I was a police officer in my own imagination, running around like a total maniac, arresting people all day long, arresting everyone I saw. ‘You’re busted you freak’, I called out gleefully, ‘I’m arresting you for breaking the law!’ I would indulge in a bit of police violence too because – in my mind – that just goes to prove the point. I would jeer at the perps and knock them about a bit – ‘That’ll learn you,’ I told them, ‘You dirty lousy scumbags!’ Then I grew tired with the game and so I decided to play at being a citizen of a dystopian future society instead. Droning robot voices pretending to be me were ordering me about, shouting at me and telling me to conform to the Malignant Autocracy. ‘Always conform to the Malignant Autocracy’, the maniacal voices squawked in my head, ‘Conform to the Pointless Brutality of the Machine World – perform Meaningless Actions over and over again just because your Inner Robot told you to…’ I rolled around on the floor in feigned agony, the agony of a man who is being attacked by his own brainwashed mind which is trying to control him, even though he realizes that this would extinguish all vestiges of humanity within him. ‘Fuck you!’ I grated out painfully from of the corner of my distorted mouth, ‘Fuck the system, you AI piece of shit. You won’t tell me what to do…’ Eventually I got bored of this game too and I decided to pretend to be a heavy metal rock star with long greasy black hair and a leather jacket which smelt of piss and vomit. I was playing an air guitar with insane energy, savagely moving my fingers over the frets, ‘Satan’s gonna fuck you,’ I roared, ‘Satan’s gonna fuck you good and proper and then he’s going to come and rule on earth’. A huge unruly crowd had gathered around me at this stage – they were banging their heads in time with the lumbering bassline, screaming at me to turn up the volume. I was The Doomed One, working his way relentlessly through the songs that the crowd loved so well, belting out all the old favourites. The audience – like a vast beast – was roaring out its approval. When I finished the set then the world would end. Eventually this game paled on me too and it came to me – with a shock – that I was wasting my life living in the hollow, claustrophobic bubble of my own futile fantasies. This realisation made me feel bad inside and I didn’t really like that so I started up with my never-ending games again, playing away as if there were no tomorrow, playing away as if my very life depended upon it.
