Acquisition, the human desire for the material, is something he wants to understand. Here, amongst the variegated painted monoliths and the seething pulse of humanity, he searches for something to take back with him. Lights call out to him from every direction, bodies flit in and out of shop entrances, and wave after wave of sound breaks over him. The world spins frenetically on a neon-lit axis.

He stops at a window stacked with a dozen brightly-lit screens in different shapes and sizes. All of them, in an absurd display of unity, play the same video of a dancing girl in a white dress. The girl is the pop flavor of the week, spinning in her ephemeral confection of a dress, pink-drenched lips syncing to the beats of some electronically generated song. A chain glitters around her neck as she dances, setting its intricate crystal pendant in motion. She is extremely beautiful, this girl, a temporary paragon of human desire: everybody wants her, everybody wants to be her. Tieria reaches a hand out towards her and finds a barrier of icy glass in the way. It doesn't matter. If he could reach through the glass there would only be a picture of a girl on a screen, and even then she’s more human than he’ll ever be.

Is this what it means to be human, he wonders? Vain hopes, wishes for the impossible, foolish desires that tickle the heart and tease it with their unattainability? The cold of the glass creeps into the bones of his hand, yet he stands there still, watching the dream-girl dance in circles.

Eventually he breaks the spell and moves away, but later that day he stops at a jewelry store where there's a crystal pendant on a filigree of silver on display. He returns to the Ptolemaios with it in his bag, carefully wrapped in tissue, a reminder of dancing girls and video screens, of walking alone in a crowd of a thousand, and the distance between the dream and the material.