> wait
Time passes...
The wheels must turn! The wheels must turn! The mantra performs insistent somersaults through the sunless corners of your awareness. However, someone's toaster is exceedingly happy.

> wait
Time passes...
A quiet chant resolves from the cadenced rumble, monstrous with suppressed intensity: "The wheels must turn. The wheels must turn."

> wait
Time passes...
The chant rises to a throaty drawl, discontent gathering like a congeries of vipers: "The wheeeels muusst turrrrrrrrrrn. The wheeeels muusst burrrrrrrrrrn."

> wait
Time passes...
"The wheeeels muusst burrrrrrrrrrn. The wheeeels muusst burrrrrrrrrrn." You envision a large, mad clock winding itself obsessively to the point of detonating its delicate innards. There is the brief flight of a mechanical bird in the imagined explosion. "The wheeeels muusst burrrrrrrrrrn! The wheeeels muusst BURRRRRRRRRRN--"

> wait
Time passes...
"--BURRRRRRRRRR--" A peremptory announcement booms from the public-address system like majuscule hail-stones: "HAMSTERS SIX, NINE, AND TWENTY-THREE: LEAVE YOUR STATIONS AND AWAIT FURTHER INTRUCTIONS. HAMSTERS SIX, NINE, AND TWENTY-THREE: LEAVE YOUR STATIONS AND AWAIT FURTHER INTRUCTIONS." And the clockwork of inhumanity clatters on like the chitinous components of a mindless insect.

You are Hamster Twenty-Three, however.

> out
You disengage from the hamster wheel. Somewhere, someone's toaster ceases to function.

In the Warehouse
The dimly-lit cavernous interior of the warehouse is a human apiary of activity. Columns of hamster wheels hang from the walls like mad clocks, each one containing a threadbare, travailing soul. Rust-clad catwalks extend to the higher wheels above, twining away to the high-ceilinged reaches of iniquity. Everywhere there is the dizzy movement of the wheels.

"Ah, gawd! What is that?" You perceive the vocal discomfiture as belonging to Master Awning, the physically diminutive yet enormously cruel supervisor of this Cage, and collapse immediately to the floor in cringing submission. Black butterflies flutter in your stomach. "Somebody throw cold water on them! Please make them stop!"

You relax. The confrontation seems to be with someone else. You struggle to your feet, turn to face the disturbance. A habitually troublesome pair of young girls is engaged in an antic of demonstrative affection, despite the inevitable wrath of Master Awning. Excited hollers from the wheels punctuate the underlying thrum of machinery as he hovers menacingly over the amorous couple.

"That is it, Six and Nine," Master Awning says. The girls are hosed down and netted, reduced to a thrashing knot of bespattered limbs and concentration-scattering squeals. A collective sigh of disappointment resonates from the wheels as the pair is hauled away like indignant fish by the Master and several armor-clad subordinates. Fat puddles of water begin to meander past your feet in rust-tainted rivulets.

> wait
Time passes... Something wet nudges against your foot, and you immediately contemplate the possibility of facing the wretched corpse of a water-trampled rodent. Or perhaps it's only wounded.

> get something
You take the small book.

> read book
Shivers trickle up your spine like chilled mercury as you recognize the Book of Servos, also known as the Slaves' Bible. It looks like a small coffin in your hands, the resting place of an aborted fetus, with the familiar Sign of Slaves stamped on the front. You blink, and abruptly find yourself reading a random passage:

And the devil's countenance was that of
a Devil of Operose, a Mover of infernal
machines that half-devoured the souls of
men, leaving the uneaten half to bemoan
the horror of such a fate--

The book is swatted from your hands, sending it spinning into the darkness. You wish to protest, but cold silence has settled in your throat. Vertigo threatens to overwhelm you. Master Awning drifts into your field of vision like a manikin vulture.

"Ah, little one," he says innocuously, although his voice seems to swim ungracefully through gravel. You notice his white-knuckled grip upon a pair of oversized hedge-clippers, its rusty grin a dull glint against variegated gloom. He frowns at your rag-clad form, aims uncertain glances at your crotch and chest several times, looking like a spectator at a vertically orientated tennis match. "With all those rags, I don't know where to start." His eyes become glazed with the mysterious dilemma.

> wait
Time passes...
A brief rumble shakes the floor of the warehouse. Its vibration places an ache behind your eyes.

> wait
Time passes...
Your teeth chatter as a second rumble shakes the floor of the warehouse. "What's the matter?" Master Awning demands. "You've recieved all your inoculations, haven't you?"

> wait
Time passes...
Another rumble. Master Awning glares at you incredulously.
"What the hell was that? That sound doesn't belong here."

> wait
Time passes... The Master's eyes are spinning Masson disks as he disappears down a sudden rent in the floor. The warehouse is plunged into a seismic fury that has you reeling away like a feather caught in a strong wind. Fat, hot stones rain upward to smite the laboring clamjamfry above. Screams of the dying and defecating fill your ears. Tendrils of smoke lick at your eyes. The darkness is there, a nebulous something resembling an aggregate of black butterflies....
Time passes...

Time passes...

Time passes...
The wet rasp of countless butterflies engaged in copulative acts issues from the darkness.

Time passes...
Unconsciousness finally decides to flee from your mind like an unwelcomed specter....
In the Rubble
Calloused and wretchedly besmirched, you stand in a smoke-laced caldera of shattered concrete and twisted steel. Orange light hovers over a rent in the center, filling the small space with its placating glow. Silence hangs in the dust-mottled air like a tapestry of old cobwebs. A Devil of Operose surveys the area with a close eye, but seems entirely unconcerned with the damage.

> wait
Time passes...
The Devil's voice is like tarnished silverware, locked away in some dark cupboard. "Sometimes you just have to start over."

> wait
Time passes...
The Devil pokes around in the rubble. "Nope," he giggles, "no worms here." Falling pebbles disturb the silence like little teeth.

> wait
Time passes...
The Devil reaches back to dislodge a pair of oversized hedge-clippers from his spine. "Ah, what is this?" he snarls. The rusty grin of the offending tool clatters at your feet.

> get tool
You take the hedge-clippers. Abruptly, your behooved friend levitates into the darkness above, his voice like ice shards in your ears: "I shall now be off, little one." A faint sussuration of gravity-bound pebbles puncuates his departure.

> d
You scramble down the orange, dusty throat of the rent.

Below the Warehouse
Orange light envelops this place like a thick cumulus. The ground is composed of an orange, spongy material, from which emerge pseudopods of humidity that coil unpleasantly in your lungs. You have the distinct impression of standing in a strange swamp. A large tooth of concrete stands as an anomalous obelisk in this orange barrenness, its blunted top about a meter below a rent in the ceiling. A strange apparatus like a large, rectangular harp glints near the base of the tooth.

> cut string 23
"That is it, Twenty-Three."

In the Warehouse
The dimly-lit cavernous interior of the warehouse is a human apiary of activity. Columns of hamster wheels hang from the walls like mad clocks, each one containing a threadbare, travailing soul. Rust-clad catwalks extend to the higher wheels above, twining away to the high-ceilinged reaches of iniquity. Everywhere there is the dizzy movement of the wheels.

Master Awning, a grotesque lump of a manikin, fiddles nervously with his bloodied hedge-clippers. "Not too responsive," he mutters.

Murmurs of "psychomechanical fatigue" drift amid the man-shadows as you are carried away to a side chamber. As your eyes adjust to the harsh light of the vaulted space, your attention is riveted to a structure of utter magnificence. You focus on its glistening form, the geometric perfection. It is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen; it is all that matters now.

"There's your gilded cage."

Your gilded cage awaits you. You are ushered quickly through the narrow door in its side. Enthralled by such perfection, you care little about the vipers that share the cage with you.
Remember thy life is in running water,
and not in still water....

- ABDUL ALHAZRED,
Necronomicon