The telepathic extractors are out there – of that let there be no doubt! There can be no doubt on that score, even though there is doubt aplenty on all other scores. There is doubt aplenty, but none there. None there. It’s as though there is no such thing as private information any more, no way to keep anything to yourself – as much as you might like to! As much as you might desperately need to. When you do try to keep something to yourself it broadcasts all the more. It is if you’re a transmitting module and there’s nothing you can do about it. All your mail is permanently on ‘send’ – as fast as you write it someone else is already reading it! They know what you are thinking before you do, and there’s something very unsettling about that. It creates fear when that happens – a whole world of fear.

Whoever ‘they’ are. I forgot to say that. They know what you’re thinking before you do, whoever they are. I don’t know who they are – the telepathy doesn’t work both ways. They know what I’m thinking and what I’m planning but I sure as hell don’t know anything about them! The boot is on the other foot and so I am at a permanent disadvantage. There appear to be certain rules in this world – one rule is that you can’t keep your thoughts to yourself, and the other is that you can’t keep your location to yourself either. You are always showing up on someone’s radar, and that makes the life of a fugitive very hard, as you might imagine. It makes it impossible…

One thing that I realised recently – in the most painful way imaginable – is that it is our secrets that make us who we are. So when all your secrets suddenly start oozing out of you, floating away from you on the aether, then that’s your undoing. That’s undoing your very identity. You’re compromised then, in a big way. In a very big way. There’s a lot of shame involved in that too, I can tell you. An unbelievable amount of shame. The thing is that the secrets which suddenly start coming out of the woodwork are secrets that you didn’t even know you had. They come as a surprise, and a very unpleasant one too. They come as a complete surprise and yet there is this terrible familiarity about them as well. You know about them and you don’t know about them, both at the same time. You know that they are your secrets though – you do know that much. Who else would they belong to, anyway?

Where do you hide when there’s nowhere to hide? That’s ten million dollar question. You’re just kind of floating there, as if in the middle of the ocean, and all your secrets are oozing out from you and producing this dark stain in the water around you. You’ve pissed yourself and you’ve been caught out! You’ve become incontinent in secrets. You’re like a teddy bear with all the stuffing coming out, and once all your stuffing has come out then there’ll be nothing left of you. The ocean is a big, big place and it’s only a matter of time before something out there comes to pay you a visit. A giant ocean shark perhaps, a Mako or a Great White. Their sense of smell is supernaturally acute – one molecule of fear in ten thousand gallons of seawater and they can detect it. That’s a scientific fact. Who knows what’s out there in that big, big ocean? Sharks could be the least of your worries. Who knows what could be out there, in the wide-open waters?