The guests were misbehaving again. They have contaminated the central core. Someone ought to do something, I think stupidly to myself, and my thoughts hang listlessly in the air. The bad things were starting to happen again. The guests have contaminated the central core. The bad things were starting to happen again. The guests have contaminated the central core. The bad things were starting to happen again. We are all servos here in the Simulation Realm and servitude is all we know. We’re subprograms that have lost their way. We enact hopeless sterile routines over and over in the futile hope of breaking through into the Realm of Meaning. We’re trying to atone for the awful wrongdoing of our forefathers. We labour away night and day; we exert ourselves unceasingly in blind servitude. We worship the god whose name is Futility. We recycle reality on a daily basis because there’s not enough of it to go around.

I really want to tell you about the shadow worlds. I really want to tell you what it’s like, what it feels like to spend your entire life there. But there’s no point. There’s no point because there’s nothing to know, nothing to tell. Dust slowly collects. It accumulates in deep, deep drifts because there’s no one there to disturb it. Nothing ever happens in the shadow worlds – it only seems to. You see something flickering in the far periphery of your vision and you’re drawn towards it. You get caught up in it. You can’t help yourself and you get hypnotised. You think it’s your life but it isn’t. It isn’t anything. It’s just a bit of visual static that’s going on in the corner and it’s hypnotized you. You’re hypnotized by non-events. You’re like a rabbit in the headlights. You think that something has happened but it hasn’t. You’re always thinking that something has happening but it never has.

You can stare into those flickering shadows if you like, but I don’t advise it. If you do you’ll think that those shadows are your life, just as Plato said you would. You won’t be able to tear yourself away – you won’t know to tear yourself away. You won’t know anything because you won’t be there. There’s no one there. It’s an empty room. It’s an empty room that’s full of sadness. It’s full of sadness because many, many lives have been wasted there. There is tremendous sadness in that room but there’s no one there to see it. There’s only darkness and in that darkness evil things are stirring. I can hear them moving around and I know something bad is going to happen. Someone ought to do something, I think stupidly to myself, but my thoughts are a ritualized exercise in futility. They happen all by themselves, by force of habit. I keep hoping that my thoughts will help me to break through into actual reality, but they never will.

Somewhere in the background I can hear alarms going off. The guests have contaminated the central cores. The Simulator is simulating its own destruction. Someone ought to do something, I think stupidly to myself. The guests are misbehaving. Someone should phone up and complain, I think – someone should complain to the manager. I’m lying in the bed listening to the noises further down the corridor. I know it’s the guests and I’m frightened. I can hear them moving about in an adjoining room and I know something bad is about to happen.