Bright wasn't sure what was going on.
He wasn't sure where he was. He wasn't sure what he was doing. He wasn't sure whether the uncertainty was his or whether it had been placed in him by something that wanted him uncertain.
He was coming off an unexpected high he had never been consciously introduced to. That was the closest description he could manage — a high, the word borrowed from things he'd heard about substances that stripped a person's relationship to their own decision-making and replaced it with something softer and more compliant. He hadn't taken anything. He was fairly certain he hadn't taken anything. But the residue was there: the specific cotton quality of a mind that had been running on someone else's signal and was only now, gradually, receiving its own transmission again.
He felt like a puppet. In every sense of the word.
