Once, not long after I became what I am, the privileged son of a Continuance household took one of my instances with a view to absorbing it into himself. I think it began as a dare, one of those ridiculous coming-of-age challenges which, declined, are the occasion of much drinking and ritual humiliation. After a certain point, though, it had become an obsession, and he did not decline, no doubt to the horror of his peers. Weeks and weeks he prepared the instance in a sealed room. He had read extensively about wetjacking, and he had the money to create an environment that was perfectly suited to the task. What he lacked in experience he made up for in thoroughness. He isolated my instance and he succeeded in inducing in it the fugue of fear and loneliness that is the necessary precursor of defection. He took the fragment into his mind, and revelled in the strange glimpses of my memories to which he now had access. He found the manner of my thinking intoxicating, and wanted more. He delved into the instance, trained himself to replicate its pattern. He became his own drug.