“How do you feel, Wakim?” asks Anubis.

“I do not know,” he answers, and his voice comes strange and harsh.

Anubis gestures, and the nearest side of the cutting machine becomes a reflecting surface.

“Regard yourself.”

Wakim stares at the shining egg that is his head, at the yellow lenses, his eyes, the gleaming barrel, his chest.

“Men may begin and end in many ways,” says Anubis. “Some may start as machines and gain their humanity slowly. Others may end as machines, losing humanity by pieces as they live. That which is lost may always be regained. That which is gained may always be lost. -What are you, Wakim, a man or a machine?”

“I do not know.”

“Then let me confuse you further.”

Anubis gestures, and Wakim’s arms and legs come loose, fall away. His metal torso clangs against stone, rolls, then lies at the foot of the throne.

“Now you lack mobility,” says Anubis.

He reaches forward with his foot and touches a tiny switch at the back of Wakim’s head.

“Now you lack all senses but hearing.”

“Yes,” answers Wakim.

“Now a connection is being attached to you. You feel nothing, but your head is opened and you are about to become a part of the machine which monitors and maintains this entire world. See it all now!”

“I do,” he replies, as he becomes conscious of every room, corridor, hall and chamber in the always dead never alive world that has never been a world, a world made, not begotten of coalesced starstuff and the fires of creation, but hammered and jointed, riveted and fused insulated and decorated, not into seas and land and air and life, but oils and metals and stone and walls of energy, all hung together within the icy void where no sun shines; and he is aware of distances, stresses, weights, materials, pressures and the secret numbers of the dead. He is not aware of his body, mechanical and disconnected. He knows only the waves of maintenance movement that flow through the House of the Dead. He flows with them and he knows the colorless colors of quantity perception.