Dolly was making it deeper down into the Stray Cat. Creepy place, could make one profound merely by observing its structure. It was a pithole for madmen; if you got to a certain intellectual point and passed the very border you could easliy end up back at the stage of ultimate stupidity, it's a loop. Going deeper down into the Stray Cat is like passing that border. Dolly was aware of that, so she spoke to Ace, just to make sure she hadn't lost her mind.
    "I had a boyfriend once, Conny. He was from New York, could say ‘fuck you asshole’, meaning ‘nice weather today, isn’t it?’"
    "What happened?" Ace asked. Actually Dolly couldn’t hear Ace, this was a one way transmission, but after been sitting on one’s shoulders 24/7 you sort of got to learn one another pretty damn good. Ace needn’t have to say that, Dolly knew.
    "He got geeked, seriously geeked. Conny wasn’t even a geek, but still they geeked him right of the face of this world. Some slick sarariman’s ninjakiller, some gajin-san. As a matter of fact he was Japanese, but in ECIN he was a gajin-san, or as Conny would have put it, a shithead. Plain and simple. A cloned thing he was too, as watching a prefect cell in action. Mindtaking. Murdered Conny-boy with a folded origami-bird. Ever seen anyone kill with that origami-shit, Ace? Ace shook his head. "They fold it, spin it through the air a couple of times, cutting your throat doing it, and then just leave the bird on the kitchen table as a souvenir. You don’t even notice they’ve cut your throat till days later when your head falls off. That’s what happened, we’re walking in the park, a dog jumps at us and Conny loses his head. Literally loses his head. The bastard even left a note inside, like a fucking fortune cookie. ‘Don’t play origami birds. Might lose your head. Hi hi.’" Ace didn’t know what to say. (In which font was it written?)
    When he left Dolly it was night. He figured she needed to take care of her feelings alone. Feelings could be a messy business, and too many chefs most often did a whole worse mess of it. So he left.
    The artificial wind swept madly over his face as he was walking, he thought of Dolly and her geeked boyfriend. A ballerina did things better on her own, and dolly was a ballerina.
    A ballerina.
    The mad wind.
    The wind was never as mad, sitting on Dolly's shoulders. Never as corageous and dumb-risky, never quite so violent. Dolly took the most of the blow and that _was_ a ballerinas job. The wind roared. "Madness," someone said, "it's all madness, Ace. Of course I heared the wind in my sleep, like needles of cold crystal, it carved me. Of course I felt the cold..." The wind was mad tonight. Ren-and-Stimpy-madness, you never grow to old.
    It was midnight.

    He walked for two days and returned to the hotel room the morning 60 hours later. He was becoming an undead, his skeleton shining through the thin skin, like the skeleton of that quasi transparent deep ocean fish. It wouldn't take as much solar wind to knock him off his feet. He thought of Teddy-Cute and of what he was doing. (What was he doing?)
    He couldn't think. His brain was a twisted mandala of thoughts, pictures, and old hentai paintings twisting into surrealistic motions of fractals. He couldn't think.
    He had lost something. The emptiness was there and he knew he had lost something he had to find.
    When he opened the door they where waiting for him. He knew they would and they where. During for an eternity if they'd had to. The elevator had been empty, and moved slower then it usually did. The woman had been the first one to speak. "Curing," she said. "We're going to cure you."
    "Where's Donaldy?"
    Case looked startled. "Donald what?"
    "Oh, we have a funny guy here." It was Mold, speaking. (He was French - they all where - Mold doesn't mean anything in French.) "You hear guys, we have a funny guy here, he wonders who Donaldy is."
    "So, you don't know who Donaldy is, funny guy?" The woman's French accent was an international breeze here at Seaside. It was warm. "Take off your clothes." she had a surveillance camera strapped to her head, filming every action she observed, and perhaps even some of the action she missed. Ace knew that probably was a direct swimswim link to the Curing headquarters. But he couldn't spot any swimswimmer on top of the camera, not even a tiny scuba diver. These guys where good, they where really good. And if they where good enough, perhaps they would succeed in curing him.
    "Why?" Ace asked.
    "You heard that, guys? the funny guy wonders why he should undress. So are we going to tell him? Are we going to tell the funny guy?"
    "Because we're going to cure you," she said and Ace was naked.
    Outside they had all got killed. The curing agents. Teddy-cute didn't like them, said they interfered with the operation, so he killed them, and Ace stood there naked in the street crying to the air, crying for Teddy-Cutes madness. He didn't have to kill them. The Arctic intelligence was insane, he knew since it had killed curing agents.
    "You bastard, you killed them all. You killed them all you mad, bastard." Case ran, lacking a destination, a goal and a meaning. They where all dead. Dead, dead, dead. This was no longer any Ren-and-Stimpy madness, this was the rapier paying a visit.

    The Bun had been a speaking bun. Case saw it from Dolly's shoulders, it's clean shapes, the vanilla on top, the cinammon. It was the Stray Cat Bun, and Teddy-Cute wanted Dolly to eat it.
    It sang three pure tones, pitch falsetto, and Dolly repeated. It was the cream of the duoes, singing into the vast space of the Stray Cat. The very heart and mosg of Seaside.
    Ace was hovering, like in manga picture.
    The bun sang three more tones...
    Dolly answered.
    Teddy-Cute was there, manifesting as a huge teddy bear...
    and the other one
    the one without a name
    it sang
    protecting the bun
    a fierce song of furious rage
    and Ace found it
    the feeling which he used towards New Advancer
    the lost word
    he was screaming as he sang
    repeating the Bun's syllabi
    screaming out his lost rage and passion
    towards the new advancer, the second Teddy-Cute
    his twin brother and alley
    It was playing with him, toying with his feelings, scattering him around the whole interior of the vastness, the eternal vast space.
    A worm of letters began gliding over the virtual screen in Ace's mind.

    WANNAPLA
                    Y
                    SOMEWO
                                 R
                                 MACE?

    He screamed.
    The motion was too hasty, he couldn't see it, it was like the solar wind in his face. He thought he was dead.
    The laughter, the laughter of the dead and their land. The veiled sound. He didn't want to listen.
    Dolly ate the Bun and it was all over.

    When he got back to the hotel he knew it before he opened the door. Dolly was gone. He wondered why ballerinas always worked alone, and why they never stayed in a place longer than to get five men killed. It must have been some sort of ballerina code of honor. She had left a note.

HEY, I CAN'T RECALL WHAT YOUR NAME IS, BUT IT'S OKAY. I GUESS I JUST NEED TO GET REWIRED BEFORE I GET TOTAL ALZEIHMER'S. STAY OUT OF TROUBLE, NOOO!

                               XOXXXXXXXXXXX
                               XXOXXXXXXXXXX
                               XXXOXXXXXXXXX
                               XXXXOXXXXXXXX
                               XXXXXOXXDOLLY

    That's why, he should have had her rewired.
    He bought a new swimswim receiver and began swimming regularly. Got employed at a company and began swimming for money, saving lives of fat ladies singing. (It was over.) Met a drag queen, called Mickey, but he never saw him.
    Ace was blind and he never saw anything again.