Time means nothing here. Colors dribble together and sounds collide and mesh. You keep thinking you taste opium. How did you get here? Were you ever not here? The only thing you're sure of is yourself, who you are. You're who you always were, solid and reliable, fully intact and self-aware. At least, it seemed that way a moment ago. There's something else here with you. Something vast and unknowable, a mighty consciousness with no form that surrounds you and fills you til you feel fit to burst with the very BEINGNESS of it all. Distantly you're aware that you aren't seeing things right, aren't hearing things right. Somewhere your feet are on solid ground, concrete perhaps, sheltered in a steel and glass box, a compartment of a dying breed, with the means for help just a hand's reach away. But you can't reach it. You can't even concentrate on it, with the colors so distracting and the sounds so head-spinning. The THING that's here with you is reaching into your skull and plucking through your memories, sifting through everything that makes you YOU, like a small child haphazardly shuffling through Dewey Decimal cards at a library. Do they even use those anymore? The sorting and filing sensation in your head continues as fathomless claws dig through your being, your mind, the fabric of your reality. A tweak here, a nudge there. Something falls out of place and something else replaces it. Bits of your inner knowledge drift through the air like burning motes on a smoky wind, like butterflies in a summer meadow, drunk on nectar and far from home. Your head is being shredded. Your mind is being reformed like clay on the wheel of an eccentric potter. You grasp at memories, feel them slip from your grasp. Traits, likes and dislikes, emotions and sensations all ripped from your fingers by this enormous entity, for who knows what end. Something is beginning to replace what's lost. A blankness, a sense of being a vessel, hollow and ready to be filled. Open to anyone who wants to warp you like this monstrous force is doing now. You are a still, glassy pond that can be rippled by anything that touches it, by a word, by a gesture, by a thought. You are who they say you are. There is no you, anymore. There is only the desire of others, the whim and fantasy of whoever chooses to call you theirs, for as long as they want you. You are ripe for the plucking. The colors melt away and the sounds fade. The world-beast slips off into the dark. You are standing in a phone box, holding a quarter and the receiver, but you don't know why. You don't know anything. You drop the phone and leave it beeping in protest as you step out of the box and onto the busy street. So many people. So many minds to please. You will become their needs. You will obey their thoughts. You will be whoever they think you are. You drift towards the coffee shop on the corner, shifting through a dozen different selves as you pass through the crowd. Maybe in there you can find someone to play with you. Someone to shape you, just for a little while. It would be so nice to be someone, to be just what they want. You can be that. You can be perfect. The only thing you can't be is yourself.