From whence did the Lord High Charlies come from? From without or within, it does not matter now. They appeared, and with them order.

A man walks down an alley without walls, only limits; though he can't see past them. At the end is a plane upon which shadowy figures play with a rubbery sphere, not because they want to, but because the man knows it must be so. His path is littered with bloodied napkins, and just as he knows how the figures must be, he knows there is a door next to him.

A room filled with statues of authority, at one point used for waste removal; now it serves as a crypt for the napkin-lord, a sight-without-sight too wretched for the man to describe. He flees, bringing with him the existence of that alley; the ones who filled the wasted crypt (or cryptic waste, he can't remember which) fade gently into memory. A street, crowded with most-melted effigies, empty shells who serve as actors for the man's dread play.

Slowly they become different, their half-remembered features becoming so vividly Oriental. Agents of the Enemy come to subvert his subconscious ("subvert a star? impossible!" cries the man) through an indoctrination undocumented within the pages of his living conscious, though this mysterious "knowledge" speaks of unspeakable horrors should they catch him. To catch - invasion is not the same. The man is aware that they are everywhere, and unstoppable, and being unstoppable are not able to catch him in the normal sense, but only surround him.

Comfortable in this oh-so-sound reasoning, the man sets off to explore; the invaders seem to pay no heed of him, and why should they? It is not through individual acts that a mind is subverted. An eye and a brain stare out at him morosely from inside a glass box; a reproduction system built by his friend in a failed attempt to make knowledge an element, to be used in reactions for ever-taller tales. He meets the eye of the brain (or the brain guides the eye to meet his nose; he knows that his nose is but a single cent of the whole sensory dollar of his face) and is overtaken by an overwhelming urge to dive into the box and let it reproduce him, though in reproduction (the man thinks) knowledge would be lost, and it would be so much easier for those invaders to invade the ground not yet invaded (indeed?).

Confused, he builds a train station on the empty side of the street and boards one of its many transport cubes. They are older than he remembered (remembered, not knew that they were new) and more terrifying, and he flies off into many pieces, all so vulnerable to the efforts of the Enemy (bomb the Heathen Dog!), but awakens just in time. "Quickly, reset the memory-buffer!" says his clock, so he does, and back into Enemy territory. The familiar NEEDLE in the distance reminds him of a pet who once comforted his leg while it healed from a particularly nasty scuffle with a lavatory, and as he watches it bends into odd shapes that reflect the tide of battle.

They take their weapons in hand, and march on through the synapses of that mind-within-mind; and he watches, calmly.