“In a nutshell: that single shot rendered me into my component symbols, or this is how I have been led to understand that it works. The sentences, the words that make up my personae were broken down into their constituent parts. This doesn’t describe the experience from my perspective, of course. From my perspective the process manifested like this: I found myselves transmigrated to an obscure limbo, where I became half of a composite hermaphrodite which contained both myself and my assassin in roughly equal parts...the effect of the ascii-izer device, which I was shot with, can often take decades, sometimes even centuries to recover from. One authority suggests that the victim is critically re-evaluated, reinvented even, in the hope of finding new relevance in the contemporary landscape. The sore point here is that it seems to have taken an unusually long time for my critical reprieve to take place.”

Inside his recollection Soma Jones approaches Piedad, the harbour and the Hotel Dashanka, through ever decreasing arcs of arrival. Each stage of the journey interlocks more deeply until the course is inevitable and at last the lens of the ocean, the carved ogive of the harbour, and the nested arches turn and turn the facets of the Hotel Dashanka. First one view and then another. It refuses the simplicity of right angles or Euclidean solids. It resembles the Fibonacci coil of a sea shell cast onto the sands, awaiting a collector or perhaps a new occupant. The inevitability of the mechanism is airbrushed by the tides of self-fulfilling myth: Soma Jones is here because Soma Jones has come here, and therefore Soma Jones must be here and nowhere else.