A process cannot be understood by stopping it

[sadtranslation]

Lloyd Patterson needed no special invitation to come into the small room in front of him. He always repeated that he was the most successful of all his classmates - Jordan hadn't jumped higher then a simple clerk, Clark joined some insipid political movement and was ordering other fools on the streets, Briain Crumpst was maybe the only one redeemable, but he was a failure anyway with his wife that slept with every officer in Leeds garrison while Brian nursed his greenhorns. Right, many of those that he called friends when they met and those who he patted on the back were already married, with children and cats, and dogs and all the other hassle, became fat and crumpsy, were sitting in front of holoscreens and watching soccer in eveninings with a can of beer and a wife in fleecy robes.

Lloyd Patterson wasn't like them. He wasn't breeding poverty, he wasn't wasting his life on those petty bourgeois enjoyments, he wasn't sitting oh his sitzfleisch waiting for manna from heaven. Lloyd was the most successful of all his classmates; he was also the most successful of those folks from University and from district he lived in for twenty seven years before moving to corporate flat in Calderdale on 150th floor, far away from noise and fuss and the dust that clogged up his nostrils and made his eyes watering. That was a transitional moment in his life when he practically shown that beggars can be choosers, but he chosen not to be beggar; and to completely forget the time before, he burnt all the holodisks for twenty seven years at once, leaving only a couple of photos. No matter what happened in the past. Now Lloyd Patterson was a wealthy chief financial officer of Planetform's department on Leeds, officialese 8 hours per day and dandyfied for the rest even if one may point at his first grey hair and say that it's time to make a break.

Lloyd Patterson needed no special invitation, especially when someone unfastened his manacles, but still got a painful kick in the middle of his back and fell down on the rough dry floor. For the first half a minute after he removed a bandage in this small 2 on 2 room with only a single dim lamp, he was swearing, promising to get those space hippies and kick the crap out of them, but when a wan light of common sense reached his mind, Lloyd Patterson just sat down, holding head in hands. He was in a place he never knew, in a cage, waiting for something and he was pretty sure that it won't be something pleasant.