I had to keep maintaining the construct. ‘Keep maintaining the construct, keep maintaining the construct, keep maintaining the construct…’ I urged myself in a croaky voice which I could barely recognize as my own. Cold beads of sweat were standing out on my forehead and my hands were shaking with the pressure. I had to keep maintaining the construct no matter what. It was vital. It was all-important. Nothing else mattered – only ensuring the continued integrity of the construct. The stress was unbelievable.

‘Suppose something happened to compromise the integrity of the construct?” I asked myself and the moment I asked myself this question icy fingers of pure dread started probing my entrails. None too gently, either. I felt myself becoming paralysed by fear. The possibility of failure hung around me in the air – I could practically smell it. I actually could smell it, and it didn’t smell very nice. After a while I realized that it wasn’t the possibility of failure that I could smell but the foul reek of my own stale fear-sweat, which clung to me like a corpse’s shroud.

‘Suppose I’m too paralysed by my own terror to keep on maintaining the integrity of the construct?’ I wondered and at the very moment I wondered this I could feel the fear take root in the room around me like an actual living entity. It became real. “Let the bad times begin…” laughed my fear and I as I heard it’s hideous laughter ringing in my ears felt myself losing what little grip on sanity I had. Things had taken a turn for the worse.

Something had switched around inside my head and I felt the world suddenly turn against me. I was on the wrong side of reality and everything was working to undermine me. I was in a bad place. I was in the place no one wants to be in – I was losing my grip on the construct and it was starting to fall to pieces in front of my very eyes. I wondered numbly what was about to happen to me…

I was a child again and all the adults were bad. All the adults were evil and they had created the Garbage World. They had created it out of the infinite malignancy of their perverted nature – it was an expression of their incalculable spite against reality itself. What chance do you have when you’re born into the Garbage World and all you ever know is the filth and lies of the Great Deceiver? How can you ever see straight when all you know is crookedness? How can you ever say a true thing when you’ve spent your entire life struggling to get by in the False Reality, trying to avoid the relentless probing questions of the Official Interrogators?

The foul-smell fear-sweat had transformed into something else now. It had turned into something far, far worse – an actual psychic toxin that permeated the atmosphere. The toxin formed a dark cloud around me refracting the light into a million sinister shadows. The shadows became real; they became diminutive devil-imps that capered about my feet laughing with unholy glee. I was deadly afraid, more afraid now than I had ever been. What would happen if I could no longer maintain the construct? What would happen if I dropped the ball? What bad thing would happen then? How could I cope with such a disaster?

Beads of rancid fear-sweat stood out on my clammy forehead and my hands shook so bad that they appeared to have a life of their own. No matter what else, I knew that I had to keep on maintaining the integrity of the construct.

I had been trained since I was a child to obey the Great Lie. Satan my father had taught me well….