During the flight I am administered a powerful sedative. I try to hold consciousness but cannot, and fall into a deep, trapped sleep. There are no dreams, and an indefinite period of time passes. When I awaken I am free of the ropes and find myself lying on a table surrounded by lights and equipment. I swing my eyes from side to side and see that the others are standing around me. Nala. One hundred ninety-nine. The rest of them. They see that I am conscious and Nala leans over to ask me how I feel. I say that I feel strong, which is true, and she nods blankly and moves away, no longer interested. I struggle to a standing posture and look around me. We are in a large room that is very bright and crowded with the polished steel facings of machines, on and among which are sitting the others in various positions, looking at nothing. They do not turn toward me. “What is this?” I say. I do not recognize the room. “What is going on? Where have they put us? What has happened to us? Are we in an operating room? A hospital? Are we being proc­essed? Why do they treat us like this?” Nala shakes her head and looks at me. She has aged; her face is ravaged in a complex way. “You fool,” she says to me, and this timefool is not a caress but a statement. “Don’t you understand yet? Don’t you see? Don’t you know?” And then, only then and at long last, understanding breaks over me like a wave and I see. I understand. I know. I must, for the next few moments, react hysterically. Finally I stop. I am lean­ing against one of the walls retching. Nala stands by me. She leans over me. She rests a hand on my neck. “That’s better,” she says. “That’s better, that’s better.” Her fin­gers move in my hair, tenderly, tenderly, and I could immerse myself in her forever for comfort. But there is no immersion for creatures such as us. “They do it to us,” she says. “They have to do it to us. They fill us up and send us out, and when we have given all we know, we have to return, to have it done to us again, and again, each time journeying out to another world. That is our function. We are laborers and that is our skill. It is nothing personal. It is the hierarchy. It is the way things are done. Once you feel this, the pain will go away.” “Yes,” I say, “yes, yes,” remembering, remembering it all. And yet even as I remember, I know that even these memories can never be trusted, any more than I can trust my memories of the enclosure on Earth, and our escape, and our journey home. I am trapped inside my own skull, just as much as I was trapped in the enclosure on Earth, and just as I will be trapped again in the next enclosure somewhere else, and the one after that, and after that, and I will never reallyknow . All I will ever know is the information with which they fill me, and which I take with me and discharge wherever and whenever I am told to do so. That information is my only reality, and there never was and never can be an “escape.” This account I have written is an impression, a conception, nothing more. And so I will myself, as I have a hundred times before, to accept all of this, as my kind must accept it. It is the hierarchy, it is the way things are done. Acceptance tears through me like a flame and leaves me rendered on the floor.