The message came into my head with great force. ‘Bouncy castles for hire’ it said. It was one of many such messages, incongruous and apparently harmless commercial memes that spring upon the unwary. I found myself defenceless against the message, just as I am helpless against all those other messages out there. I recognized it instantly as a garbage meme of course, a virulent industrial pollutant, but there was nothing I could do about it. The message took up residence in my consciousness with all the others. We’re wide open to all this commercial mind-junk, there’s no legislation to curb it. I automatically shook my head from side to side to try to dislodge it but the trash in my mind wasn’t going anywhere. The false thought was there to stay. It had taken up permanent residence along with all the other junk. No one cares what gets lodged in their heads these days, I thought to myself. There was a time, still within living memory, when people had a bit more dignity with regard to what they let in their heads, but not anymore! Now it’s a free-for-all. There’s no consideration given any more. Anything goes. It’s all in the name of free enterprise. We’re all helpless meat-puppets – we’re all legitimate targets in the neverending commercial war between the Transhumans and the infamous ‘free-marketeers’ operating from their randomly distributed base in the now destroyed United States of Europe. Impossible to stop, the Transhumans were little more than digital ghosts haunting the corrupted brains of ex-social media addicts, most of whom were now held in illegal detention camps run by the World Health Organization. We’re all fair game as far as the transhumans are concerned. We’ve all been sold up the river. Free will was one of the first causalities. None of my thoughts are my own, I realize with repugnance and dismay – the Transhumans own everything we think. Everything’s copywrited these days including our most intimate emotions. No ideas are original – they’ve all been designed by the corporate AIs to maximize product loyalty. My mind grew clear for a moment then and I realized with a shock that none of this was true: the thought-jackers were making me think that the conspiracy memes had gotten inside me and were thought-jacking me without my knowledge but this was a lie. I shook my head from side to side to clear it from all the mental debris that was clogging it up and then, at the next set of traffic lights, took a sharp left turn instead of continuing down the dual-carriageway as I had planned. I had just created my own destiny, I realized; I had just given the finger to the sinister thought-controllers. I am a free man, I tell myself – I make my own decisions. No one is in charge of my thinking. No one apart for me, that is. That was just the Government making me think that by putting all that disinformation and fake news into the newsfeed. The Mandela Effect wasn’t real – no one was changing the past. I am a free man and the past has already happened, I tell myself again. There was no way the past hasn’t happened yet – that was crazy talk. It was just all those conspiracy memes that were making me think that. The ones that we see forever circulating and recirculating in Facebook. Poison for the mind created by the Transhumans. Endless maddening conspiracy memes telling us that the past hasn’t happened yet.