Chicken nuggets, chicken nuggets. Four Euros twenty cents for five. My mind was chattering like a chattering skull head. My mind is good at chattering; just about the only thing it is good for really. Everyone’s got to be good at something, right? Unless they’re not, of course. Unless they’re not. I found myself wondering if perhaps I shouldn’t go for the Rebel Whopper instead but I couldn’t make up my mind. I was stuck in the agony of indecision. I was back in the Adaptive Environment again you see – all flashing lights and funny beeping noises coming at you from all directions. It’s testing you, you see. The Adaptive Environment is always testing you. It’s part of a giant experiment, that’s why. Did you ever get the feeling that you were part of a giant experiment? Part of the experiment is to see if you can be experimented on without you ever knowing it. Part of the experiment is to see if you know that there is an experiment in other words. I know all about the experiment and so I passed the test. I’m suspicious by nature anyway so it was only a matter of time before I spotted it. Before I spotted the Environment at its old tricks. The Adaptive Environment can take any form at all you see – it is in no way recognizable. There are no guidelines to spot it. The Adaptive Environment reflects back your own mind at you and so you just won’t spot it. People just think that it’s normal so they relax. It is normal, for them! It’s their own ideas reflected back at them which makes it all perfectly normal. You could bump into a colleague from work or someone you met once at a party and so you’d never be suspicious of them. You’d relax straightaway. You’d be lulled into the proverbial sense of false security and then the Adaptive Environment can experiment on you as much as it likes because you’re off guard. I’m never off guard! That’s the good thing about being paranoid, I guess. You’re never off your guard. Never, not even a little bit. That’s how come the Environment doesn’t really work on me. In a way I’m immune, although it could still catch me out if I allowed myself to get too cocky. You should never be too cocky, should you? The Environment is always waiting for you if you get too cocky. Damn right it is! It’s as cunning as you like – it reads your mind with ease. It reads your mind like a book so how could you ever expect to get the better of it? I don’t expect to get the better of it, but I can survive prolonged exposure to it without allowing it to experiment on me. I’m too wily for that! The Environment bounces your own expectations back at you so you think you’re in ‘normal’ reality. That’s a laugh isn’t it? Just what the hell is ‘normal’ reality when it’s at home? For God’s sake. “It’s just normal people,” will tell you. That’s all. Normal, normal, normal. So very normal. “It looks fairly normal to me!” you’ll say. It’s definitely normal. People are full of shit, basically. If you want the real low-down on it – people are full of shit. That’s the bottom line. Just remember that and you won’t get fucked around too much. You’ll get fucked around, but not too much. Not too much. Just a bit. It’s unavoidable really. It’s unavoidable that you’re going to get fucked around to some extent. You have to get used to it. I was having a happy time in my happy place and then everything got normal. As normal as normal can be. As normal as fish fingers. As normal as chicken nuggets. Chicken nuggets are pretty normal, aren’t they? Except they’re not. The Adaptive Environment follows you around making everything normal for you and straightaway you get lulled into a false sense of security. You’re a sitting duck, you’re a patsy. You don’t realise that there’s no such thing as normal and never was. That’s the Adaptive Environment playing you for a fool. It’s automatically adapting itself to your ridiculous half-baked assumptions about reality. ‘Half-baked’ is overstating the matter, come to think of it. Your assumptions are not baked at all – they’re all doughy in the middle. Talk about indigestion! You’ll get the worst gut rot you’ve ever had in your life. Heartburn too, I shouldn’t wonder. Plenty of acid heartburn. You’ll be reaching for the Rennie big time my friend and I can tell you that nothing.