Iambran lay in a hidden room in the Marxist New Republic’s hidden bunker, past rusty chambers through dusty corridors. The door ahead of him rotted and creaked, rust dripping from the orifices. A white flag lay in the corner, while a PO-KT plugged into an outlet lit up with MindStop and KneeDeep. Both of which gave him heavy cocktails of moods, all mixed with pocket drops.   

He was transcendent. He knew the world, the features of clay, formed by mold, carved by the hands of god. He saw the kaleidoscope of people and things. Buildings, pure marble, shimmered, glistened, white as snow, dropping slowly, floating… Floating… He saw it all in his strangely dead eyes. Gone, were they, under the obedience of the PO-KT and shriveled from years of closing them. He dreamt of the soft bulbs of green fruit, a dragon with red eyes, a man in chain armor, an ocean of pearly-white fish, and the ivory teeth of a strange god. The dreams he had bought from the store. 

They were fun and happy, full of bright colors that flashed across his useless, dazed eyes. 

Beside him, his hand rested on a title with the insignia Magister on it. The card with the Court of Marxists laser-grinded on it rested underneath the table in piles and piles of dust. Another hand rested on a soft pillow, his unusable hand, pale from the shade, and crisscrossed with veins.

But inside his strangely, twirling, chaotic mind, he felt euphoric, high. In the lights of multiple dreams and multiple PO-KT’s connecting to his mind, he saw God, he dreamt of the stars that rotated in the grey night sky. His mind rambled forth images, spouting like a waterfall filled with rainbow salmon. 

It allowed him to see into God’s Magic, and he did this while taking those spurts of MindStop and allowing the spurts of pleasure to fill him. 

He dreamt of other things outside of the earth, flying in the air, having all power, superhuman, flying. The PO-KT was making him superhuman, he saw it all, everything, the inner flames of humanity, the logs burning, the things, the people, the horrible Tanuskuit, Partigmon, Sitwaxit, Maquon, all strangely warped, strangely random, strangely surreal. Putting out their curled fists and beady eyes, observing him, examining him, twisting their lips upward into a mocking smile. 

He laughed suddenly, sharply, greatly. It echoed into the poor air, as he smiled, keeling over the couch, and then twisting and turning around in a Creus-like dance. 

He continued, again and again. Gone from this world… 

Gone… Gone….

Zircon sat in his great mansion of a sky-home, eating his meal from the Grab-M-Eat. The squeaking of the giant cable was stifled by thousands of noise-proof pads. Allowing it to seem like he was floating above the world, alone by himself.

He looked at the view. The glancing towers, the shining lights, the crevices of dripping rust, and the sculpted metal bodies. Streetlamps twisted around marble columns. After that, there were the ghettos, where the regulars were born, and the Cured were sent after their Treatment in the reaffirmation camps... 

He watched the horrible grovelers below. Their fire pits gleaming gold, their grease and smog silently creeping in through his air vents. Zircon watched their strange little lives, their diseased, their cripples, the Useless. They were a strange type that he had avoided through the entirety of his childhood. The soaked rags and their horribly soft, stinking bodies made him gasp out and run to the nearest bathhouse… Horrible… Horrible…

He looked away, instead, upon the plastic containers, and the Ronalde Meal. Ronalde himself smiled at him, whilst he wore a bulletproof vest and held up his standard RK-98. 

“Look upon the glory of the State, buy 3 and get 3 for 1.50. Chicken Nuggets are 30 percent off for every person that enlists! Buy! Buy! Buy!”, the tinny speaker spoke. The holographic screen glitched as Ronalde spoke and spoke again.

“Buy! Buy! Buy! Buy! Fight the bad guys! Fight Ainom! Fight them all!”

The food in the meal was horrible, smelled like boiled rubber, and it was clearly a kiddie meal, but the message made it alright. He saluted as usual, and peeled the Tech off, and stuck it onto a giant billboard, filled with thousands of more screens. 

The voices yelled for attention, screaming out, decrying the horrible Ainom, shooting guns into the air, stomping forth with iron boots and cutthroat knives. Bearded faces smiled as they fired into crowds, and soldiers marched on the High One’s orders.

He sat back on his couch again, watching the glitching screens and dull smiles. For a while, he wondered and thought. Introspecting into himself, tapping the coffee table, and drinking the Ice. 

  As the Main Lights went down, he plugged the PO-KT in and lulled himself into sleep. He dreamt another person's dream, with visions of a thick jungle, festering with the boiling heat of the sun, and with swamp water dripping down the greasy vines. People of the jungle, a glowing egg, and the skeleton of an archaeologist.

When he woke, an alarm blared in his room, a speaker around a pole. He rubbed his tired, lazy eyes, and saw that it was 20:54. He jumped up, stumbling a bit, seeing that he was late. That he had slept past 10 minutes! He ran to his room, put on the epaulets, then the uniform. The stairs blurred, going past him in a colorful array of handprint turkeys and preschool colors. 

He saluted the receptionist, and then flew onto the streets, past the motorcars. Then, around the screaming young man with glasses. The blood had made the Rebel’s torso completely crimson.

At 21:00, he stopped at the Cinema-Theatre building. He straightened at the sight of Fetcher Of The Scrolls and the Magister Of The Mind.

He strode toward the main Ticketmaster. 

“Your late!”, A fellow, with a gleaming array of medals, from the State Watch cried, “Pull out your card!”

The red marker came out. His card came out, out of the 14 total, there were only 2 marks left. Two more left until the Reaffirmation Camps. Two more! 

He shivered, stumbled into the dark, damp place. The projector flickered and then lit up. An ad formed on the screen, with a smiling man, a dancing dog, and a soldier shooting guns into the air, again and again, shooting with his ferociously terrifying smile.

A man held by two soldiers went screaming past. But he was more focused upon the marks. The red marker. The camps, the mines, the disloyalty he had brought upon himself. He pulled at his hair while the title card swung into view, muttering to himself frantically, rambling about his loyalty, his allegiance, and then stopping. 

He looked around at everybody else, to see if they were watching him. But they were sitting, sleeping, not watching fully, dazed, or seeming obsessed. But still, they were all uncomfortable, fidgeting, twitching, only the children loved it, laughing at it, shooting their invisible weapons along with the Charmer at the screen.

He took a glance at the aircraft hanger rumbling onscreen, the unrealistic special effects, the crude humor, the happy smiles, the strangely dumb characters, and the loud flashes and bangs that populated it all. But, the great message about the horrible Ainom.

He looked away, continuing in his thoughts, thinking and thinking about his fate. Wondering about Ainom, wondering about the world, wondering about the horrible reaffirmation camps. Zircon lay back. His eyes grew dimmer and dimmer. He coughed, shook, as the movie continued.

When it ended and the lights flashed on, he dragged himself toward his sky-home and plugged the PO-KT tightly to his head. 

He bought multiple dreams, flying, a complicated story about meeting gods. One by the government, Shot Down By Ainom. 

When he fell into the deeper parts of his subconscious, he dreamt of not getting enough sleep, and then more and more, flooding his empty mind with strange, surreal ideas. 

A dream about Ainom filled his head, a life, a strangely tantalizing life. A life of magic, adventure… Something better, something filled with the tantalizing lure of something else... Raw power, raw discovery flowed through him… Red coursed through his veins, blood pumped from his reddened heart into his mind, warmth filled his body, he saw the irons of a giant cage, and then a great concrete building covered in gold. 

Throughout the dreams, he could not get the thought of a red marker out of his head. 

 Soros sat in his rocking chair, the PO-KT whining and whirring in his ear, filling his mind with a cacophony of Ainomian sounds and Ainomian memories. His feet were on a blurry street, of clay and brick. Tiraders ran past him, with their heavy suits of iron chains and golden sticks to lift themselves. Their vests dully gleamed throughout, as they trudged through the shimmering, melting mud.

He saw realistically cold and melting snow, the peaks of Everest, the hoarfrost that covered the trees, and the vault that held the people. Fading letters appeared as he walked further, The Global Seed Vault, or the home of Ainom. 

People surrounded him, the workers and the helpers of the Lord Of Ceremonies. Some played music, others drank and talked about the past. He laughed in their faces, chuckled, remembering those times as if they were only a minute ago, a day ago, not a decade, not a century. He was young, energetic, full of the limbering energy of summertime.

And he could still practice the magic he once did years ago. Manipulating the echoes and the golden pitch to make a melody. Forming and sculpting something from Nature. It’d been years since he’d done so, but he could still do it. He could still see those little flames gave by God, the energies of life, the little worlds forming inside his eyes.

The shivers in his spine faded away after a while, forming a numbness in his back, so he took more PO-KT drops to help cope with the uselessness of his body. He trembled and trembled like a frail leaf, withered, useless, quiet, strangely thin in the bone, weak… Weak...

During the time that he took the PO-KT off, and propelled himself into deep thought. Twisting and turning around in his chair, he muttered Zircon’s name, hating him, hating himself, angry at the world, angry at Time, angry at his old age, angry for bowing down to a man he despised. Angry… Angry… There were too few he could trust in these dark times. 

He sat quietly, in the angry place, where the cold sadly blew past him.

He hated the flood, the thing that had ruined him. He hated death, he hated age, he hated himself… God… God… He hated the strange, horrible world. He hated all people, the things that made them up, the buildings that they had built, the flood that they had caused. God…. God…

He put on the PO-KT again, shaking his head, stretching his legs, his body, and collapsing back into nothingness, into Ainom again, into that isolated world where nothing happened… Where nothing was strangely confusing, where nothing was complicated…

Nothing at all… Nothing at all…

At night, he went with Frederich to the deep heart of the ghettoes. Down the twisting roads, through the stairwell, opening a secret hatch that led into an old government bunker. People silently danced and sang, drinking and eating, or with their PO-KT, in an unknown place and an unknown time, sleeping…

In the corner, around a table, sat the Marxists, the Socialists, and the Republicans, all planning the demise of the State. They were glorious people. People that were happy with their lives, and despised the world without freedom, radicalized by a horrible, new world.

He hobbled forward with his cane, holding a heavy case in his left hand, twitching and shivering as he weakly went forward.

The rebels stood up, greeted him with smiles, and sat back down as he opened his briefcase. A package of Macker’s 0.70 rounds and a couple of giant MK70’s and G330’s greeted them. They took two of each and gave him some money to compensate. 

Soros shook their hands, giving a glance at the diagrams and complex maps before them.

Storm The Capitol! Kill The Fascists! Death To The State! Today! Soon!, where most of the words scribbled across a manila folder. He read it quickly and saw tomorrow’s date scribbled atop it.

He hobbled away, while Frederich continued to barter with the rebels, revealing a variety of weapons to them, yelling to them about money, deals, and more. Into the outside cold, where he smiled, laughed, chuckled, and stumbled forward, onto the dry, filthy road. 

Soon, while Zircon was at the Capitol, sitting there, droning on and on, the rebels would come and shoot them all dead… They were going to kill them all… With all that senseless blood spurting out in great waves, but Zircon, dead, that stupid, dumb, idiotic man… Goodbye to them, pigs and muck, flies tearing at their rot and corruption. Goodbye… Goodbye…

He laughed a little, smiling to himself, as he walked away, past a young man with glasses in a chamber of red, yelling with delirium.