I was thinking away feverishly, trying to make the good thing happen, but all that was happening was that I was hollowing myself out inside. I was making pain for myself, I was creating it as fast as I could…

You know that feeling you get when you reach that point at which you stop being a human being and turn into a hungry ghost instead? That point at which you actually stop being a person, the point at which you lose that quality of what it is to be human. That very precise and uncompromising point – the point of no return, so to speak. The tipping point. That’s what happens when you push it too far. It’s like when you leave the baggage collection area in an airport and you pass through those doors where it says ‘no turning back past this point’. It’s a one-way door. It’s a one-way valve and you’re about to go through it…

I was coming up to that moment and I knew it – you can’t help knowing it. It’s an innate knowledge, somehow. I knew it as clearly as I ever knew anything and yet I couldn’t stop myself. My will power no longer existed – maybe it never did. My mind had been taken over by something and all I could do was watch on. Watch myself pass through that one-way door. Everything kind of flips over then, doesn’t it? When you reach that point. Everything gets turned on its head and yet you never realize it because you’ve gone past the point at that stage. You don’t know that you’re no longer a person, you don’t know that you’ve been downwardly transformed into a mere thing, a mere mechanical pattern of impulses that can’t be stopped. You don’t know that this has happened to you – you think that you’re still a human being, you don’t realize that you are simply following a trajectory, like a stone that has been thrown. There’s only one was to go and that’s down but somehow you don’t realize this. You think that you’re still steering the thing, you think that you’re still in control, you think that you’re on the trail of something good and that you can make it happen if you try hard enough. You know that you have to try really really hard but that’s OK – you still think that you can do it, you still think that you can pull it off…

That moment is so terrible, isn’t it? It’s such a terrible moment. The moment when you know you’re just about to turn into a machine but you still can’t find it within yourself to do anything about it. You know but you’re paralysed. You know and you have a true horror of what’s about to happen to you but something in you doesn’t care, something in you has taken over. It’s unstoppable – even the thought of going against it is too hard work. You give in immediately, you don’t want to admit that you have but you have all the same. You’re trapped in that moment, frozen in it, and soon you’re going to be frozen in it for good when you pass over into the Machine World. You can dwell on your status at leisure then because you’ll have all the time in the world to do so. You’ll have all the time in the world and then some. Time to be a machine who doesn’t know that he’s a machine. Time to be a programme in the Machine World without knowing that you’re only a programme. Time to be the false you, the you who is only a subroutine of the deterministic universe, the you who will never know the truth of what is really going on…

Maybe it’s not going to be as bad as all that I find myself thinking, but even as I think this I know that the thought is ridiculous. Maybe the suffering won’t be too great, I tell myself, but I know it will. Maybe life won’t be so bad in the Machine World. But even as I try telling myself this I know that the opposite is true – I know that the Machine World is actually the Torture World. It’s a place of suffering, a place where there is no peace, no joy. There’s no life in the Machine World – only the poor mockery of it. But even knowing this isn’t enough to stop me. Something inside wants it. Something inside me doesn’t want to be free. I’m like a fully-automated guided missile – I’m locked onto the target and that’s that! I’m hell-bent on getting to where I’m going and you couldn’t talk me out of it! It’s really not something that’s open for discussion; something in me is dead-set on turning its back on reality…