“Baby, I’m here for you.”

“And why am I here?”

“You are here because I need you. Our world needs you.”

Dharma whispered into my subconscious. “What is the meaning of life, Robert? What is this crazy world of ours all about?”

“That’s just it, Dharma. None of this is real, it’s all an illusion. It’s like each of us is in our own Omega dream.”

“Let me share your dream.” Andria peeled off the wet fabric.

WARNING: TESTOSTERONE LEVELS DROPPING.

I backed away, my feet sticking in the muddy bottom.

ABE, this isn’t real. Reboot my senses.

WARNING: TO REBOOT THE FIVE SENSES WOULD REQUIRE STOPPING ROBERT EISENBRAUN’S HEART.

Andria reached for me—

Do it … now!

And suddenly I couldn’t breathe.

Collapsing to my knees, I looked up. The sky was spinning and the cephalopods were falling from the tree like leaves—Andria’s flesh fragmenting into cellular dust before everything went black, adrift in silence.

Life is but a dream …

Chapter 32

32

Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.

—ADOLF HITLER

BREATHE.

I took a breath as commanded, and then another, the aching organ pounding in my chest beating stronger with each inhalation. Seconds later sound returned to my brain, followed by the scent of a strong disinfectant, which prompted me to open my eyes.

The bizarre hummingbird-like creature fluttering above my neck had a hypodermic needle for a beak and a tiny cyclops lens for eyes. The left side of my chest hurt where it had injected the shot of adrenaline directly into my heart—a medical treatment that was wearing on me.

Convinced I was alive, the battery-powered version of Tinker Bell flew away.

I was back in GOLEM’s sphere, strapped to the same surgical table. Then again, to say, I was back was to infer that I had left, and suddenly I wasn’t so sure. It was very possible that everything that had transpired after my threat to GOLEM to “internally sterilize my own sperm” could have been artificially implanted memory—from the computer’s mind game with the dead Andria clone to my awakening on the Hunter-Transport … and everything that followed my passage through the gates of the cephaloped death camp.

All one glorious mind-fuck.

Lifting my head, I looked around. My eyes widened at the transformation within the spherical chamber, my bio-chip translating all I was witnessing.