So I went down to the chicken run at the bottom of the garden to have a bit of a talk with the old chickens. Enlighten them a bit, if you know what I mean. Help them to see the light. I found them there doing the usual kind of stuff, clucking and scratching around in the dirt the way they always do. “Ok listen up you chickens,” I said, “I’m going to talk to you about Plato’s allegory of the cave, right?” So I launched right into it, explaining about how there were all these prisoners, chained up in the cave in such a way that they can’t turn their heads around to look behind them, and how the only thing they can ever see is the play of the shadows on the wall of the cave that a fire behind them is casting, and all that. I squatted down in on the ground with them, making what I thought was a pretty good job of elucidating the esoteric meaning that underlies this famous philosophical allegory. Going over the key points to help them understand.

Did they listen? Did they fuck. They just carried on clucking and scratching just the same as they ever did. In fact they took very little notice of my presence amongst them at all, apart from occasionally pecking at my socks. Then all of a sudden a hen flew up on my head and before I could throw her off she crapped right down the back of my neck. That did it for me. That was the final straw. Is this how they repay me for the gift of wisdom, I raged. Didn’t these bloody chickens realize that there was more to life than running around clucking like feathered fools and scratching about in the dirt? Didn’t they even have the SLIGHTEST bit of interest in looking beyond the crap of their abysmally banal everyday lives? Doing the same old thing they always do, day in day out? I looked at them in utter disgust. “That’s the very last time I waste my time with you, you fool chickens!” I yelled at them, and stormed off back to the house, in foul form. Just then my sternest critic, the wise old duck from the duck pond, flew up and landed in a bit of heap in front of me. “It’s not the chickens who are foolish Nick,” it quacked, convulsed with laughter on the lawn, “Its YOU! You are a total fucking moron!”

I was in Pagoda Ward, in Queen Mary’s University Hospital, which is in Roehampton, which is (if geography is your thing) somewhere in-between Wimbledon and Richmond. I had had a number of admissions in this place so by now there was nothing new about it for me. The routine never changed. I was sitting in the room where they do the ward round. The consultant was talking to me, asking me questions so the rest of the team could hear what I had to say. He already knew my story. He wasn’t a bad guy, this doctor. His name was Jim. There was something about Jim I liked – he had a curious type of gentleness or softness to him, which was a quality that was rare here. There was more to Jim than the others, who appeared to me to be completely shut down, completely blank in themselves. Malignantly so, in some cases. I wouldn’t talk to the other doctors at all. Sometimes I got the sense that Jim might even understand the odd thing that I said, and this was perhaps why I bothered to go through the gratingly tiresome rigmarole of answering all these formulaic questions. Though probably I was mistaken in this.

Jim was asking me where I came from, and inviting me to explain about the nature of the problem that I considered myself to be experiencing at the present moment. He didn’t use those exact words, however. I answered him willingly enough, as always. I always said the same thing. It was like this business of coming out with name, rank and serial number when you are captured by the enemy. I came out with my story, even though I had no expectation of being believed, or even understood. I told the doctor, whose name as I have said was Jim, that my spaceship had crash-landed on this planet, and that I was from a far-away star-system – a star-system too distant to be seen with the naked eye. I told him that the drive in the spaceship had been too severely damaged for us to repair, and that myself and my fellow crew members had been obliged to leave our craft to see if we could obtain the elements that we needed to replace in the damaged star-drive. I explained to Jim that although this planet appeared hospitable, it soon became clear that there was some kind of anaesthetic gas present in the atmosphere, the effect of which caused us to lose our memories of who we were and where we came from.This gas was both irresistible and irreversible in its operation.

I had seen with my own eyes the other four crew members become convinced, within a matter of a few days, that they had always been on this planet, and that they were native terrestrial humans, like every one else here. In addition to this amnesia, I had observed my friends develop a very great interest in all the activities and pastimes beloved of the natives of this world, despite the infinitely trivial nature of these pursuits. Somehow – to my very great dismay – my crew-mates had become convinced that there was something extraordinarily valuable to be gained by engaging whole-hardheartedly in these totally empty activities and had devoted themselves to them accordingly. They had given themselves over to time-wasting as a result of the corruption that had entered into them. To my sorrow, I realized that I could not even begin to reason with them, for their powers of attention had dwindled to the extent that they could no longer understand anything of what I was saying to them. Their attention span was too short for anything other than the trivial, the banal, the inconsequential. This I found abhorrent in the extreme, as I knew well the true capacities of my fellow Starfarers, and could not bear to see that they had come to this. I was silent then, as sorrow had overcome me.

After a few moments, the consultant psychiatrist (whose name was Jim) spoke: “And why do you think you have not succumbed to the gas, as your friends have done?” His imperturbable grey eyes met mine and their quizzical look echoed the question on his lips. “My Gift is different to that of the others,” I replied, as I always did. My response was always the same. “My task is to look after the unity of the group, and see that we do not fall asunder. I am the communicator and the Key Holder. I am the holder of the Sacred Symbol. But I have failed. And now I am also losing the struggle to remember my own identity. The periods during which I forget get longer every day. I can hold on no longer…”

The rest of the interview was quickly over and I returned to my bed. A nurse came after a while and told me that Jim had decided to increase my medication, saying that it would help me to feel better. I knew this was not the truth however. The purpose of the medication was to numb my brain, to cause me to forget who I am, and also to block the PSY Gift, which is the gift of communication with other minds over great distances. I knew that there was no way I could avoid taking this medication, as it would be administered by injection if I refused it in oral form. Every night I would lie there on my hospital bed – fighting off the heavy smog of drug-induced sleep as it inevitably descended upon me – listening out for the inner voices which would on very rare occasions come to guide me. But now it appeared that this door, precariously open as it was at the best of times, was finally going to be shut…

I like to have a rule for everything I do – if I’m going to the shop to buy some bread or some milk I say: “I have to buy some bread!” or “I have to buy some milk!” Then off I go to obey the rule and everything is fine. Everything is great. I make the rule and then I obey it. It feels good to be obeying the rule. There are lots and lots of things that I need to do during the day and so I have to have lots and lots of rules to tell me to do them all. I am kept very busy obeying all these rules and that feels good. I know I am correctly obeying all the rules and this is very reassuring for me. It gives me a very reassuring feeling…

Sometimes I’m not busy. Sometimes I do nothing and I have a rule for that too: I say “Do nothing for a while now!” and sometimes I specify the time. Then I do nothing, in accordance with the rule that I have just made. Then when the time’s up I say “Get up and do the thing now!” Whatever the thing is. Whatever it is that I need to do next.

Sometimes I’m with my friend and I make a rule saying “I have to talk to my friend!” and then I say some stuff to him. I say some shit. Something or other. Whatever is appropriate. It could be anything. Sometimes I specify what I am going to say. I might for example tell myself to say “Did you see Manchester United playing against Bayer Leverkusen last night?” And then I go ahead and say it. I go ahead and obey the rule and it feels good. Then my friend might say something back to me and that feels good too.

Rules are very important to me – as you can see. They keep me busy. They make me feel as if I am doing the right thing and there is a lot of reassurance in this, as I have said. I make rules for other people sometimes but they don’t always obey them. This is something I can’t understand at all. When other people don’t take any notice of the rules that I have made for them then I get very very angry. I’m like a total madman then. I go ape-shit. I go completely off my head. Sometimes when people don’t obey the rules I get so angry with them that I actually want to kill them. I want to make a rule for myself to kill them. But I don’t make this rule. Instead, I make the rule that says I mustn’t make this rule. And so nothing actually happens, even though I do feel VERY, VERY angry….

I had a good old scrape around in the word-box to see what I could come up with. “Cabbage fire,” I said dramatically, “Neuropathic ice handle. Dream wire spindle mania. Psychopathic…”

I paused and reflected. Good words, I thought to myself. I savoured the feel of them in my mouth as I articulated them, the salty taste of them. I had the sense that I was getting somewhere here. I had another feel around to see what I could find. “Mud-tree earflaps. Bean-fruit fart burger. Nasal drips. Orthogonal. Pustulate…”

The creative fervour was upon me, I knew and I wanted to go with it. I launched boldly into a free-flowing soliloquy of dissonant dissociated syntax: “Mandible. Scour pox. Muck rats. Scab seasoning. Seminal vesicles. Mandrax. Scutter. Remnants. Recidivism. Atavistic arm pits. Fluctuate. Marmosets. Mermaids. Myriapods.

I was on a roll. No doubt about it. I was in the flow. My audience was rapt, appreciative. They were clearly deeply impressed. Men in top hats and tails nodded from time to time, frowning slightly with concentration as if they were discerning some unexpected inner meaning to my words. Ladies in elegant evening wear leant forwards in their seats.

“Pock-marked whoreson!” I expostulated, “Fornication. Frenzy. Flophouse. Forebrain.” And then, in one sublime scintillating stream of syllables, “Error fountain whip bustle fang mountain bucket the splitter broom lick he could counted ever sat winding merry indent pastry cock diddle district jack contract burger men whether daily speak core average…”

The crowd went wild. The applause was tumultuous. As I looked down at the sea of enraptured faces from my position on the podium I knew beyond a doubt that I really was in the groove – I knew then that anything I said would be golden. I held up a hand –

“Spook-fever trouser slime,” I intoned magisterially. And then, on an afterthought, with a twinkle in my voice, “Pixie penis spider mite. Barf flower sponge murmur. Slobber-bucket monkey pudding bum clot. Fetish finger. Weasel broth.”

The crowd stirred in their seats uneasily. It was obvious they were having problems following me. I was going too fast for them. Undeterred, I continued, “Mongrel mange balls, toad-scratcher wart soup. Louse lemon. Brain fondler. Puke burger trouser fantasy. Gripe biscuits. Jackal dribble. Flaky fox sphincter-drool – puppy bubbles. Pooper scooper….”

At this stage it was clear to me that I was losing them. The connection between me and my audience was becoming strained. The magic had gone and people were shifting about in their chairs – some had already left the auditorium. I had to turn things around. I had to pull something out of the bag. “Toe nuts,” I ventured, “Euphemistic. Mouse droppings. Smegma. Helmet cheese. Crab garden. Infundibulate…”

People were leaving the lecture hall in droves now, muttering angrily. Some were even sniggering. I felt panicky. My face was flushed. I was losing control of the situation. Even just a few minutes ago everything had been going so well. I reached desperately into the word-box to see what I could find there. It was empty…

The bad old ones have come home to roost. I’d forgotten about those bad old ones, those rotten horrible old things, but now that they were back it was as if they had never left. The period of time when they weren’t there is revealed as a foolish illusion, an exercise in pathetic make-believe.

How could I ever have forgotten about the bad old ones? How could anyone forget about them? Once they’re in the picture then that’s the end of it. You can forget about it. That’s the end of the story – it’s over, it’s finished.

The bad old things, the bad old things – how could I have ever forgotten about them? They sit there like dirty fat horrible owls, feathers sticking out all over the place. Squat and shapeless. Ancient beyond our understanding, and infinitely malign.

That’s all they ever do, the dirty old things. They just sit there. Roosting…

They aren’t going to go anywhere. They aren’t ever going to go anywhere. They are roosters. That’s what they do – they sit there roosting, casting their sinister black shadow over the whole world…

They roost, but they roost invisibly, which is why you don’t see them. They have learned not to be seen. They are adept at hiding in plain sight, so that no one suspects that they are there. The whole world is their dirty, filthy nest. The whole world is soiled by them but no one knows that they’re there. We just continue bickering pointlessly amongst ourselves, as usual.

Every now and again one of them stirs, moves around a bit in the nest, and then untold misery and misfortune casts its shadow over the world. Pestilence and war stalks the earth. Then it settles down again and the uneasy, troubled calm resumes – the blighted, corrupted peace of their occupation. They always settle down again. They never go. Almost never, anyway. And if they do, then they always always return…

You think I’m talking nonsense. You think I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I do. I’ve seen them, even though they’re invisible. I’ve caught glimpses of them at the very edge of my vision. I’ve caught sight of them from time to time, as if a curtain had been pulled away to show them sitting there in their own stink.

They don’t like being seen. I remember one time, the only time I’ve seen one of them full on, staring back at me. It was like opening a lavatory door and by accident surprising an extraordinarily wicked and unbelievably hideous old woman sitting there on the toilet, having a crap…

The poisonous look you get as you meet her stare. First surprise and bewilderment, then indignation, and then pure poison. Pure corrosive ancient venom.

Oh I know they’re there, even if you don’t. They’re there alright. They’re always there. Those bad old things. Those dirty rotten stinking filthy old roosters…

I was on my way back from work, grumbling to myself as usual about this, that and the other, when suddenly – out of the blue – I remembered the thing. “Oh my god!” I said, “The Thing!!!” I couldn’t believe that I had forgotten the thing. “Oh my god,” I marvelled, “I forgot all about the thing!!” Then all the way home I kept on saying to myself, “The thing is so great! The thing is so great! The thing is so great!” I was over the moon. I was in a state of exultation. I had remembered the thing and the thing was wonderful. It was so great to have remembered it.

I got home and went straight to the kitchen to make myself a cup of tea, still saying to myself all the time, “The thing’s so great! The thing’s so great! The thing’s so great!” I started to drink the tea, my head all in a spin with how great it all was. I couldn’t get over it. “The thing is so great!” I marvelled for the millionth time. Just then, as I was draining off the last drop of my tea, and regretting in passing the fact that I hadn’t had any digestive biscuits left to dip into it, it occurred to me that I didn’t know what the thing was any more. I knew it was great. I knew it was totally fantastic. I knew it was incredibly marvellous. But the problem was I couldn’t remember what it was. I didn’t have the slightest clue what it was!

“What was the thing? What was the thing? What was the thing?” I kept asking myself, in agony. But no answer came. I couldn’t remember anything about the thing. “I’ve forgotten the thing! I’ve forgotten the thing! I’ve forgotten the thing!” I wailed loudly, full of pain and desolation.

I couldn’t believe that I had remembered it like that, out of the blue, and then straightaway forgotten it again. I felt like beating my head against the wall. I didn’t know what to do with myself other than to curse and continually recriminate against myself for being so stupid as to forget it. “Why didn’t I write it down when I had the chance?” I moaned. “How could I have been so hideously stupid?”

Then as time went on I calmed down and it no longer seemed like such a big deal. Eventually I pretty much forgot about the whole incident and just got on with my life, doing the kind of ordinary everyday kind of things that I always do, not really bothering much about the fact that I had forgotten all about the thing…

I was fleeing towards the grey place. fleeing, fleeing, fleeing, as fast as ever I could. Something had taken over me and I was fleeing. Fleeing to that terrible grey place. I don’t know what had taken over me, what had come over me, but all I knew was that I had to flee. I had no interest in anything that wasn’t fleeing – fleeing was all that I cared for. Whatever it was that had gotten into me was very single-minded in this respect. It knew of nothing else but fleeing. A terrible urgency had overtaken me, an urgency that could not be denied. An unholy urgency. It animated my thoughts and my limbs. It animated my will. It ran me. It operated everything about me, and all in pursuit of that grey place. What, you might wonder, is so great about that grey place? Why the hurry to get there? This is of course the funny thing (although in some ways it is not so funny): there is nothing good about the grey place, nothing good about it at all. It has no redeeming features, no worthwhile qualities. It has NO qualities at all and that’s the whole point of it. The grey place is characterized by its complete lack of qualities, like a person with absolutely no personality. There is no life in it, no nothing. Everything worthwhile, everything wholesome, is elsewhere. Life is elsewhere. All good things are elsewhere. All joy is elsewhere. The grey place is barren beyond description – no desert was ever as barren as this. Even the most arid, the most hostile desert has its secret life. Not so the grey place to which I hasten. As I have said, there is no life there, secret or otherwise. There is no anything there and yet – I can’t wait to get there! Or I should say, the thing inside me – the thing that controls me – can’t wait to get there. I’m just the passenger. I’m just the passive witness to all this fleeing. To all this unceasing fleeing through life, as if nothing mattered but reaching the grey place, and making the time it takes to get there as shortened as possible. As non-existent as possible. Or maybe it is me that wants this. Maybe I’m deceiving myself – maybe it’s me all along and I’m trying to pretend that it isn’t. So that I don’t have to face this terrible perversity that lies within me. So that I don’t have to take responsibility for it. I don’t know. I can’t tell. Mainly I think it’s the thing inside me that wants to go to the grey place. It’s playing a clever game with me, making me doubt myself, controlling me, making me think that it is me…

The next group I encountered were little more than children. They were sitting on a wall near an off-license, watching the passers by with sharp, bored eyes. I came up to them, my hand running automatically down the inside of my lapel to make sure the microphone was in place.

“What’s your problem mate?” said one.

“You’re looking for something, huh?” said another.

“Well, no,” I said, conscious of the need to avoid any misunderstanding at this stage. “Just information…”

This did not seem to make the situation any easier.

“What are you, a copper?”

“Some kind of a pervert?”

“Yeah, he’s a fucking nonce!”

They all started to laugh at this.

“No, no, no” I interjected. I’m doing a survey. Any information that I receive will be treated with the utmost confidentiality. Your confidentiality is guaranteed.”

Would this do the trick? Already I could feel the aggression and suspicion turning into contempt. Contempt and indifference. “What sort of fucking information do you want?” asked one kid, who obviously thought that this ought to be explored further.

I phrased my words carefully. “All sorts of information. Where you like to hang out. What you think of the traditional authority figures within society. The qualities that you admire and respect in your fellows. The sort of behaviour amongst your mates that you find unacceptable. The terms in which you measure success and failure. Your ambitions. Do you think education is important? Do you think God is important? How do you regard the role of women?

I seemed to be loosing their attention.

“Do we get anything for telling you these things?” the kid asked. I admitted that they wouldn’t. Upon hearing this his interest seemed finally to be at an end. A few of the others signalled their irritation by sucking their teeth.

As I walked away I heard someone mutter the word “bloodclart” behind my back. I was clearly meant to hear it. An interesting term that, I mused, the symbology was very rich. A bloodclot – I reasoned – serves no function; it obstructs the life-giving circulation, the circulation that serves the whole organism, without favouring one cell more than the other. The bloodclot might therefore be said to signify the ego, which obstructs the greater good for its own benefit. The bloodclot threatens – possibly even fatally – the integrity of the organism for no good reason.

On the other hand, the urban dictionary – as I knew very well – relates the Rastafarian insult ‘bloodclot’ to a woman’s menstrual fluids, and ‘the frustration one feels at not being able to pursue sexual activities’. Were these two levels of symbology incompatible, I wondered, or was there a higher synthesis? Was I missing something here? Or was I perhaps over-analysing the situation?

It occurred to me that there might be something fundamentally wrong with my approach. I needed to change my model if I was to collect the data I wanted. I could see now that I was being insufficiently reflexive – I obviously needed to immerse myself more deeply in the culture I was attempting to study…

The estate I moved into earlier this year is – I have since found out – populated entirely by bad machines. The world is full of machines masquerading as human beings and on the whole I have no problem with this. They are – in my opinion – free to masquerade as anything they please. Human beings are as good a thing to simulate as anything else as far as I am concerned. Why not? But the bad machines – the actual genuinely bad ones I mean – are another story altogether. They I am not so happy about.

The bad machines are just plain bad. They are not simply mechanical or robotic, they are bad-minded. I don’t know what else to say about them. You can smell the badness off them like chronic halitosis.

The bad machines fall into three main categories – scavengers, parasites, and outright predators. Often the determining factor is simply what they can get away with, so maybe these categories aren’t always that helpful. The basic rule with bad machines is that they will always try to take advantage of any situation if they are able to (which is to say, if they are not specifically and forcefully prevented from doing so). In practice of course this comes down to bluff – in any given encounter that you have with a bad machine it will straightaway try to assess its chances with regard to either scavenging or parasitizing or predating you and it will then proceed to act in accordance with its assessment. So the key point here is to never, ever, under any circumstances, show any signs of vulnerability.

Vulnerability is like a beacon to any bad machine, no matter what type or variety it might be. Vulnerability draws them onto you like mosquitoes are drawn to soft, warm, sleeping flesh, like a sex-starved dog is drawn to a bitch on heat, like a marauding gang of great white sharks are drawn to a lump of bloody meat thrown into the sea. They come from nowhere, they come out of the woodwork, they ooze out of the cracks on the pavement. They simply manifest as if by magic out of the dark and stand all around you in a silent circle, their beady little eyes following every move you make, their pink little tongues protruding between their grey cracked lips, darting in and out in greedy anticipation of feeding on you.

Once they sniff out any vulnerability at all they will never let up – they may back off if you lunge at them but as soon as you have made the gesture they will be back again, pushing the boundaries, probing your defences, wearing you down with their perpetual mind-games. You can keep them at bay only so long before eventually they manage to turn the tables on you – testing you, probing you, goading you, mocking you, playing with you, all the while gauging the moment for the final attack. That’s how they operate, that’s how they work.

I had a bit of an encounter with a juvenile bad machine the other day and I made the mistake of answering it in a pleasant and reasonable way when it asked me something. I made the mistake of replying in a civil fashion, like any human being would. I realized immediately afterwards that it had merely been probing for weakness, they way they all do. It obviously took the fact that I had answered it in a genuine way (instead of ignoring it or threatening it or taking the piss) as a sign that I was weak. That of course made me into a legitimate target. Immediately it came out with a stream of vile innuendos regarding my parentage and sexuality. It went on to make a number of unpleasantly suggestive remarks about certain unusual sexual behaviours. I couldn’t believe some of the words coming out of its mouth.

Afterwards I cursed myself. I should have known better – juvenile or not makes no difference as far as these machines are concerned. They’re all the same, they’re all pure bad. The little machine was quite harmless in itself of course but who is to say I wouldn’t bump into it a bit later on with a whole gang of little malignant mechanical friends. Or maybe some bigger mechanical friends, come to that.

Or maybe the word would get out that I was a soft touch and baby robot’s big brothers would come around to suss me out. Put pressure on me to see how I’d react, to see if I start to show fear. Play a few mind-games with me, the way they do. Life in my apartment could start to get rather uncomfortable – not that it was exactly a bed of roses as it was. I cursed my own foolishness again. Would I never learn?

Then I remembered that I wasn’t entirely defenceless. A friend of mine studying physics in GMIT – a bit of a super-nerd, if the truth be known – had made me a hand-held mini-EMP device for use in emergencies. I had it in my coat-pocket and I’d use it if I had to. Fry every robot brain for within a hundred meters, good, bad or indifferent. The thought cheered me up. “Those scum-bag robots better not fuck with me,” I said to myself, “or they’ll get what’s coming to them…”