I wake up in a guest bedroom with a huge sleep boner. Someone's talking to me. A thin blonde is making her goodbyes, her boyfriend standing quiet next to her. I get up to walk them to the door -- I don't know whose house this is. I remember playing with someone's toddler the night before, that stupid airplane game kids seem to love, hoping he won't vomit on me. One of those wierd toddlers that looks like a perfectly proportioned tiny adult.

The blonde is kissing me or doing something else that's embarrassing everybody. We get to the door, they walk out, and the boyfriend isn't interested in shaking my hand. Go figure. My hard-on is painful.

I shut the door. In the room next to me, the girlfriend's sister sleeps curled up on a hope chest. In the corner, the moonlight beyond the wall exposes a cat, satisfied and fullbellied from warfare, laying down on the other side of a perfect cartoon mousehole, big as any in a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

Things have changed since I was here last.

Down the hall. Adjoining room. Here's where everyone crashed last night, my girlfriend and some friends, some kind of experimental slumber party where everyone perfected and memorized codes before falling asleep. Someone's on the floor and I crawl under the blanket, put my head down.

I open my eyes and wish I hadn't.

Outside the supports of the exposed wall there is a horde of troll-things waiting, powerful brown misshapen things the color of coffee with too much cream poured out on the ground. They move to enter the room through the wall. Through the milling grotesque shapes I see the most powerful of these troll-things, their champion, standing, watching me with suspicion. I'm pretending to be asleep. His body is swayed like an S, his shoulders and torso curved like the sloppy fingerpainting of a child, his left arm twice as thick and long as his right, gripping a massive mace with a bronzed sphere at one end bigger than a basketball and ringed in cruel-looking debris I can't quite focus my eyes on.

The champion enters the room, dragging his monstrous mace on the ground. Should I keep pretending to be asleep? I almost laugh out loud and just before I do, in my mind's eye, I see the configuration file I'd been perfecting all week. One stanza leaps out at me and I know if I laugh I'll die. It's not their fault. These things are too embarassed of their bodies to hear laughter. He nears my head. I imagine feeling that mace crash through my legs and the aftermath. I hold still.

The creatures leave the room, moving throughout the house. Someone wakes up, and someone else, discussing this in low tones. Suddenly some of the trolls are back, with officious-looking humans who are interviewing my friends like some kind of census. "Name. Origin. Code."

Someone drags me to my feet.

I'm looking at a black man, his weathered face serene. "I'm the Pocketsmasher," he says. Am I supposed to have a descriptive label here? I can't think of any. "Daemian."

He writes this down. "In the last world, I was a thief." He pulls out an old ziploc bag full of circuitry. "I'd rob people and sell whatever I found in their pockets. Like this."

The old plastic bag he's holding out is full of ancient RAM chips, and I tell him so. "Who's going to buy stuff this old? It's got no practical use, except maybe in some kind of micro-budget low-power environment... like something NASA would do."

"Exactly."

"I don't think NASA is in the habit of buying their RAM from people like you and me." Weathered black Pocketsmasher in the clothes of the homeless, me in my day-glo frightwig and combat boots. I look at Meta and we laugh. It feels like a con, but that's impossible here, where pretense is stripped away as a matter of course.

The Pocketsmasher puts down his clipboard and grips my shoulder. "Close your eyes and hit yourself on the forehead with the palm of your hand. Then when you open your eyes, put your hand over your belly and wave your other hand over yourself to apologize for your body being the way it is."

I shut my eyes, bring the heel of my palm against my head, and suddenly I'm looking out his black eyes, huddled against a city wall, pretending to be broken-legged, pretending to beg from rich-looking passersby, knifehand hidden inside my shabby coat.