I first saw a Botcloud, and became familiar with its existence as an actual real phenomenon, sometime last summer. On a hot sunny day such things are easier to discern – it must be something to do with quality of the light, something to do with the particular crystalline clarity which the air can sometimes have on a sunny day at the height of summer. Botclouds are not easy to see and if you don’t happen to know what you’re looking for then you won’t spot them at all. You’ll never see them, even when they’re there right in your face…
When you do see a Botcloud it first becomes visible as a kind of intangible unearthly shimmering in the air, something which I can only compare to a type of barely discernible heat-haze. The air around peoples’ heads is – in some subtle kind of a way – opaque, thicker than usual, extra dense, if it makes any sense to say that. Then, once you have spotted the opacity and keep on looking at it, whilst keeping your vision somehow unfocussed at the same time, the next thing that happens is that you suddenly get to see them – the bots. You see all these millions of tiny metallic dots flying around in space, vibrating ceaselessly back and forth like a swarm of microscopic aerial fleas, hanging there around peoples’ heads like a kind of ghostly halo.
The Botcloud! Why is it there? What does it means? Why does everyone I meet have one? These are all the questions I didn’t know the answers to when I first started seeing this phenomenon. I didn’t know then but I surely do know now. I have learned an awful lot since those early days. What they are is nanobots, millions and millions of them. Each one of them no bigger than a microbe, each one of them no bigger than a grain of pollen dust. Molecular robots, that’s what they are. Super-advanced nanotech. In shimmering metallic clouds, invisible to the naked eye. Visible only as a type of barely perceptible hallucinatory heat-haze – only if you saw it you wouldn’t believe it because it doesn’t fit our normal parameters of perception and so would immediately get edited out again. Most people – as I say – never even see them at all, and even if they do they immediately forget that they ever did. Only for me it’s different – not only can I see the heat-haze I can actually resolve the haze into individual nanobots – I can see the Botcloud as being composed of a swarm of slivery molecular masses, doing their unholy dance around peoples’ heads. Don’t ask me how I can see them, I just can. I’m now psychically attuned to them – I’m so attuned to them in fact that I can’t not see them. Having seen them, I cannot now unsee the damn things…
It’s a sinister thing, the Botcloud, you see. It’s not good news. They’re not benign. The nanobot swarm is there for a reason and that reason isn’t a good one. The Botcloud is there to modify our perception of reality. It’s there to edit our perceptions and change the way we see and understand things. The Botclouds are there to imprison our minds, really. The botclouds close reality down for us; they partition and seal our consciousness off into a little mental box that looks like reality to us (because we don’t know any better, because we’ve been bamboozled) but which is actually nothing at all. Just a box for our minds to live in…
I know what you’re thinking. If the swarm of nanobots is there to edit reality for us, to control reality for us by editing our perceptions, then why do they have to float in a cloud around our heads? Why aren’t they inside our brains, out of sight, where they can do their work all the more efficiently? What’s the point of them weaving around in the air like that? What you probably don’t understand about this is that what the Botcloud really wants to do, more than anything else, is to get a chance to spread and infect other people. They are a type of disease, really. They want to pass themselves on, to copy themselves as many times as possible. They’re replicants. They are generic reality replicators. That’s what it’s all about – infection and reinfection. Infection and reinfection. That’s the name of the game.
This is the reason I’m so scared of getting close to people. It’s because with my enhanced acuity of vision I can see what’s going on. I can see the Botclouds that are controlling everyone consciousness. I can see the way everyone I meet is in a mental prison manufactured by the nanobots without them having even the slightest idea that this has happened. They don’t know the difference, but I do and this is why I always back off if people approach too closely. I can see all the nanobots getting excited about the chance to jump ship and infect someone else. I feel like shouting out loud and yelling at them to get away from me but I don’t because I don’t want to attract attention.
Sometimes I wonder if perhaps I already have been infected with my own special tailor-made Botcloud that I just can’t see. Because it’s tailor-made just for me. It could be a different kind of Botcloud that edits my perceptions in some kind of a sly way so that I believe that I’m not infected because I can see the Botclouds infesting other people. That’s just the kind of a trick that the Botclouds use, after all. They trick us into believing that we’re free so that they can control us better…
