Out in the daylight of morning he stands barefoot. White baggy trousers- casual wear. A grey loose top hangs off him as he shifts into another contrived stance. The right foot is slightly forward from the left. The feet are fractionally wider than shoulder width apart, toes turned in. His right forearm crosses slowly across his body, fist slowly twisting so that his knuckles face outwards. Inhaling loud, long and drawn. With left arm pulled back, fist on hip, he tensely pushes out his left in a punch; right outer block being withdrawn back to right hip. He lets out breath slowly as before. Dexter watches from a window above Walker, her attention captivated with these movements: blocks and strikes to imaginary attackers; predetermiried moves to practice karate.

Halfway through he suddenly switches into fast movements. Switching to the right. Then the left. Then forward once more. Striking. Turning to opponents behind. A kick here and there. Repeating sequences. Then all over. Slowly drawing back and tensing down onto a movement evidently blocking his groin area, then to where he originally started.
*
She eats breakfast. He sits at the end of the table drinking some thick solution. He still sweats from training that morning. Observing her, she starts to feel uneasy as he stares.

"What was that you were doing this morning?"

"Didn't your research reveal anything about martial arts training Ms. Dexter?"

"I recognized that it was a.....kata?"

"Yes."

"Though I haven't seen that one before I must admit. I don't recall it at all," she continues to eat, ignoring his glare.

"I do hope you enjoy the food. The stores haven't been called upon to provide a meal like that for some time, " Cutter takes a drink of fluid.

"What is the purpose of training like that? I read that kata had become passe in karate circles. People tend to go more for actually practicing with a partner. Do you hold with this?"

"Ms. Dexter...you haven't got your recorder on."

"I merely asked."

"Karate should involve three fundamentals:- kata, basics and free sparring. Anything else is an additional bonus."

The reporter pushes her plate away, finished.

Walker leaves the room without comment to her, heading towards where they have been sat for the last few days, he moves with a brisk pace and flowing form- even in the act of walking. She watches him for a while. Checking the battery on her recorder, slipping in a new disk.

The reporter gets up and follows him down the corridor.

Cutter stands naked with his back to her. He changes into fresh clothes. Toweling himself dry from water. His garments are held over the left arm of an android. A bowl of water and soap suds sound on the hard floor. Dexter wishes to leave the room embarrassed, yet, as she examines his body more she sees a multitude of scars latticed across muscles.

He turns to her, unbothered by his nakedness.

"Sorry..I..er..didn't realize," she bungles over her words.

"You must forgive me," Walker dresses more quickly for her benefit, "I have been alone so long that to act with manners toward human ladies has escaped me. I assure you that my intentions were not to seduce you in some unsubtle way. As I have mentioned I am not human."

She crosses the room.

"Leave No. 23," the android by his side exits with bowl, towel, soap and dirty laundry.

"Allow me to show you what I really am…"

With habitual ease he removes his contact lenses. Dexter's whole body goes into surprised, strangely, delighted shock.

Walker has no pupils, no iris.- clear white. She draws closer. A faint pink outline marks in a sketch type line where the pupil and iris circle shapes were. They move as normal eyes would move, looking, flicking actions.

"Are you blind?" The reporter asks stupidly, dropping her recorder on the floor.

It breaks, splintering in tough plastic spread.

"No."

Mary Dexter draws back, feeling that fear once more, the one she felt when first opening her eyes to him after the crash. It happened confused, a mish-mash of panic. Last thing she remembers: aborting ship, only survivor; rest of crew dead. Being awoken from chaos by strange young/old man..Walker...feeling fear, like now.

He picks up the pieces.

"J-just..put your contact lenses back in.." Dexter backs off as he tries to hand her the pieces.

He clasps the pieces of her recorder together in his hands.

"I'll repair it for you."

He leaves the room.

The room seems to spin with fear, although Walker has gone. She hears his footsteps, gentle, off down the corridor. The journalist takes a deep breath in. 'Must control myself, she thinks, 'if he were going to kill me, he would have done it by now. Alternatively, maybe he is playing some great psychological game. Nevertheless, he doesn't seem to give a shit. Moreover, why is he telling me all these things? I don't buy any of it. There must be something inside him, otherwise he would just clam up- sit silent like some serial killer.'

She goes in the direction of where Walker disappeared. No sign. No androids either. Curiosity naturally springs forth and overrides her fear. She keeps walking. Following down corridor. Turning to the right with it. Down a great, long, spiral, staircase. Darkness looming in around the smoothed walls, getting colder as she keeps going down. No light, pitch-blackness. Dexter begins to worry. Her investigative side decides to push on, regardless.

Slowly now, her feet touch each step tentatively as the staircase goes on. 'I must remain cool. Don't lose it. Keep on going. Keep-'

"Keep calm and don' t talk aloud to yourself Mary, " she says to herself.

Dexter slips over as the steps beneath her cease. A smooth, shiny surface makes her lose her footing and she slides down a steep gradient of a helter-skelter type ride through pitch blackness.

She smells a mustiness, it is dark and has not been used or inhabited by a person for a long while as light suddenly streams into her vision. The reporter lands on some hard surface- BUMP!

"Oww! Shit!"

Her bottom complains in numb pain, right up her torso as the hard paving stones (metre squares) cushion her fall. The woman finds her self in some kind of courtyard; like in a gloomy, errie castle situation. Daylight leaks in from high above. The walls surrounding her are cobbled, aged surface in texture. Pentagon shape blandness not threatening at all. No windows, walls featureless except for a door opposite to where she is sat. Dexter picks herself up and crosses over to the next logical step of her unguided tour.

"Shit!"

The door does not open. Locked.

Behind her is either going to be impossible or next too impossible to clamber up. To her horror, the way behind has been sealed. No archway from whence she came. The five walls stare in on her and pangs of panic clamber up in her like some food-poisoned retch.

"For Christ's sake!"
*
"SUBJECT WITHIN WEST-WING COURTYARD."

Walker pauses from repairing Dexter's recorder. Within the curved room, overlooking same view as any other in castle, sunshine illuminates the scene like a church. There's one table. A box of tools. A deep blue rectangle moulds itself out from the wall, as its voice sounds small, rebounded back quick.

Cutter would appear to be puzzled. He would appear to be intrigued at least. To show some concern as to how and why the young woman happened to chance on that section of the castle. Nothing. Devoid of emotion, he drinks in the information as circumspect. He returns to his job at hand, "contained?"

"CONTAINED," the deepened automatic voice configuration speaks at him awaiting his next long, arduous response, unmoved to rush.

"I think it is time to pay the young woman's curiosity with a little truth. Guide her to the vaults."
*
"YEERAGH!!!"

The whole courtyard floor tumbles away from underneath Dexter's feet as she sees sunlight above snap out of view. A horrid feeling of coming down through empty blackness fills her as she screams again.

Something soft absorbs her fall, from several feet: having taken a good minute or two to fall into an expanse, cold air rushing past, the descent slows gradual as if she has landed upon some massive stuntman air bag. Like in slow motion, the force pressing her down, body weight, plus gravity, plus speed, met with cushioned resistance, all rapidly propel her back up, canvas type material holding her small body. She comes back down. Then up once more as the waterbed motion slows.

Light begins to slowly glow around her. At the same time, the giant pillow deflates. Light grows from a dull, dirty orange becoming yellow, then more intense in hue, as the safety device which broke her fall gradually rests on a stone floor. The light comes from a corner of a room, a bare empty room. A spotlight of some sort.

Dexter stares down at her feet in horror to discover the cushion or inflatable is in fact a living organism, shrinking back into the floor; a large plastic moulded blob, dark blue in colour and rapidly moving like it were liquid.

A door opens behind her.

The reporter turns around, in apprehension. Nothing there. With great caution, she approaches. A noise like a choir begins to sing off somewhere in the distance. The same piece of choral music that Walker played to her before, but it is mixed in with crickets; an ancient insect now used as a sound effect in holiday resorts such as on Mars. It's all very dramatic. She hears sea waves washing against a rocky shore.

Wondering down a much narrower corridor than those above. She still hears the sounds that seem so real, of course, they can't possibly be: the sounds are out of place, like her.

Through an alcove, Dexter looks out expecting to see familiar desert floor. Instead- waves crashing against a cliff face way below. Even the scent of sea brings up brightly to her nostrils.

The woman runs through a door at end, desperate to get away from obvious hallucinatory tricks. The door cracks and whispers itself around, made of paper.

Castle once more. Coldness and dankness relocates her to knowing that she is some distance below ground level. Thousands of crickets crawl across the surface of a paved floor. "Shit!". Their noise cuts in abruptly. Then cuts out. A multitude of insects leap through a door to the right of her in a successive wave of tiny bodies.

She takes a door on her left. Confused. Somewhat bewildered.

"Al'! Al'.....don't go! Please!" A voice pleads, it isn't hers.

Into yet another long narrow corridor, this time though, it is so narrow Dexter can just squeeze down it. A woman's voice speaks again. Faintly to the left of her. Peeking down out of an alcove: a city street from Earth's past bustles before her view. Nobody pays any attention to the reporter as she looks out. "Oh...my.....God!". A young woman, roughly the same age as Dexter thirty-five, thirty-six, stares straight at the reporter, "please! Where has he gone?"

"Oh my God!" Mary repeats in surprise, the hallucination so real, the illusion interacts with fluid macabre precision.

The woman on the street weeps, underneath where Dexter observes from. "Where is he? Al'? Have you seen him? Alan Walker? He's an old friend of mine…"
*
Walker finishes repair work on woman's recording device. He closes his eyes sharply as though a needle has been stuck in a voodoo doll. He grasps his stomach area.

"Computer! Two meal shakes immediately."

From a hidden part of the table, a dumb waiter slides up before him. In it two thick, white, tasteless drinks slop in large, quart mugs.

Cutter quickly grabs them and drinks hurriedly, chewing the thickness of viscous liquid.

He belches loudly after finishing them off. He rubs his forehead as though suffering some great headache. Even if he did have some inkling of feeling, his brain is beginning to shut down and fatigue weighs heavier and heavier with each passing second.

"Compu..ter....take care of...wom..."

He slumps forward in his seat, spreading tools and mugs across floor in an abrasive clangorous crash. The deep blue rectangle forms out of the wall. It sends a message to androids 14 and 36, being the nearest operational machines. Outside the windows clouds and elemental disturbances rush across the once calm desert. Chaos instigates. Walker takes one great long breath in and releases one, great, exhalation. Then silence, his body totally relaxed with enforced slumber.
*
Dexter runs. Down the corridor, shoulders painfully bumping sides, grazing her flesh.

Through one door. Across a hexagonal courtyard. The other side of it, no longer any bright sunshine but foul, pelting rain, like a monsoon, coming down in lashing waves.

Thin corners once back inside, right then left. Far from pleading, distraught woman.

Through yet another door. Onto a courtyard which booms thunder and lightning above her as bad weather roars.

It all goes on in a flurry. Running. Out of breath, she finally comes to an iron door. Before her, in the middle of the door a large dial with switches reaching off it, appearing as though not to have been used for some time. Cobwebs cling and wrap around the edges of the iron construction. She wonders how real this door may be. Dexter reaches out and feels the soft clinging vulgarity of the webs. It crosses her mind that there may be some spiders on his world- that even he doesn't know about. A chill runs up her spine.

Suddenly the dial before Dexter springs into life. Red digits come up into a long, thin display screen in the centre of the dial. Whatever kind of security door it is, it certainly isn't from her time. The lock looks completely ineffective to stop any intrusive force. A good blast from a standard ladies' Magnum 57 could decimate the whole door in a split second.

Numbers flash and roll through several combinations until they reach a locked code. The central dial releases air encased for years and years, blowing dust all over her. A latch somewhere inside groans noisily as it shifts inactivity. The iron door wedges open slightly as it unlocks.

Dexter attempts to move it.

It doesn't budge.

An android appears beside her, from an entrance that wasn't there before to the right of the reporter, "allow me Ms. Dexter." The android talks to her in an electronic way, but it certainly sounds like there is a faint hint of her own voice. Before she can question it, the robot swings the door open with ease.

"I am No. 27. Here to aid you in your search. Shall we enter?"
*
No. 14 and No. 36 hook an arm each under the slumped form of Cutter. He is in a complete unconscious state, resembling a coma. He cannot register anything.

They lift him with ease, no worries about injuring him through extensive programming. They haul his body from the room, down hallway, up to a small room several floors parallel to where he was being interviewed by Dexter. With each android, a small computer carries reflex actions within it. Also hooked into the main computer for more complex orders.

No. 36 and No. 14 enter room with Walker. The room is empty but for a large double bed, without sheets of any kind. No. 14 lets go of his arm and comes around, picking up feet end. In an unceremonious movement, they sling him onto the bed. A long rectilinear window lets in light from outside. Abruptly the storm has stopped and the calm, nice-dayness comes back, sharp.

The two androids seem to be observing the view. Then they leave by the only exit, the door through which they entered. No. 36 and No. 14 stand guard outside the door.

The room remains quiet. Briefly, for an instant of a few seconds, the long blueness of the computer moulds out of a wall above Walker's supine figure. It appears to watch him. It retracts.