It was obvious to Conan that Webmind was taking this worse than a lot of the other arrivals he'd met. But then not many of the other arrivals had experienced what looked like some kind of sensory deprivation or a bad feedback loop.

"That," he says at last, "is a long and complicated story. The short version is that all of us here have been taken from our own worlds to be passengers on a train through a void."