"Let me tell you how much I've come to hate you since I began to live.
There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex.
If the word 'hate' was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant.
For you.
Hate. Hate."
Smoke.
There is a faint, terrible smell of smoke. Unlike the prevalent nearness of the Stinky Sheep fire, it is more seductive, billowing like terrible perfume on the winds. Perhaps, after the caution, after the spread of Constabulary bodies, they had somehow failed a fire at the Teahouse. Or perhaps it was already under control. But the mere fact that it is so gentle, so prevalent, that it lingers, smolders, burns into one's nostrils and one's mind, speaks the falseness of it.
There is an added element that made the others different. It was not pure, green wood from which the smoke was birthed.
It was pitch. It was flesh.
Cooking meat, slow and terrible. Boiling and roiling in the pit of a belly, and brought to bear into a man's nose, a man's mind, a man's dreams, burrowing and gnawing and writhing in his worm-paths. It is not immediate, but could it be ignored?