<P>"You still don't know who I am," he repeated, then turned to Dom (who suddenly realized that the man's head was blue, and that it held the same blue face seen in his earlier hallucination). "You may have guesses." Dominic opened his mouth, but the man raised one hand to silence him. "It does not matter now. You have operated efficiently. I am impressed by your progress. Frankly, I did not think you would perform so well under such accelerated strain."
<P>
<P>Dominic felt like a helpless child being addressed by his teacher. The room was beginning to fill with liquor.
<P>
<P>Some words were in Dominic's throat. He vomited them into the air: "What is this place?"
<P>
<P>The man smiled, though he was reversed, and gave no answer. The liquor rose to Dominic's knees. Then to his head. It was inhaled. He drowned, and was dead.
<P>
<P><JC>--- --- --- ---
<P>
<P>"A lot of this has been hard to swallow," Jock said. He rotated his beer bottle on the table, turning it so that the label became distorted, then faced him again, he, all the while, remaining expressionless... He paused and waved his hand in a general collecting gesture of his surroundings. "All this, I mean. What's been going on." There was silence. "But the world is very different... Everything's changing. Occasionally I wonder if the whole mess we've gotten into is bigger than any of us. Sure as hell seems that way."
<P>
<P>Jess nodded. She lifted her bottle and drank. "Everything and everybody." She couldn't stop thinking about Dominic. None of them could. They had just witnessed him fall from a building and shoot himself in the head, and yet, there he slept, in Jock's Hong Kong apartment, without a scratch on him. "Dominic's not himself," she continued, an obvious statement that had already been spoken multiple times.
<P>
<P>"I know," Jock said.
<P>
<P>"No. I mean it. He's never been this empty. This... dark." Her eyes started to water. She still couldn't believe or understand any of the transformation he'd gone through.