I was worried about the terrible onslaughts of complexity. I didn’t know how that phrase got embedded in my head but it had done somehow. I must’ve heard it somewhere. Maybe I’d read it. I didn’t know what it meant even. I knew that it was bad though, whatever it was. I knew, in some dim and confused way, that it was very bad news, possibly the worst possible news. I was busy living my life but no matter how hard I worked at that I wasn’t really getting anywhere. I was running on the spot. Perhaps I’m not very good at living life, I thought. Perhaps I just naturally aren’t very good at it. Through no fault of my own. The same way that a complete plonker can’t help being a complete plonker – he was just born to be that way. Do you think he had any choice in the matter? Do you think anyone asked him if he wanted to be a plonker? I was busy living my life but then one day I realised that it wasn’t my life at all. There had been a mistake. An error had crept in to the system. The Big Machine that creates reality had developed a fatal flaw. The Big Machine that prints reality off. It’s an n-dimensional reality printer. Can you hear it working? Humming away in the background. It really shouldn’t be that noisy. It shouldn’t be noisy at all – you’re not actually supposed to be able to hear it! That was never meant to happen. When it starts making a noise then you know that something is wrong. I wonder to myself if anyone else can hear it apart from me. It’s come adrift from its moorings. That’s the problem – it’s worked itself loose and now it’s banging from side to side like some kind of crazy thing. Like some kind of crazy mad thing. It’s banging from side to side like a centrifuge that has been improperly loaded. You know that awful frightening noise they start to make before they shake themselves to pieces? When you introduce an error into the reality feed then it very quickly starts looping, you see. It feeds off itself. An error in this case means anything that should never have been there in the first place. There are so many possible errors that one could make, wouldn’t you say? Who’s to say what the consequences would be. Perhaps reality will start shaking itself to pieces. Perhaps reality is coming loose from its moorings. Perhaps it’s gone off the rails. I find myself remembering events that never happened and when I remember them I feel sad. There are some things that never happened and because they never happened no one ever misses them. What went wrong though, why didn’t they happen? Did someone mess it up? Was it me? Sometimes I remember people I never knew and then for the briefest moment I smile inside, only to remember seconds later they never actually existed. Sadness floods me from an unexpected quarter then. It catches me off guard. Did I make a mistake, I wonder? Is it possible to make a mistake that is so bad that the whole of reality gets affected? Or is it a mistake to imagine that you could do that? Is the thought of the error itself the error?
