cafe table with seating outside. I'm simultaneously indoors at this cafe - closed, with the metal shop front gate closed to my left --- and I'm still outside, with the dirt road, and tree line to my left.  It's disorienting.

I'm supposed to meet someone here, a lawyer. He needs me to present something about the "nature of desolation" using bits I had in a notebook, and pages from an old Dark Horse comic I had with me. The lawyer is late, so I take a seat at the table / indoors. I start up a conversation with the people there, who are the defendants in the lawyers’ case. I'll be helping them somehow. I speak with a man to my left, sitting on an L-shaped sofa the runs around one side of this table. He says he's from G----- college, part of my old university. We're getting along really well, and a female friend of his switches sides of the table so that she's sitting beside me. They're all part of an organization that's being sued for something, and they're all waiting on this lawyer.

There's a man drawing very accurate space ships at the table next to his, but has 2 other people shading them with pencil crayons. One I recognize. He shows me his poorly colored picture, and then returns to what he was doing.

I'm simultaneously outside and in. The sun is rising - filtered through the trees to my left. The table and people are still there, but they're outside -- the two rooms existing within the same three-dimensional space. I see a man walking through the treeline down a road. It's the lawyer. I meet him half-way, and ask what I need to do for the trial. "You'll know when you're there." is all he says. He's friendly, and it feels like I've seen him before.

There are chimpanzees nearby, and one lying slumped near a tree as we walk back to the table. The lawyer shoves it over at me, and it falls into my leg. The chimp is partially decapitated, with the head only attached by a small bit of flesh. This is horrifying and confusing. "Why did you do that?" I yell at the lawyer. He just shrugs.

We get to the table, and immediately we're no longer outside. The left side security gate, with the exit beyond into a darkened mall exists now. The lawyer gets everyone up to leave, and I help pull up the gate area, holding it high enough for everyone to slip though.

As we leave the gated cafe behind, the twilight illuminating the room fades, and the room becomes a black void. I turn to catch up with the lawyer and defendants as they walk off into the darkened mall, but all I can hear are their distant voices receding in the distance.