He was the Dream Slave and what it meant.

Turned around outside a backwards glance, this time of a Cyclops, it felt weird, it always felt weird, being turned around in that fashion: your being seen the primary evidence of your existence, not merely being.

You wouldn't think you'd be able to feel that, but you could.

He went by that particular corridor so often; that he knew that particular Cyclops there. A big one, an old one. Interpreting a man out of Old Works, and passing him into the real world - it took a particular level of experience and skill. He glanced at Pry; back, him too; not glanced out at him behind, behind him, and then – he was simply looked out, and now here.

The town of his birth. They called it: Theust 3 - it was no town, of course - it was the third biggest city in Theust. Theust: a monoculture, a planet society, a unit, a thing, a single entity and thing. A mind? He'd often thought that, that Theust was a mind. Decentralised. - That was the experience of living there, actually, and that was why he'd had to escape; if he had - he hadn't, of course, because just being, the experience of existing/being, in an of itself, merely of being being your primary attribute, in falling apart quasi-philosophical language he wasn't smart enough to append to anything coherent, that experience anyway – as opposed to that out a Cyclops – he couldn't – but it was there. Not smart enough.

A poor scribbler – he cobbled stories of heroes bashing pipes on demon's coupons, etc. – that experience anyway whatever it was, that transition into, seen as being into mere being and then – that experience lasted however long it took an ant to take a breath.

Or maybe a shit.

Because being seen. Here too. If there was a place that being seen was. - Was the primary experience of existing in the world - that place was Theust.

Right now, Pheel Cazzo was seen, and he was plunged immediately back into it. The exhausting experience of living life primarily as performance, an acting existence, a completely performed reality - he never thought about it once outside, the place, but immediately. - Fought not to in order to reclaim his own soul – but that experience of performance, once plunged back in it – it was the concrete window between you and reality and it was constant, and it was unceasing, and it was now.

A mission from Massimo; Massimo Diap'leptico Rampposz; there was a philosopher, apparently, if he'd picked it up right, from whom, Massimo, had been, imparted, the truth; or at least a much more accurate, or in some sense more rounded or anyway accurate picture of – what reality was.

If Pheel understood it. And this philosopher, he was surprised they still had such things here in Theust... he would... - in Theust 3 of all places, his home/reality-land-place in which he'd first been catalogued as a, contingent on factors, Individual Entity Being, as they poetically described one in Theust, not just Theust 3 but Theust -

It had a culture, and he was looking at it.

Okay, also an alleyway, the district in which - he abided, this philosopher - but Theust -

There was nothing beyond it. This was the reason that he existed. His agreeing, only, only his agreeing, there was nothing else about him that was worth the weight of matter that allowed him to exist. A being that believed, a being that agreed, here, how to explain it expect – even to himself again so he could survive here the duration – this was living.