Black slithering ooze under the skin, proptosis gestating, hybernating doom. Wars of injection rise up from under the sands, bees bred under clicking slats released like a twenty one gun salute. Enter the white surface cavern concealed where love hovers frozen, intubated. Release her and fight another day.

"Five years together, Scully. How many times have I been wrong? Never!"

Certainty, like an arrow, speeds forward into walls. Confusion, that spiked-drink paralysis, does the same. Stumbling blind-folded through the flooded basement of secrets, you must step carefully but never stop. Stay calm, senses open; wait patiently for the vouchsafing signal. Believe, and in believing, find doubt.

"What I don't want to see is the Bills winning a Super Bowl. As long as I'm alive that doesn't happen."

At benthic depths, a woman hides, working pelagic intrigues from the bottom upward and then back down, twisting memory and thought in on itself until there is nothing. Her world spans centuries, a lake at midnight, the littoral zone a chalk outline of a murder mystery. So tired, annihilated, empty-handed, she cannot go on. There is only one conclusion to draw, she says, there is no truth out there.

"What if, during their memory experiments, Aquarius stumbled onto a mind-control substance?"

Floating adrift on tattered raft, surfacing the blue-into-black abyss, eyes scan nightmare heavens, hoping for a sign. In the distance, the galley awaits. Behind, the colony. Pulled along an incomprehensible current towards the unknown, hands clasp tight into prayer. I want to believe.

"The men you've been seeking are the progeny of two original visitors, clones who have been attempting to establish a colony here since the late 1940s."

The cartoon world of No Girl sprawls rotten, cable-ridden among dislodged monuments, a landscape of fouled water and lonely souls. Here a mutant death machine towers over young lovers, jealous and drowning, pulled by the riptide of its broken heart into the trench of darkest despair. The hope of this world can only be found in a forsaken union and in the blessed release of fire.

"The supermen fight and die and return in a meaningless shadowplay because we make them do it."

Shakespeare is not the source of the phrase "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely." But don't tell that to Bill Jemas. Walk silently through the halls. Keep your head down. Don't talk back. Keep your job. Keep your job. Keep your job. The rains will come. Just wait. And don't talk back.

"...and where would we be without a laugh?"

The lies travel from big fight to big fight, hiding right before our very eyes. Is he or isn't he? Can she or can't she? Do they or do they not? Watch carefully. Ask yourself: where is the ball? Something dangerous is being made safe again. Profitable. A Dark Knight is made to truly return.

"Car? That's a relic!"

Hallway audio like a fun house welcomes us to Renaissance Station. Here they were seeking solutions to the problems of peace and war. 3D printed rape crabs. Black Lovecraftian goo. What more would mankind need to ascend? Dig, horrors, dig, and die for the Company.

"Get away from her, you bitch."