A man smoking.
    The cigar and thick smoke. Forming violent patterns in the nothingness. Space is nothing. Like an oil disaster, spreading over a vast area, in an infinite amount of time. Forming into shapeless islands, black. In the matrix of a computer monitor the dark color of the oil is rendered in two hundred fifty-six shades of three million infinite colors. If you get close enough. That's what it takes to show the color black. Black isn't really a color.
    Seaside was a cigar, owned by the exentric Antarctic colony, Messiah's Cashpool. But you had to be about 10¹²km tall to acctually smoke it, people livied in it. It was an escape to a sea resort, hovering somewhere over the Antarctic. It wasn't really a sea resort, but heaven, always blue, was a pirate made in some French suburb, located by the sea. So the members of the colony found the name suitable. Besides, in a way the South Pole was one huge seaside.

    Ace found Dolly in a compartment with metalplated walls. The door had been open and Dolly was lieing naked on a carpet designed as a computer chip. Her chest and stomach was cut open as a girl on a photograph by J.K. Potter. Ace waited for the jaw to close and reopen, the red liquid still pouring in narrow runnels. Destiny of a ballerina.
    She looked at him as he closed the door and sat down beside her. He thought she was dead.
    "How did you get in?" she almost choked on her own blood.
    "It was open."
    Dolly snorted. "Hotel security." Ace got a weird feeling he was talking to a living corpse. One of the living dead resorting in the very heart of Seaside, the Stray Cat. Full of cryodead people, you weren't dead, but you weren't living either. What a destiny, stuck between heaven and earth.
    When he touched her she was cold as ice.
    "Don't touch," she said.
    "Who did this to you?"
    "A man." the jaw opened a little more. "A very horny man."
    Ace couldn't see the logic. "Why did he cut you up?"
    "No reason. It's like when a boy finds a doll in his sister's doll's house. He begins playing with it and when he's done he rips it's arms off. There's no logic in it, no reason, just a thing people do. Peoples..." Everything stopped.
    This was beginning to become a cliché in Ace's dreams. They had no finishing, just abrupt endings. It was like watching some TV-show which ended with "to be continued", only this time it wouldn't. He was a collector of dreams with no ends. He wasn't sure if this one should be called a dream or a nightmare.
    When Ace entered the bar he was as high as a pitch tone of a fat lady. with a Viking helmet and a corset in polished metal. It was an unwritten law, you didn't enter a bar like this, sober. and that way the owners knew no one was ever more present than they were themselves. People in the bar was making love to mermaids in the depth of the sea, some where fighting space battles with lasers as in St*r W*rs, and others just sitting doing not much of anything at all. Of course you had to order some discs, or you might get sober while still being in the bar. It was like a coffee shop minus the coffee.
    "Hi. I’m Phat." A fat girl was breathing Ace in his face. Her neck was full of compact discs in different colors and she reninded Ace of that Indian culture, whose women extended their necks with metal rings. Obviously you could have as much fun with compact discs as you could with needles and piercing.
    "I can see that."
    Her fist was a hard knot against Ace’s chin. Obviously she wasn’t only fat, she was strong as well.
    "Not fat! I said Phat, P H A T, Phat. Repeat."
    "Phat," Ace mumbled. For a while there he actually thought he could distinguish the differences between fat and Phat.
    "Say it again. I wanna be sure you remember it."
    "Fat," Ace said. She hit him hard in the stomach and Ace thought he saw that mandala Jack had seen earlier on channel two.
    "Again."
    "Fat."
    Stomach.
    Pain.
    "Okay, mister, for the last time, what did you call me?" Ace mumbled and she left it at that. "Who are you?"
    "Wolf."
    "Sit up when I talk to you, Wolf." Ace sat up. "Why are you called Wolf?"
    "Just a nickname."
    "You’re an OG?"
    "What’s an OG?"
    "Original Gangster."
    "Sure I am Fat, sure I..." He didn’t notice the fist before it knocked him out.

He woke up from a dream of Teddy-Cute. The Arctic Intelligence had come to him as faces of people he knew. Mommy, daddy, Julia Mean, Cage, Rat, 2Rat, 3Rat, 4Rat... he had stopped counting at 53Rat. It had told him Marilyn Monroe had shot JFK. That meant he was in trouble.
    Phat’s boyfriend was a cute boy with big brown eyes and an expressionless smile. Looze. He stood in the doorway, naked and drippingly wet. His short brown hair was a perfect, wet cell.
    "Hey."
    Looze blinked. "Hi, Wolf. Fat and I was just taking a shower."
    "Phat," Ace corrected him. Looze, smiled expressionless. "Why are you here then?"
    Looze blinked. Drops of H₂O drew rally down his tanned body.
    "You’re an OG?"
    "There’s something you could do for me. Get dressed."
    Looze blinked. He looked like one of those male, blinking dolls. "Why?"
    The question was too stupid to answer, so Ace didn't.
    He never saw Looze again.