Through the open window to the east, I can see through the thicket of winter bare branches blown broken in places by the bone dry kansas wind, across the cemetary, to the pink hues of a cloudy dawn, light streaking across the sky. My head aches from the night before. I wonder what binds me if I cannot be chained. A koan presented to me in a dream moments ago, I stare at the page, look through the window pane, listen to the far-off roar of the train loaded with hydrochloric and sulpheric acid leaving the chemical plant. Jet engines throbbed low, nearly below hearing, and the whine of traffic snarl creates a backdrop of soundscape. I've spent the night asleep, patched into the WE, a download that rewires the omnicillian MEMs into an open registry and allows for conscious access to my preconscious mind. It sure sounds simple enough, but I know now it packs quite a punch. Legislation is even being drafted to classify this bit of code as a schedule one narcotic under the increasingly misnamed drug laws. For now though it's still legal. The first twinkling of the WE unfolding in my Omnicillian gland is a quality of clarity in my thinking, a precision of thought which seems to manifest in my writing. Empowered writing. Each user of the WE is at their own apex in a vast pyramid of interaction. My consciousness suddenly unfettered itself. The room wavered on me. * "Compartmentalizing. Isolating the secondary psychic functioning." Words spilled out of Oliver. "Subjunctive recursals... neurotransmission complete." It felt like the emancipation of counsciousness. Oliver felt every hair follicle, every twitch in his gut, instantly understanding the sensory overload aspect of the WE that Qwerty had described, that led Astrix to go skindancer electrolysis. The hair on Oliver's body now felt like he'd fallen into a nest of spiders, a sensation so vivid and abrupt that he accidentally triggered a visual upload of arachnoid googles into his back brain. Now, with the MEMs gland suddenly pulling so much on his metabolism, he felt dizzy and disoriented. He began experiencing timegaps, a series of jumps in and out of continuity. He wonders if he's broken a link between his consciousness and his awareness. Sunlight is now streaming in through the window and he lay before it prone, basking. He feels his skin ripple. No longer can he even hold the pen. At the word 'me,' a long trail of ink flows off the page and ends where the pen lies, his hands nerveless under the changes wrought in his cerebellum. He imagines tiny insectoid bots scurrying through his bloodstream in their camoflauged casing, appearing as innocuoous blood cells until they reach their target, then latching in and injecting their new coded instructions before regenerating a new load for the next cell. Then he felt blackness wash over him, a warm, untterly mindless oblivion.