‘This is – like – the matrix’, said my guide. He had cool sunglasses on and also other cool stuff. ‘We are – like – in the matrix and stuff, you know?’ he said meaningfully, ‘and there’s all this heavy matrix–type stuff goes down here only nobody knows about it because for them it’s just normal and stuff only it isn’t normal really because it’s like the matrix you know? Do you get me? That’s kind of the point here dude – nobody knows that they’re in the matrix and stuff’. My guide was inducting me; he was putting me through a crash course. He flicked right out of existence then. He was only in my head anyway – he was only a mental projection, an autonomous function of the teaching module. I was left alone at this point, left to cope all on my own in the bustling matrix, with all those smartly-dressed people walking up and down the street. The way that they do – you know the way they do. You know I am saying here, right? All those busy people, all those busy people. It was like they all knew exactly where they were going – they had that very deliberate, very purposeful walk people have when they know exactly where they are going. There’s a type of confidence in that walk and it was kind of intimidating for me. Not ‘kind of’ – it really was seriously intimidating. I wasn’t like those people – I didn’t know where I was going and as a result I stuck out like a sore thumb. I remembered what the teaching module had told me earlier about the importance of not standing out from the crowd, the importance of not sticking out like a sore thumb. My trainer had said that it was of major importance never to do this. If people got the idea (the unconscious idea, that is) that you weren’t part of the matrix then they would automatically assume that you were an enemy of the matrix and then they’d turn on you. The crowd could turn vicious in a second. This was of course all unconscious (as I’ve already explained) since none of the people in the matrix know that they are in the matrix. It is all totally unconscious behaviour on their part but this doesn’t mean that they won’t turn on you.  They’ll turn on you alright, you can be sure of that! You can understand how very uncomfortable that was for me, standing there in the middle of the crowded pedestrian concourse, not sure of my next step, not sure what direction to be heading in. I was becoming rather scared because knew that the passers-by could smell it off me. It was in my pheromones. My body was betraying me; my own body was trying to get me killed. This made me quite angry with my body until I remembered that I didn’t actually have a body because I was in the matrix and this meant that my body couldn’t give me away. I had been blaming my body unfairly. The next thing was that someone came up to one side of me and grabbed me by the upper arm causing me to almost crap myself thinking that it was an agent but it was only my trainer from the training module who had reappeared on the scene. ‘You dumb fucking knob-head,’ he hissed angrily in my ear as he guided me deftly into the main current of the pedestrians, ‘don’t you ever learn anything?’