My hands vibrated, with fear or power I couldn't tell. I felt the roots of my hair stand, felt my arms hum with the electric shock of death; I felt my anger leave, but not my passion. It knelt at my feet, eyes upturned to mine, the only gods it needed to know now. I felt the hot trickle of blood from its chest where my knife had sunk into its heart and lung. It gasped, and it's head fell. I let it's body slide from the knife. I awoke.

The augmented dream filtered out of my conciousness. I didn't feel the icebath anymore. With a shocking waterlogging experience, I felt the icebath flush, instantly replaced with excruciatingly scalding-feeling water. I screamed and tried to writhe in pain, but my body was attached to wires, needles, subcutaneous electrical probes, all to maximize muscle slackness: I couldn't even gasp. As the tank drained and my body came back, my sensations relaxed. The water became less scalding, the needles no longer stung, and as I became able to scream, I was able to stop myself, as the drugs settled, and my mind slackened momentarily. The doctors carried me to a metal table, and withdrew from the room, pulling off shoulder-length black rubber gloves and murmoring to themselves in low, ambiently traumatized tones. I saw Tren watching me from the corner as the last flickering darkness left my concious. Tren's form slumped darkly in black techwear against the wall. Tren's face was plugged into a talkbox with one giant corner cable in the center of Tren's face.

The talkbox asked if it had gone well.

The room was dim with flourescent lights that sang softly overhead, as the paper on the operating table crinkled under me. I saw two scalpels left on the workbench and five cables were still wrapped around my shoulder that were starting to tug at my scalp. I didn't move my neck. The needles were still attached.

A nurse came in after a few moments and detached everything for me. My hands felt cold and numb after the icebath. Tren's thin wiry arms helped me get my things and helped me to the car. I waited till we got home to throw up.

After that, I told Tren everything.

How I'd killed it. How I did it in as brutal and sick way I could, again and again, watched it's life seep from it fifteen individual times, and how I finally felt that it really, truly died… and how I was finally at a point where I was accepting of it being gone forever.

The talkbox asked me several times if, in the visions, I had ever died myself.

"No, I didn’t. It never even- no, it never once tried to fight."

The talkbox said that this was an odd sign. As Tren poured tea with Tren's dexterous fingers, the talkbox told of experiences that Tren's mind had gone through in similar augmented dreams. Tren had killed parts of himself that did not want to die; exclusively. The parts of Tren that needed to die, had universally not wanted to. The dream procedures and artificially-assisted vision quest experiments were capable of taking one immediately into the direct presence of aspects of one's self in an internal plane. Killing parts of one's self, and nurturing others, was highly experimental, said the talkbox pinned under a nylon flap at Tren's chest. But never before had an element of one's self allowed itself to die.

"It did die," I said, swirling the tealeaves in the stained pewter mug in the candlelight, as incense sputtered around us. "It is dead." I couldn't make eye-contact as I said, "I can't feel it anymore."

Tren's highly reflective camera glowed electric purple in the light of the flame between us at the table, staring electronic in the center of Tren's face, where Tren's mouth had been. Tren's left hand reached for mine. I took it, somewhat fearfully.

The talkbox spoke. I felt fear and confusion. The talkbox spoke. I finally agreed.

Later, I dreamed that the needles from that night were attached to snakes, and had skewered me and were dragging my body, rendered useless, to the metal operating table in the room with padding on all sides. I woke, drenched in sweat and tears, and threw up again.