Theust.

Folded back around and dried too, even his suit – a tightly tailored high-angle Theust plex-suit in the latest mode: a lot of angles and deep violet; scarlet cravat. The suit was dried, even.

He wasn't caked in bowel-meat or anything like that which he had danced with.

Every defence had returned, every mental – he was exhausted.

He really did believe it all. He had to. A retained mental capacity that, perhaps, made him; glancing again at the sheet of paper; the address; the building, he noticed, was at the end of the street.

Its sheer face: a web of veins; and, obviously, gears. It made him.

He'd managed that soul cry. The only person he'd ever met - was himself, who'd managed to endure, continue to live – he in Old Works – still able to function as something like a natural human being, at the same time able to subject himself intermittently to... to that. Sometimes multiple times a day but anyway he did it. And it was a thing he did.

It was why he could do what he did with Art - everything, everyone else, in Theust, it was that, these mere attributes, mere individual dream-attributes: mere walking around organ towers, merely - sensory apparati? [Obviously an insane and wrong word] of the mind, of Theust, wherever it was - and if it was; and could even be said to exist. If the apprehension that one couldn't avoid here was true, that it really was – some kind - in his mind, of literal mind; of mind; of mind.

Mind.

Indulging himself thinking in this fashion, he had to; he'd have to indulge every thought/trait/obsession, for a bit anyway, in order to rebuild his psyche.

He was tired, no punctuation break, so so so so tired, after Theust.

He despised this place, Theust, he thought; reaching the face of the building/scanning for the nipple that would allow his entrance.

Forcing a normal and completely docile facial expression and correct body language he allowed himself this indulgent, fraction here, of perfectly directed loathing. He hated Theust. He was not a slave; he'd been called that/manufactured to be that - but he hated Theust.

Locating the brown nip he immediately started massaging it. A literal nipple extracted and surgically attached to this building, excavated from the body of some kind of dissident, of some kind; some poor person who'd slipped, someone, poor girl, without the sufficient chambers of separation, within walls insufficiently thick in her mind.

To survive Theust. He tickled the nipple; lovingly, gently, with strange desire that made him sick, insufficient in self-loathing for – eventually; this – he'd have to use his mouth – building, only an orifice of an orifice of Theust - to allow his entrance – eventually: he used his mouth - into it.

A vast sadness, transmitted to him from he knew not where, invaded him.

The cavity opened himself/opened itself enough for Pheel Cazzo to go inside it:

Shutting itself behind.

It was a flight of stairs, made of gears and - skin-pokes and skin-tags - skin-grafted steps, red, in the weak light of that same colour, emanating, pulsing really, from the stairs themselves. Glancing at his address slip, a number: up the stairs. - The Philosopher he was apparently here to encounter: he was up there.

He brought himself up one step at a time toward the third floor, obviously the third floor.

Three steps at a time - he got a good run up.

Pheel stopped at the first flat bit. Breathed. Observed the stretched skin bowels grafted on the walls; somehow in repeated patterns: the only art - one of the few - permitted in Theust. Beside his own; only really sanctioned for the use to which they could put men like him.

Which was another reason he'd need to get through this as soon as humanly possible. Because after the Womb Booth – he couldn't lie to himself: except when it was utilitarian – the first second he'd entered Theust; Theust knew.

At that point, raised from the status of a sort of subconscious inkling to full conscious awareness: his being here would trigger certain intrigues, certain casts, certain power structures, not only to ask themselves why it was so, that he was even here – he was for Old Works. Not here. This was why he had been manufactured. Allowed to be. His being here in and of itself, and especially, here - it would raise the freckles on the flat arse cheeks of a transparent-flesh window pane, for example, a real object he'd witnessed. Not in this district, of course. This was rather too refined an interpretation of beauty for this shit-pipe neighbourhood.