Transform your world with new World Transformer™. Upgrade your lifestyle with new Lifestyle Upgrader™. Turbocharge your career with new Career Turbocharger™. These are the supreme words by which I live my life. Was there any doubt of this, this which I hold to be most self-evidently true? My eyes behold wonders – I look through the electronic portal onto a world that beckons me onwards. It’s a world that beckons us all onwards. ‘Come, venture forth,’ a silvery voice tells us, ‘seek you the treasures that lie within my domain’. My eyes are tired from looking through the portal. My sight has grown dim and weariness writes deep furrows upon my brow. All around the Treasurescape lie the glittering skulls of those who had been tempted and had failed. All who are tempted fail – they can’t help from failing. They always fail. The skulls are gaudy and inconsequential and I walk by them without a second glance. They are cheap and tawdry trinkets, they vanish as I passed by. My eyes behold wonders but these are not them. These are the glitzy, gaudy skulls of the terminally unwary. Children understand but we adults rave and froth at the mouth. We are sad useless creatures. We seek fulfilment in fantasies and delusions; we seek fulfilment in the unspeakable drivel of the master mind-manipulators. We vomit out our loneliness and despair into the darkness. There never was any hope for us and I think we all know that. That knowledge adds to our delirium. We cough dryly and make ironic sophisticated comments. We buy the latest kitchen appliances. Our souls are black; our souls are always black. Our foolishness defies description. Our foolishness defies the limits of the physical universe; molecules creak and groan under the strain. ‘The experiment has failed,’ the voice in my ear tells me, ‘the experiment always fails. It was in bad taste anyway…’ The voice belongs to a robot fly. It’s a drone operated by the Faceless Ones, an ancient order of mutant mantids. There are predators but very ineffective ones; they are cruel but also incompetent. All they can do is eat away very slowly at the periphery of our attention, fraying the edges, unpicking the threads one by one, turning everything into a bleary, inconsequential mess. My life is a bleary, inconsequential mess. I shout angrily at the skulls of my enemies. I speak the forbidden words. Shadows dance frivolously on the very periphery of my vision. I have to do the thing and yet I don’t know what the thing is. I don’t want to know. I am afraid to know…