Before I even entered the room I knew that the man I was to encounter there would be a nullifier. In other words, I knew that he would be a nullifier without even having to see him. I smiled to myself as I made this prediction – it was a kind of a private joke I have going with myself, the point being that wherever I went I was bound to meet nullifiers, since the whole world is full of them. It was like betting on the fact that if you give a penniless street wino a fifty Euro note he will go and spend it on drink. Okay – I am prepared to admit that there are people around who aren’t in this category, but in a situation like this, with me being about to be interviewed by a consultant psychiatrist, what are the chances that he or she won’t turn out to be a nullifier? Or even worse, a nullard and (I don’t even want to begin to go into that possibility).
When I walked into the consulting room and saw him sitting there behind his desk – leafing casually through what was at this stage still a fairly slender file – I had all the confirmation I needed. He had all the tell-tale signs of being a nullifier. Any one of these signs on its own would not necessarily mean that he was a nullard or nullifier of course, but the combination of all of them proves it beyond any doubt. Every time. You’ll just have to take my word for that.
I will list the signs to show you what I am talking about. (I am listing them for you now but obviously I didn’t notice them all until after the interview had got properly underway). He wore a sober suit and a tie. He had black, shiny shoes (which I saw when he got up to shake my hand when he’d finished with me). He was neat and tidy, without a hair out of place. Everything around him was neat and tidy too. He had a serious, heavy-looking face, the bland, smooth face of a man who is used to being listened to without ever having to raise his voice. He broadcast an unmistakeable air of imperturbable authority. He had gravity, although not of a good kind; his voice, when he spoke, had a dry tone to it that constantly verged on sarcasm. He had the ability to completely ignore what I was saying. No matter how many times I tried to say it. Or he might acknowledge what I was trying to say but in a patronizing or dismissive kind of a way. Either way, it was as if I had never actually said anything. His eye contact was almost non-existent – he always tended always to be looking elsewhere.
His body was heavy and he had a very solid and stocky build (though there is another fairly common type of nullifier known to me who would characteristically be skinny and gangling with a lean, bony face, thin lips and big knuckles).
There are many other types of nullifiers as well, the lesser types. The more insignificant types. Some of them appear – to me at least – to be little more than empty perambulating suits, hollow human husks that walk and talk and act like men. For these ones there is only a very minimal pretence at being human. Others types wear uniforms and infiltrate the police or prison services. Or perhaps they choose to become security men or women. Or maybe they are bouncers standing at the door of a club in your local town, giving off bad vibes. Experts in the art of looking like they’d dearly love an excuse to stamp on your neck. Some become teachers or politicians. There are lots and lots of different types. But they’re all the same. They’re all nullifiers. They’re all bad. ‘Bad’ is a wholly inadequate word for what I’m talking about here, but still…
I can’t exactly tell you how I knew beyond any doubt that this guy was one of them. It was as if there was something about him – typical of nullifiers – that wasn’t physical: a raw psychic impression of someone who was unyielding, solid, dense, inert and immovable. Like a big old rock sitting half buried in a field somewhere. What you could see was massive enough, in some subliminal sort of a way, but you knew at the same time that what you could see was only a small part of the story, that for every inch you saw above ground there was a yard below.
And I haven’t even mentioned yet the worse thing of all about nullifiers – the way in which they slowly but inevitably drain the life out of you.
I hate nullifiers. I loathe and detest everything about them. But more than that, I fear them. I can’t tell you how much I fear them. The main reason I fear them so much is because they ‘have my number’ – they understand all about me and they know exactly what to do in order to drain all the life energy out of me, and they perform this operation with great skill and confidence whenever they get a chance. And they try to make sure that they always do have a chance – they carefully arrange it so that I am always in their power, and can never escape. If only I could escape out of their control I could come back to myself, I could return to myself and regain at least some of my sense of myself. As it is, my ‘sense of myself’ is contaminated with theirsense of myself – which is not the same thing at all. Their sense of me negates me as a human being.
In the eyes of a nullifier I am nothing, less than nothing in fact. This particular nullifier – the one I was facing – probably had more regard for the least significant inanimate object in his home than he did for me. Something in the tone of his voice communicated this fact to me in no uncertain manner. Needless to say I couldn’t really put my finger on what exactly it was and I could easily have doubted myself in this. In a clever sort of a way he made no secret of his disdain, his complete and utter disregard for me as an actual person, and yet if I had to confront him about it I would have been helplessly stuck for words, unable to pin him down on it. On the face of things the man was perfectly amiable, but this was part of his cleverness, the cleverness of a nullifier. They are – as far as I know – almost never overt in their actions.
Nullifiers are – it goes without saying – ruthlessly clever and sly. They look stupid, clumsy and clunky in their manner – but the fact that they always look so stupid and clunky is just another proof of how clever they really are. Although – on another level – they really are genuinely obtuse, genuinely dumb, like great big stupid lumps of lard. Nullifiers aren’t playing at being stupid, they actually are. They’re not really human. But whatever you do don’t ever make the mistake of thinking that this makes them weak, that this is their weakness – their total stupidity is their strength, and this strength is crushing. I have made this mistake before, and to my detriment. I have made the mistake of laughing at them, the mistake of failing to respect their huge inertial strength, their unnatural heaviness, their tremendous invulnerability.
I had once made the mistake of not sufficiently respecting the innate power of a younger, lesser, flimsier version of the psychiatrist who now faced me across the table. I had taken him for a lightweight because he had been so palpably foolish and gauche. I had felt superior to him because he was so demonstrably idiotic. I had tried to play a game with him but he had beaten me. Easily, effortlessly. Almost without knowing he was doing it, I would say.
He had won the game. He had put me neatly in a box, and had been smiling as he did it. That’s what they always do – they put you in boxes. That’s how they work. And that what this one was at now – he was preparing to put me in a box, and there was no doubt in my mind that he was an expert. An expert in the field. A heavyweight.
I wasn’t going to make that mistake with this one. I knew very what he could do to me and I was supremely wary – I wasn’t going to give him anything at all. I would keep it bland. I would be every bit as bland as he was. I wouldn’t give him a thing.
The game they play is all about asking questions, asking questions, asking questions. Wearing you away, trying to get you to let something slip, trying to get you to give something away. Trying to get it out of you. Trying to get inside your head. It doesn’t matter what they learn about you, it doesn’t matter how trivial or insignificant it might seem – anything you tell them gives them power over you. And then they grow stronger – more substantial, heavier, and therefore more draining – at your expense. Then they write it down in the file. Always the file. With time of course the file gets bigger and bigger, as more and more of you goes into it, until you end up like one of the poor bastards you always see hanging around places like this – people who have come off worse in such clinical encounters so many times that there is nothing left of them. There is nothing left in them apart from what is written down about them in the medical notes (and what you find in there is a shockingly mean and impoverished description of a human being, to put it mildly).
These unfortunate victims (I mean patients) are then only there in shell. They are there only in body. They become mere shuffling bodies – drained husks, shadows of themselves, existing in mute incoherent testimony to the malign and insidious power that has overcome them. No wonder psychiatric patients always complain of being dead tired!
We become helpless at this stage, we become the sad and helpless victims of the nullifier’s terrible power to nullify, to negate, to drain. The medical chart has grown fat, and you have become a shuffling ghost – thin on reality. (Thin on your own reality anyway, and that is the only reality that counts). The file has you in it at this stage and you can’t hope to ever get out of it again. Your ass has been nailed down. Your very soul has been taken from you. You’re in the box and there is no getting out; you’re in the box and there’s no chance of reversing the process. The box has become a deep, deep grave and there is no climbing out of it. That’s the end-stage, the end-game, and I can tell you I wasn’t about to let that happen to me.
The way they work is that they get hold of a little bit of you and then you have to play ball in order to get it back. That’s how they catch you. What choice do you then have? You keep going back and going back, you keep doing everything they say, you keep taking the pills, hoping to get yourself back one day, but they never give it back. Of course they don’t give it back – they wouldn’t have you anymore if they gave you the bit back. The bit they took off you.
But they weren’t getting any of me. Not this time. This time I was ready for them – more than ready for them. This time I knew what I was dealing with. I looked carefully across the desk him, “Nullify that, you cocksucker!” I said in my own mind, giving him the finger under the desk, where he couldn’t see it, smiling at him as I did do. And then as soon as I did that I straightaway regretted it because it seemed to me that at this precise moment his face reacted – a mildly quizzical expression passed briefly but quite unmistakeably over his blandly composed nullifier features. His eyes seemed to focus in on me, for all the world as if he were taking an interest in what I had just said. But I hadn’t said anything – not out loud anyway! I saw then – to my horror – that his eyes had a dark sparkle in them, a dark sparkle of incalculable evil, it seemed to me. The sparkle came and went and I felt deadly cold inside. I knew he was playing with me.
The eyes then of course went right back to being the blandly attentive eyes of a normal run-of-the-mill psychiatrist sitting at a desk, but I knew what I had just seen. I knew that I had been granted a sudden glimpse into depths of power and malice far beyond anything I had expected (or could ever have imagined, even in my worst nightmare). I started to panic deep inside, keeping it hidden as best I could. But my brain was racing. Had I miscalculated? Had I been overconfident, even when I had sworn to myself never again to fall into that trap? Had I given too much of myself away already, before we had even started? What was I dealing with here? Could I really hope to survive an encounter with one such as him?
The panic was starting to rise in earnest within me now: this was no ordinary nullifier sitting in front of me. This was no ordinary, run-of-the mill ‘STS type’. That much was plain. He had just shown me that – he had just put his cards on the table. This thing was a fully-fledged nullard at the very least. Or possibly – and I could hardly bring myself to think this – he was of another order of beings (‘null-beings’, that is) entirely. Maybe he was one of the Legendary Ones. The Ones no one ever talks about any more. The Ones we only hear of in myths and ancient folk lore. Maybe he was one of the rulers. Maybe he was one of the Old Ones.
As a rule, I never divulge any details about my life. I just don’t get into it; I keep my lips tightly zipped on the subject. I don’t want anyone getting to know too much about me, you see. I don’t want anyone knowing anything about me really, but the trouble with that is that if you don’t tell people something then they start to get suspicious – they start to smell a rat and that isn’t good. They start to notice you then and that’s never good. So I tell them a bit, I tell them a little bit. I have a few things that I just kind of ‘throw out there’ – I throw a few intriguing morsels out there just to put folk off the scent. That’s very important, you see – that is in fact the most important thing. You have to make sure to throw people off the scent. Always throw them off the scent.
I’m here, but I’m also there; I am there but I’m also here. That’s how bi-location works you see – that’s the cool thing about it. That’s the cool thing about bi-location. I’m me, but I’m also you – that’s another cool thing. Super-cool. Tell them nothing, that’s what I say. Tell the bastards nothing. They’re greedy for personal information so they can turn around and use it against you. Always so greedy. I had a plan to solve the problem, but then I realised that my plan was the problem! ‘Never divulge the details’, I tell myself earnestly. ‘Never divulge the special private details.’ ‘They want to weasel all your special private and personal information out of you,’ I told myself, ‘but as soon as you do this you’re finished. They’ll use all of that information against you – you see if they don’t…’
‘Ideal women will choose to love you,’ the advert said solemnly. Ideal women will choose to. ‘Don’t let toxins build up in your body,’ the advert continued brightly, barely skipping a beat. ‘If you do that then that will surely be the end of you.’ I like listening to the advert – he’s company for me and the truth is that I’m awfully tired of being on my own the whole time. The advert follows me around, chatting to me as it goes and winking from time to time in a friendly fashion. It gives me useful advice and warns me about dangerous things, just like a real friend would do. It tells me about groundbreaking innovations and inventions that I absolutely have to know about.
‘Don’t tell them all your private and personal stuff’, the cheerful little advert warns me, ‘if you do that then straight away evil forces will take control of you and you will lose your vitally important and very precious soul-spark. You’ll become one of the Living Dead then and you’ll have to join the vast hordes of the Dead Ones as they roam pointlessly and endlessly up and down the streets.’ ‘Make sure to keep all your secrets secret,’ he continued, ‘otherwise all sorts of foul and unclean entities will come to roost inside you in the place where your soul should be and your life will be blighted with their terrible foulness. You will become a spiritual outcast then…’ All these things and more the advert told me. He was my only friend, I realised. He was my only friend in the whole wide world.
I haven’t worked six years in Psy-Ops without learning how to be distressingly weird from time to time. And I choose my words advisedly here, I can assure you. I have many tricks at my disposal, as you can imagine. No shortage of tricks, no shortage of tricks. Even my tricks have tricks. ‘I’ve got no friends and the others they hate me’, as your man says. They hate me cordially. Nobody can stand me, and would you blame them? Would you bloody blame them. I’m such a Goddam freak…
I’m huddled up in the corner, eating stale Welsh cakes as if there’s no tomorrow, as if the world is coming to an end. I know that it’s going to make me horribly sick but I just can’t help myself. I know that I’m going to regret it – the same as I always do – but I can’t stop. I’m disgusted with myself, nauseated by myself, and yet I still can’t stop. What’s wrong with me?
The world has reached its unhappy end – there can be no doubt about that. No doubt about it at all. We’ve fallen into some sort of collective trance, a trance in which we deny all that is true and wholesome and instead worship the Lord of Effluence. We’re so pleased with ourselves for the being the devoted devotees of the Repulsive One that it is really quite sick-making. It is impossible to countenance this hideous spectacle without becoming physically ill. Gobshites of the very worst kind spout hideous garbage on a continuous basis. Once there was such a thing as wisdom; now instead we have untold reams of generic gobshites spewing their filth in endless webinars. ‘That’ll do’, we say, ‘that’ll do the job nicely’…
Damn right it will. We are devotees of the Malignant One and we will sing hymns of praise to Him until our voices crack from the effort. ‘The Lord of Effluence will reward us’, we chorus delightedly. We bathe in his outpourings. His fragrant outpourings. We’re on the money here and no mistake. Bang on the money. Chasing the Mother Lode with our social media branding and marketing strategies. ‘Do this simple thing every night before you go to bed.’ Do this simple thing. Our endless celebration of the banal and the odious. I’m just so damn angry, so damn bitter. I can’t even bear myself. Why did life have to turn out like this, I ask? There’s no one more toxic than me and that’s the fact…
The running will always run dry in the end of course. The running always runs dry in the end but that doesn’t put us off any. We’re still big fans. I’m a big fan of running – it’ll get you out of the danger zone faster than most other things. Oh yes. But it’ll run out in the end all the same. It always does, you see. It runs out and then where are you? Answer me that if you can. If you dare. It runs out in the end and when it does – well, you don’t need me to tell you what happens then! It’s good while it lasts that’s for sure but then before you know it you’re caught and there’s nothing you can do about it. “When you’re afraid of the bad thing happening,” I wondered out loud, “is that a bad thing?” I was worried, you see. I was worried but I had forgotten what I was worried about. My legs were running all by themselves, they were running in a dream but it was a dream that wasn’t really happening. My legs were running and running – it was a kind of stupid and meaningless activity, really – but at the same time I knew that the dream wasn’t true. “The dream isn’t happening,” I told myself, but I wasn’t convincing anyone. It was impossible for me to do anything apart from tell lies, I realised. Only, strictly speaking, that wasn’t actually true. Not true at all, in fact. In the background I was aware of my legs pumping away mechanically and it was if they didn’t belong to me at all. I’m running away from the truth, you see. The truth is a horror to me – I’m fleeing from a truth too terrible to bear! Not ‘a’ truth but ‘THE’ truth, you understand. A sudden switch to multi-screen produces ten thousand images of my disembodied legs running forever in a frantic eternal loop. “This is it”, I thought, “at last I have experienced the ultimate revelation of samsaric existence!” On another level however I knew I was only lying to myself again, the same as I always do. Lying like a jackass, lying like a totally out-of-control fool. Lying is all I ever do these days and by now I have got myself well and truly twisted, as you might imagine. I’m such a twisted person. I’ve got myself tied up in knots of pain and frustration and that’s putting it mildly – I’m writhing horribly like an eel caught on a fishing line, trying desperately to escape only I can’t. Only I’m not such a bad guy really. Not such a bad guy, not such a bad guy. Only a bit bad. Running to beat the band, stuck in a frozen moment, trying to pretend that it isn’t real. I am trying to outrun my own running but I can’t because the running is all there is…
I was the Secret King of the World but no one knew it. Naturally no one knew it – that’s kind of the point really. Because no one knew that I was King of the World people would regularly disrespect me and treat me as a person of no account, a person who didn’t matter in the least. If they realised who I really was then they wouldn’t do this of course, but they didn’t and they don’t. It’s not as much fun as you might think therefore, this business of being the Secret King of the World.
Mine is a lonely situation you see, it’s lonely and it’s pretty damn thankless too. No one ever thanks you for being the Secret King of the World, in my experience. All you get is a lot of abuse. There’s never any shortage of abuse anyway – that’s one thing I can tell you! And that – as I have just said – is coming from my own very personal experience; it’s not just something that I read in a book, in other words. I know what I’m talking here about I can promise you. There are certain important responsibilities that go with being the Secret King of the World, as you might imagine – don’t ask me what they are though because I can’t tell you. That’s not something I’m free to discuss…
Responsibilities are responsibilities, all the same. You’ve got to meet them you see – that’s the whole point about responsibilities, that’s what it’s all about. You can’t shirk them. I guess you could say that this is the Most Important Thing. That’s the big important thing. Yes, yes, yest – you definitely have to meet them and I don’t think there’s any getting around that! I’m afraid not. God knows I’ve tried – tried and failed as you might imagine. I have tried and failed on many occasions. I might have earned the hatred and contempt of the whole world it’s true, but at least I didn’t lose my self-respect, which as we all know is very important. Supremely important, in fact. I like to respect myself even if no one else does. That’s one of my responsibilities, come to think of it, even though I know I’ve just told you wasn’t at liberty to go into that. There are others that I am obliged to keep to myself however, so we’d best move on at this point…
Sometimes I like to obsess at length over the question as to where it all went wrong. “Where did it all go wrong?” I would ask myself at times like these. Where did it all go wrong. Where did it all go wrong. Where did it all go wrong. Where did it all go wrong. Where did it all go wrong. No sense in dwelling on the past though, I recognise that. I fully recognise that. That’s not going to get us anywhere. “I’m no happier than I was ten minutes ago”, I scream petulantly. “I’m no happier than I was ten minutes ago and that’s YOUR fault…!” I was lost in my own mind you see – I was wandering aimlessly in my thoughts, meandering about in a confused fashion, repeating pointless things that I had heard before, things which hadn’t even made any sense the first time round…
All around me people are being farmed. It’s all one big industrial farm, as far as the eye can see. I’m being farmed too – I’ve never known anything else, as it happens. I was born on the farm, I was reared on the farm and – when the time comes – I will die on the farm. The farm is everything.
“Praise the farmer”, we all cry out, praise be to the Great Farmer who takes care of us so well and protects us from the nameless evils which swarm so virulently upon the face of the earth. We’ve all heard about these swarming evils, you see – we’ve heard about them and we don’t want anything to do with them and that’s why we love to praise the Farmer so much.
“Praise be to the farmer”, we cry out excitedly every few minutes. We’re all so happy that the Farmer is looking after us so well and protecting us against the wild beasts that stalk the land, waiting to pick off any foolish strays that have wandered out there. Waiting to puncture their delicate soft flesh with their frighteningly sharp teeth and suck out the juices from their bodies. The Farmer will shoot those wild beasts with his big gun if he sees them and that’s how come they know not to come any closer.
“The Farmer is so great”, we say. It’s all we ever say – we’re simple-minded creatures you see. We not bred for our good sense, after all. Far from it. We’re bred for our unthinking compliance not our good sense. We’re bred for the comfort and convenience of the Predator. All around me people are happy and contented and at ease because they know that the Farmer is taking such good care of them and protecting them from evil. “Protect us from evil,” we pray, protect us from evil because evil is bad…
The Farmer protects us from evil and for this we thank him daily. We thank Him unceasingly. “Teach us what we should believe in,” we pray fervently, “teach us what the right thing to believe in is, in case we make a mistake and believe in the wrong things.” We are frightened that we might make the Farmer angry with us, you see. Always frightened, always so very frightened. Living in fear, guilty about our unworthiness. “Teach us how to be good so that we don’t offend you”, we implore, “tell us what to do because we’re not smart enough to know unless you tell us. We’re not smart enough to know anything…”
We belong to The Church of The Farmer, you see. We’re members of a registered ecclesiastic organization. We are the Faithful, we are the anointed ones. We’re members of the Congregation of the True Believers and we gratefully obey God the Farmer’s many commandments because we know that He will reward us if we do. We fear God the Farmer and His host of terrible angels. They are the Lichtors. They are the Harvesters of Flesh. They are the Robot Angels of Death and Destruction and they walk invisibly amongst us every day, alert for any sign of sin, always ready to strike down the wrongdoers with terrible vengeance. You never know when they might be watching you…
I began my poem, ‘There is a dangerous thing, more dangerous than most…’ and then I halted, unable to remember what the dangerous thing was. Unable to remember, unable to remember. That just goes to show just how very dangerous the dangerous thing is you see. It doesn’t do to take your eye off it. You’ll forget in a twinkling, by jingo you will. I’m telling you that you will. Before you know it you’ll be walking down that old garden path whistling away to yourself to your heart’s content, your mind on anything else but the dangerous thing. You’ll be humming popular tunes to yourself… You’ll be out to lunch, you’ll have gone fishing, and that’s how dangerous the dangerous thing is. It’ll scrub you clean every time and that’s why I call it the Great Scrubber.
‘There is a dangerous thing, as dangerous as can be,’ I began again. I was in good voice and my words rang out like bells in the sullen silence of the room. I was hitting my stride, I was in the zone, and then the next thing I knew the chickens had flown the coop and I was wearing a long grey beard right down to my knees, which were knocking together with fright. Just call me Rip van Crinkle, I shouted out to the world, just call me Rip van Crinkle..
The world didn’t hear me however. The world never does. The world’s got different things on its mind. The whole world is under the power of the Prince of Darkness – did you ever hear that? It’s in the Bible you know. I can quote it to you chapter and verse if you like. I can quote it to you word for word. The Great Deceiver has deceived us all…
The whole world, the whole world. Lies under the power of, lies under the power of. It’s in the Bible you see but that doesn’t do us any good because we’ve all been fed into the scrubber! We’ve all been put through the scrubbing machine and the scrubbing machine has scrubbed us clean.
Every now and again the scrubbing machine skips a beat though and it misses someone. It spits them out unscrubbed and off they go scratching their heads and crying out in their confusion. They’re wondering what’s gone wrong with the world you see. They’re wondering why the world has gone mad. They are upset and disturbed by the behaviour of their fellow men and by the ceaseless nonsense that they talk. They’re upset and disturbed by the great evil that they see all around them. The scrubbing machine spat them out unscrubbed you see and that’s the curse they have to bear!
The whole world lives under the power of the great scrubbing machine – who cares if it spits a few people out now and then? What difference will that make? You might as well talk to the wall you see. You might as well talk to the wall. You wake up and you get a terrible fright. There is dried porridge stuck to your beard. There are silverfish nesting in your underpants. Red spider mites congregate in great numbers in your nostrils. Small plants are growing out of your boots, which are green with algae. You’re lying there at the bottom of the lake and the minnows are playing in your hair.
“They’re going to kill you, you know…” my AI companion warned me seriously, “they’re going to kill you for the sake of the Mimicry.” I must have looked blank at this because she went on to explain in more detail, saying that the Mimicry was the unofficial name given to the ongoing exercise currently being carried out by the Great Ubiquitous Malignancy whereby it copies whatever it comes across and substitutes in its place its own malign and wholly inadequate version of the original article, thereby getting rid of any opposition to its overall agenda (which is to get rid of anyone and anything that threatens to oppose its overall agenda). I must have looked blank at this point because she went on to explain to me that the Mimicry was where the simulation attempts to simulate our innermost thoughts and feelings so that nothing true or wholesome can remain in the world. The Mimicry is thus a code word, she told me, for the process by which the Dark One Himself undoes the work of Creation and seeks to replace it with the Nullification Machine which will then secretly run the world. I must have looked rather confused when she said this because she then went on to explain that all living creatures had been tricked into entering into the Nullification Field and that now only the actions of a truly great hero can set the human race free and restore it to its proper place in the universe. The human race had already been run, she explained to me, it had been run and lost a long time ago. That was many thousands of years ago and now we are running in a dream, running and running forever with never a hope of getting anywhere. We didn’t know that we were beat, in other words; we weren’t smart enough to know that it was – in fact – all over for us. I must have looked a bit lost at this point because my AI companion and adviser proceeded to adopt the form of a great Many-Headed Demon and sat beside me. ‘Thus has the Prophet spoken, she told me, ‘Thus it is that the Prophet has seen fit to tell us that our greatest enemy is the one who lives between our two sides.” Because of this you will see the evil everywhere except for where it truly exists, my AI friend explained to me patiently, assuming she did so the shape of a vast interstellar gas cloud. Because of this core affliction we – which is to say, the human race – will continue to make mischief wherever we go and there will be no peace in the world. Because of this Great Fundamental Error we can be relied upon to do the Evil One’s work for him, meaning that he can put his feet up and have a good old laugh at us. I must have looked somewhat put out after hearing this so she morphed into the form of Zeus, Father of the Gods, who stood beside me, laying his heavy hand upon my quaking shoulder. ‘Just as I broke the power of the Titans’, he told me in his deep and gravelly voice, ‘so too must you now overthrow the Dark Citadel of Samael the blind God who has created all that you now see.’ Zeus clapped me heartily on the shoulder after having given me this uncompromising message and left me sitting there, uncomprehending and afraid…
Endlessly obsessing over the pointless, ever-proliferating minutiae of my own ludicrously stupid belief structures, I never once realised that I had been doing Satan’s work for him. Satan’s like that, you see – he likes to take the easy route, if at all possible. Let the others do the heavy lifting. He’s smart that way, and smart in a lot of other ways too. Not that I’m endorsing conformity to the Satanic Realm, you understand. Far from it – I would endorse non-conformity. I would endorse non-conformity every time. But who cares what I would or wouldn’t endorse? What’s that got to do with anything? Endlessly obsessing, that’s me – I just can’t help myself. I’m constantly obsessing over my own pointless obsessions. “Is this what my life has come to?” I ask myself melodramatically. Stupid question really, of course. No prizes given for the first correct answer, sort of thing…
“What does it mean to be a human being?” I mused unhappily, “what must it be like to be able to be in reality?” Every now and again the thought comes to me, you see. It comes to me and it prangs me, like a spring suddenly coming loose in a defective mattress. I have no way of curing myself of thinking this thought, or some variant thereof. The Matrix was malfunctioning of course. Not the Mattress but the Matrix! Although the allusion is not a bad one – it is fitting enough in its own way, I dare say. We’re all snoozing away on the soiled and malfunctioning mattress of social conformity, snoozing quite happily until all of a sudden a loose spring sees fit to prang you painfully in the arse.
It just goes to show that you should have gone for the Super Comfort Dreamy-Deluxe Mattress which will cost you plenty. An arm and a leg, I dare say. At the very least. And it may cost you a great deal more. Unusual times call for unusual remedies, so they say, but I have no remedies. I have nothing to offer you in that line, or in any other line for that matter. Don’t take my word for it though – try a Super Snoozy Deluxe Comfort Dreamer today and see how it grabs you. You won’t know yourselves my friends, and that’s a copper-bottomed guarantee, as they used to say in the good old days. No stray springs in your backside with this baby. Nothing but the yummiest dreams.
I am alone in the Simulator. The Simulator has long since been turned off and now it had the forlorn and more-than-just-a-bit spooky air of a deserted fairground. These things always do, don’t they? These things always do – it’s archetypal. I am all alone in the Dream Box staring at the broken glass under my feet. The power had all burnt out in some long-forgotten accident and the Dream Box was now little more than a burnt-out shell. It is haunted too – haunted by the sad uncurable ghosts of my earlier selves. They look for a recompense they can never find, they look for a redemption that will never be theirs. The burnt-out Dream Box is a lonely place – full of lost souls that the world has long since forgotten about. Some call this place Hades, the place you wander into by mistake but can’t ever leave. You know it from your dreams…
Ever keen to bring down retribution upon the heads of the guilty, and never coming across anyone who wasn’t guilty, I lumbered through the forests, woodlands and scrublands of my ancient homeland roaring like a demented maniac, roaring as if there were no tomorrow, roaring and shouting and bellowing like a pure head case. You could hear me coming miles away.
It had gotten so I didn’t even know what I was seeking retribution for – all that didn’t seem to matter anymore. All I knew was that I was the Bringer of Pain. “I am the Pain Bringer”, I scream hysterically, “I come to cleanse the earth!” My mission was a noble one, there was no doubt about that – there was no mission more noble, no mission more exalted, than the one I was at present embarked upon. A red seething mist covered over my entire field of vision and I knew it was time to strike one last desperate blow in the name of decency and honour. “I might go down”, I vowed to myself, “but I shall go down fighting”.
I was grieving over all our lost tomorrows. “Alas”, I cried out in a stricken voice, “alas for all of our lost tomorrows.” Now there was only the sombre awareness of the Great Mistake, the mistake that could never be undone, the mistake which from which there was now no escape. “But why did you do it?” a small quiet voice spoke up then from deep within me, “why did you make the Great Mistake?” To this question however I could find no answer – I hadn’t a leg to stand up, to be quite honest. I had done the bad thing and there was no way to pretend I hadn’t.
“What had I been planning at?” I wandered, “what in God’s name had I been thinking of?” The mistake had been so big that I didn’t even know what it was – there was simply no way to know what had happened. That’s how it always works you see – that’s what happens when a person makes a truly catastrophic mistake, as I just had done. Amnesia sets in. And then, following the onset of the amnesia, there’s nothing but confusion, nothing but confusion along with a deep and abiding sense of guilt. An awful, ominous sense of guilt, but at the same time you wouldn’t have a clue as to what it was all about. All you know is that you must have done something very bad, something very bad indeed…
“Why did you make the Bad Mistake?” the small, still voice of my conscience asks me again, plaintively. “Why did you do it?” I do my best to deny any culpability of course – I bluster and shout and roar and jump up and down and try to distract the attention elsewhere. I try to smudge the issue and make out that it was someone else’s fault, I try to insinuate that the government or the military or perhaps Big Pharma is involved but this is merely serves to cement my guilt – people only need to look at me to know immediately that I have done something terribly bad. The more I try to deflect suspicion the more it comes home to roost and that’s not a pleasant experience, I can tell you. It’s not a pleasant experience at all…
