So anyway I was dissolving myself into a mass of conflicting subroutines, just for the fun of it, just by way of a little experiment. My own private little experiment. I am after all always one for an experiment! My whole existence is an experiment and it isn’t a very successful one either  – I’ll tell you that for nothing. But in science as you know we always say that there’s no such thing as an unsuccessful experiment. We all know that no experiment, if it is carried out correctly, is ever unsuccessful. All findings are valuable even when you find out nothing and I have yet to find out anything in all the experiments I have ever run, in all the dubious existences I have ever lived. I’m drawing a blank as we speak but that in itself is a valuable result. As I study the data I scratch my head and chew thoughtfully on my biro – a picture is slowly taking shape in my head but it’s a picture of nothing. It’s a kind of a scrawl that looks as if it has been half-erased and then rewritten again in a somewhat half-hearted way, and then had some coffee spilt on it. The experiment itself was grandiose in its conception, noble in its execution but entirely inconsequential in its conclusion. The conception was the best part and it went downhill from there. Such an audacious experiment though – audacious is hardly the word for it but it will have to do as I can’t think of any other. So how does this experiment work exactly I hear you ask. What are the parameters? What is the hypothesis that is being tested? If ever I knew the answers to these questions – which presumably I did at some point – then I certainly don’t know them now. It’s all a jumble in my head. The dim and distant memory of a jumble, really. First you have to make a logical analogue for the reality you are describing and then you write a program to operate within said analogue. All aspects of yourself are replaced by fully autonomous subroutines and you yourself become redundant – you become something of an embarrassment. You’d only get in the way, anyway. You have no place there – even you don’t want to have anything to do with you. You wouldn’t recognize yourself; you’d run away in fear and confusion. You turn against yourself. So then we have to wonder what happens to the surrogate self – what sort of a life does it lead, what are its dreams, its aspirations, what sort of experiences lie in store for it, and so on.  Welcome to the pretending world my friend – but will ‘the pretend you’ be happy or sad? Will ‘the make-believe you’ have a good time or will it all be a total disaster?