When I was younger I used have my own private world that I used to go to – I called it Marmuria. Actually, that’s not true I used to call it ⴃ¡§Zongratt!!֍. Actually that’s a lie too I didn’t call it that at all, I called it something completely different. All my memories are mixed up because of the Mandela Effect. They’re all mixed up anyway whatever the reason. I can’t tell you the true (or secret) name of my private world in any event because that would potentially give you power over me; you might be able to use it against me. Assuming of course that that is what you wanted to do…
I created a virtual environment for myself and then and then I was able to seamlessly slot myself into it and that meant that I was perfectly invisible. Nobody could find me. Nobody could find me in the virtual environment because I fitted in so well. I was like a proton in a universe made up of facsimile protons. All protons are facsimiles of each other anyway by their very nature. Whoever heard of a proton that stood out from the common herd by virtue of its unique and highly original personality and its once-in-a-lifetime only contributions to the subatomic world? That’s not really how it works, as any particle physicist would be happy to tell you. So there I was, perfectly adapted to the virtual world that I had made and the bottom line was that no one could ever find me there. My disguise was perfect – I had become a blank generic unit in a world that didn’t even exist.
People sometimes ask me what was so wrong with the real world that I had to invent my own private one. Well, they didn’t really. Nobody actually ever asks me that. Although to be fair I’m reasonable sure that no one knows that I have actually created it – it’s not the sort of thing that one usually tells people, is it? That would immediately make it all very crass, very public, and who wants that? It rather goes against the spirit of the thing. It’s like having a secret word that only you know about and then going around dropping hints about it in the hope that someone will get interested and question you about it. “So buddy,” such a person might say, “what exactly IS this secret word of yours, then?” “Yeah wouldn’t you like to know, asshole,” I’d reply scornfully, only to realize seconds later that I had just given the game away there. Oops! Kind of let the cat out of the bag there, didn’t I? Kind of shot myself in the foot there. Scored an own-goal…
The thing about this private world of mine – let’s call it Marmuria just for the sake of the argument – is that it keeps on changing in my own memory, so that I now have totally conflicting memories of what it was, and what name I used to call it. Well actually let’s not call it Marmuria, that’s kind of stupid-sounding. Let’s call it something else. I don’t know what but maybe we’ll come back to that later. Or maybe we won’t as it’s not strictly necessary. All the best names are taken now, aren’t they? Or maybe they’re not. Marmuria sounds like a cross between Lemuria and Narnia and that’s just embarrassing. Who wants to have a private world that’s a cross between Lemuria and Narnia? But the point (which I keep going away from) is that this private world of mine always tended to be rather entropic in nature. I can recognize that now. I used to picture great planet-wide swamps and marshes filled with the subtle odours of decay. Everything went very slowly in this world and nothing ever ‘progressed’. There was an ecology of sorts but all the creatures making it up were degenerate or regressive or involutionary in character, if that makes sense. They were degraded forms of life living in a degraded world in which nothing very much ever happened…
The bulk of the creatures living there were parasites. Everything was busy parasitizing everything else, in other words. Everything was looking for a free ride, an ear to live in… Corruption was rampant and everything was looking for a host. There were psychic parasites too, drifting around the darker places of that world like smoke looking for a fresh mind to hijack, looking for an unoccupied mind to take control of. You’d end up riddled with parasites in this world – the parasites that riddled you were themselves riddled. All purposes were subverted in this world. That’s a good way of putting it, isn’t it? I rather like that. I must remember that – all purposes were subverted…
I can’t remember what my purposes were, if I ever had any. I can’t remember what my purposes were in creating this private world of mine, this lower-analogue world where everything tends towards decay. Most people would probably say that it doesn’t sound particularly appealing. Not the sort of world that you’d want to create, if you had any choice over it. But then again, entropy has its own kind of appeal, doesn’t it? Why else do people like all that dark stuff, vampire-type stuff? Why else do people want to become Goths, and get involved in all that type of stuff? Decay and degeneration has its own type of charm, believe it or not. Or maybe it’s just a type of fatal hypnosis, I don’t know. But whatever my purposes were in creating this world, it has thrived and grown stronger over the years – in its own dark way. It has thrived and grown stronger while I – alas – have not…
