‘Thank you,’ I replied graciously, ‘I’ve never met your dog before but if I had I’m sure that I would have been entirely charmed by the encounter.’ I spoke easily, assuredly, confidently and with all my natural flair and ebullience, but at the same time I was gripped with a profound unease. Suppose the aliens were listening in? Supposed they were overhearing me with their highly developed telepathic powers? Suppose they were eavesdropping on my conversations? Suppose night was day and day was night? Suppose my thoughts weren’t my own but had been implanted within me by the Deterministic Universe, by the Evil Pseudo-World? A cold sweat broke out on my forehead with the advent of this idea, which I knew I couldn’t entirely disprove, and I experienced an ominous prickling sensation at the back of my skull. The alarming thought that my thoughts were being controlled by some alien force had also probably been implanted, I realised. This was exactly the sort of thing that the EPW was so good at doing – introducing regressions that you could never, ever escape from. This was one of its tricks, so to speak. One of its many tricks. One of its many nasty tricks. No one has ever escaped from the EPW, it occurred to me, and at the same time that I realised this I also realised that it was the EPW that had fed me this insight. Which meant of course that it wasn’t a genuine insight at all but only an infernal pseudo-insight. I was suffering from a bad case of double vision; everything I thought I thought twice – I would realise something and simultaneously realise that this was what I was supposed to realise. I couldn’t diverge from the script that I had been provided with and the realisation that I couldn’t escape from the script was part of the script. It is always a worst mess than you think it is, and that’s not a pleasant thing to have to think about. The EPW is always one step ahead of his victims you see – by its very nature it is always going to be one step ahead of its victims. We can’t outrun the EPW because it invented running in the first place! We can never think our way free from the problem that is the EPW because it invented thinking. It got there first, in other words. It always gets there first. We can’t ever escape from the EPW in our dreams because it is the EPW that designs our dreams and allocates them to us. We can’t even console ourselves with happy memories of the time before the EPW swallowed us whole because our memories all have its trademark on it. And escaping via our hopes for a brighter future won’t work either, for obvious reasons. Some things we are just better off not knowing about, you might say, and if you did happen to say this I would be inclined to agree with you…