~ The evidence was everywhere; across the desert, caked in loam, lodged in plants, sunk to the bottom of lakes, and there in the cultural record too; the sudden vanishings of art works, changes in architecture and agriculture. There were a few hidden records - books, photographs, sound recordings, indices, which contradicted the re-written histories - but they still didn’t directly explain why so many people, so many peoples seemed to vanish so suddenly, without any sign of assimilation.

What are you talking about? (What was this in his head?)

~ You would not believe what I am, commandant, but what I am talking about is a thing called genocide, and the proof thereof.

We did what had to be done!

~ Thank you, we’ve just been through all that. Your self-justifications have been noted.

I believed in what I did!

~ I know. You had the residual decency to question it occasionally, but in the end you did indeed believe in what you were doing. That is not an excuse, but it is a point.

Who are you? What gives you the right to crawl inside my brains?

~ My name would be something like Grey Area in your language. What gives me the right to crawl inside your brains, as you put it, is the same thing that gave you the right to do what you did to those you murdered; power. Superior power. Vastly superior power, in my case. However, I have been called away and I have to leave you now, but I shall return in a few months and I’ll be continuing my investigations then. There are still enough of you left to construct a more . . . triangulated case.

What? he thought, trying to open his eyes.

~ Commandant, there is nothing worse I can wish upon you than to be what you already are, but you might care to reflect upon this while I’m gone:

Instantly, he was back in the dream.

He fell through the bed, the single ice-white sheet tore beneath him and tumbled him into a bottomless tank of blood; he fell down through it to light, and the desert, and the rail line through the sands; he fell into one of the trains, into one of the trucks and was there with his broken leg amongst the stinking dead and the moaning living, jammed in between the excrement-covered bodies with the weeping sores and the buzz of the flies and the white-hot rage of the thirst inside him.

He died in the cattle truck, after an infinity of agony. There was time for the briefest of glimpses of his room in the retirement complex. Even in his still-shocked, pain-maddened state he had the time and the presence of mind to think that while it felt as though a day at least must have passed while he had been submerged in the torture-dream nevertheless everything in the bedroom looked just as it had earlier. Then he was dragged under again.