Cleansing!

A Novel

1

Chigwell Row, Greater London. 2080

They left and I was so glad about it. I mean it could have been worse. I could have been in a real prison and struggle to understand the reality of all realities – freedom – but am not. And thank you God for that.

I guess, one has to be ruthless with time management these days. It really is a tremendously difficult balancing act trying to keep up with expectations of life. My family have been waiting outside the door for a good few hour. They have attempted to climb the walls in the garden to try and see if they can get in but to no avail. They attempted to throw heavy rocks and steel bars trying to wake me up. To no avail. Only by luck, as I was landing back on earth, that my Vertigo went quiet, and I heard the loud banging outside. I was initially in need of a heart jumpstart really, but then I realised quickly enough that I, actually needed to come off it. And I did. But regretted it immediately.

I do the honourable and really, really generous thing and open the front door. There they are. My two boys. Without being too rude I made sure that they know that I am angry and not happy.

‘Where have you been dad?’ James, the youngest asks. I mean what a silly think to ask, ‘where have I been!’ ‘Where else would I have been? Where would I go? Where else would I have been? I have been here. I have been in my Vertigo for a few weeks now. I told you. I have sent you a text.’ They slam the door behind, and I am struggling to orient myself in my own home.

James is the nosey one, David is less so, but you can be deceived by his silence.

‘But dad, we were worried. It’s been over twelve weeks since we last spoke and you weren’t meant to be on a Vertigo for that long’ David said.

I gave him the look. He does not like it but insists.

‘Dad, you got to stop going on it for such a long time. You just cannot do it. Doctor Harper told you not to. You know very well that you are not meant to do that’ David insists.

I managed to find the bar stool, taking a deep breath, and struggling to keep up with my steps, I sat on the stool and looked at both of them staring at me.

James throws a ‘Are you ok dad?’ and David shakes his head.

‘I am ok.’ I spoke.

David, never the generous one. Aims for the whisky in my cupboard. It’s an old bottle that I haven’t tried for a few months now. But David being David knows what would cheer me up and that is a glass of Whisky in late afternoon.

‘You can have this after it. Can you?’ he asked.

‘Yes’, I said once I looked at James to read his mood. It’s funny how one feels obliged to ask for kids’ approval when you are an old parent. It’s funny how things turn out when you are only slightly older than you would like to be. They become over-protective, and we end up seeing the world blurred and dark.

All I wanted from them is just a bit more understanding and a lot more, what is the word! Compassion or even to be left alone. I thought I was an adult, and they were the children. I mean how are they supposed to interfere in my lonely life like this. Anyhow, he pours the whisky onto a glass which has not been washed and I already knew he was about to say something as he noticed the glass not clean.

‘Daaad. I mean’ Yep. I knew it. I just gave him the looks. He stopped. He moved on and I was bewildered as to the purpose of their ‘visit.’

‘We just came in to see you dad. Is that all right?’ Of course, you idiot. I wanted to say. It’s just I tried and do it at the right time.

‘Of course. I appreciate it very much. But guys you need to be able to understand that I can’t be interrupted like this. You know how dangerous this can be for my health’ I look at their slaying faces. They look at each other in disbelief.

It is the youngest one who would say something harder to swallow up this time.

‘No, no, no, you do not understand. Mum is dying. You need to come with us now and, you will have to say the last words. She is not well. She has not been well for some time now.’ They look at each other once more before saying more.

‘She has asked for you. She wants to see you before she leaves this world’ Huh, I could not believe it. I mean what are the chances. After all that malarkey of divorce and more and she wants to see me. She wants to see me before she dies!

‘Ok. I am sorry boys. Am so sorry. I understand. Let me just go and put some clothes on and then we can get over there quickly.’ I spoke.

I must admit the outside world has got a bit different. I feel like I do not belong on this earthly living anymore. Empty. It has been a few months since I have purchased the more mega-powerful Vertigo XIX. New way of enduring the pain of going through your life’s dreams and aspirations in a world where you know very well it is not real.

But, what is real anyway!? I mean you could say that reality and the REAL does not exist itself.

It is a bit chilly. The house where my boys and ex live are only three streets down the road.

We cross the road and I stand at the edge of the zebra crossing and look in both sides of the road for an incoming traffic.

David pulls me over and says ‘Dad, there is no car. They have vanished. Everybody is in their lair. Roads are empty and meaningless.’ I look at him as if to say – how come? What do you mean? - but I have to keep my pretence going. I have been in IT for longer than three months according to my Inter Sense. It just displayed me my results. I have scored three lifelines which means I am eligible for another insurance extension FOR ONE YEAR. Oh no. I cannot help myself but be very happy. But I try to keep my pretence with my boys. I try and contain my happiness until I realise that I am approaching a funeral. A body who is going to be a funeral very soon. She was my worst nightmare for most of times. Bloody challenging work she was.

We approach the front door. Its number 79. Red. I remember it very well. Now the colour of the door brings me a lot of memories. Good ones and the bad ones too. I remember when David and James were little boys, they used to roam these roads in their bikes. I stop right outside the door and I say to David to let me be for a minute or so.

I can see from the distance that there are a lot of her friends inside the house and my initial instinct is not to go in. I hate crowds. I mean what do they want there anyway!

I look away at the end of the street. I see all these houses boarded up and some of them uninhabitable. No cars parked outside properties and some of them have signed up for their permanent contracts PERMANENCY PASSPORTS. They get all the advantages of a life-long membership on the ORMERTA – hard to get to but if mental issues or life difficulties take over one’s life then this is the best solution. You go there, you isolate yourself permanently, your property becomes part of the Digi-Council and after five years you get reallocated at the ORMERTA. Huh, forever losing your existence. Oh, well you become part of something and that something is the data source on the underbelly of permanency. The air stinks though. David was telling me earlier that we have to watch for vicious animals who are impalpable, patrolling our streets. Some of these animals are of the tropical origins, Africa and South of India. I smell them actually. I can smell the animal kingdom. It brings a lot of memories of a life gone past long ago. I remember my safari days. Oh well! What’s gone its gone. If it ever existed.

I step in and everybody with their heads down almost take an instant dislike of me. I can actually feel the rumour under the tongue: ‘Oh here we go, the man, the father who has abandoned his children, the highly transactional husband who abandons his wife. Here we go – that’s the bastard who doesn’t care for anything in the world. There we go – there he is, what a prick, what a wanker…’ They don’t stop don’t they. David pulls me forward to go and see his mum. My ex-wife who has had the guts to actually invite me to be there at the last minutes of her life. And, me being me, never understanding the WHY. Why would you like something like this. I mean I am absolutely, completely emotionless. I have no feelings. I can’t think straight. I have been pulled away from my Vertigo and brought back here to mourn the death of somebody to whom I have not had any emotional or physical attachment for a very long time!

Anyhow. I get closer to her and began pondering exactly the same question I have had for some time now. She is holding my hands and I am looking around to see who I can kick out as I don’t feel very comfortable.

‘Sorry guys, you need to leave. Can’t I not have some private time with my ex-wife’ I said. This bunch of youngsters who are more likely to be James’s friends as they share the same outlook and hair style and age as him. Leave the room, slightly embarrassed. I shut the door back. James wants to come in, but I refuse to let him in. ‘What if she dies now?’ He asks terrifyingly. I stop there at the cusp of shutting the door on his face. ‘She won’t die now. She won’t die because she won’t.’ My response’s a bit unconvincing, partly knackered and unjustified doesn’t satisfy James. If it wasn’t for David to come and pull James away at that moment, I would’ve killed my own son. The prick.

I take a semi-sitting position in the bed. It is very smooth. ‘This is our bed. We bought this twenty years ago. Do you remember Alex?’ She asks me.

I respond with a smooth YES. She isn’t sad, she looks happy. For the first time in my life, I must admit I can see through her. I can actually sense that she is going, and she is leaving us. I get this funny feeling deep inside my heart. I don’t understand. I know I am not in my Vertigo. But where am I then? What is this!? Is this some kind of super-heavenly send off!? Together we’re conquering heavens or something. I was not meant to feel anything. But I do. She looks at me potently and wants to say something. ‘I have seen. I have seen so much. I know what it is…’ Closes her eyes. I am speechless. She tightens my hand and then a smooth and gentle let go. To be honest it felt like the devil released me. All my twisted incoherent thinking instantly stopped and the waves of optimism and positivity conquered my mind.

What do I do now!? I thought to myself. Arice, Arice, Arice. I call out. But, of course no response forthcoming from her. She was gone. She has gone there where she thinks she can see. Or she did see.

I am left here licking wounds now. What do I do. I call out James. Why James!? I don’t know. My brain is working funnily. David. I call out again. Both come in a nutcasey hurry. ‘Whatsup, whatsup?’

‘Your mother is gone’ I have never seen young man sob so much in my entire life. I move away from the bed and take position as a guilty man for all his undoing. His sins never washing away from his consciousness. I take my place in the corner of the room. I watch them two sobbing and pulling almost all her skin off her body. Other men and women walk in the room. James is the one that took her death the hardest. I decide to step in. Behave like a father and help my sons out. At last!

It took us a few good minutes to try and take these boys away from their mother’s body. Everything else, straight after Arice’s death became something else. My sons started not to care much about their father, and I began looking at them as my life’s impostors and not people who should be there for me. I mean far-fetched. A lot of wishful thinking that has been going in my mind lately.

**

You know it’s been over a week since I haven’t been in Vertigo. Life is weird and empty. Not much to do out here. I mean I could contemplate and feel like I can do anything and go anywhere and visit places and stuff. But isn’t very nice really. There are no people at all out there. Towns are completely empty of people and retail. Not much breathes in our cities anymore. All these van drivers with superspeed boosters attached to their arches, speeding crazy down the road delivering goods and occasional robot prostitutes. I decide to go a bit further from my town. Just because I am bored and I feel contempt for anything that doesn’t move. My reflexes have gone better since I contracted Arthritis a few years back. My doctor online told me that the situation is improved because I had kept my muscles moving and have been active on Vertigo which apparently helps a lot. I am contend. I lost an ex-wife and have probably, highly likely a long life ahead of me. But still feel neutral. Passive. Unhinged sometimes.

I have two more days to kill before I embark on my next reality of utter happiness. Many would consider me crazy and delusional if we were on the previously enamoured years of total crisis and lower self-esteem – the years of early thirties. But, we’re not. I think we have moved from the world of assumptions and certainty has completely been removed from our vocabulary. This is what I try and tell my boys – keep heads down, and chin up and be proud of your every day encounters and let’s not overkill on all of this thing called “HOPE”. It has always been overstated. I can’t emphasise enough. I look back very often. But find no solace on thoughts of recovered memories modestly. I don’t like the idea. I think this is for the idiosyncratic moronically favoured people. You know, they tried to envisage a world full of moving particles, you know the collection of these never-ending, energy-pumping little atoms that supersede any sense of rational thinking – they detect our level of happiness and determine which genetical code to decode first and then…! Its called Genification They tried that back in the forties, and I tell you what – boom, the motherfuckers, inhaled so much poison on the testing that the whole stratagem of a marvellous, well-equipped laboratory went into flames. You know what they called it? You know the failure? ‘A bad investment’. Christ’s sake what a garbage. They never admitted the fault of our preconceptions and built-in limitations. They failed and they don’t want to accept it. Because you know what – it will turn out that the whole project will just be a bad investment.

Two days, going back on the Perdue Road – is a long time. Its like picking up a journey and, without realising too much as an afterthought that you are actually embarking on a sleep-walk and head-bashing the walls until your mamma wakes up your pappa and real head-bashing is when he hits you so hard that you wake-up unintelligently realising that you have been in deep sleep.

But, I must be patient and that is not a virtue I am inclined to be in possession of.

**

I cracked a small bone on my left ankle. It hurts. One more reason to head back at my home and repair the damage by going into my Vertigo. How happy I am, how awful I feel that my visit to Perdue Road is not to be realised now. I am heading back. The fields in front of me are a real challenge. They are steep and slippery with a lot of undeterred greenery and shrubs. I am actually scared to go through it all. I mean I have no choice. I have to go past it, through it even if it is a live sand laid out in front of me.

2

Last night, I had to come off the Vertigo. It was terrifying. I couldn’t take it. I chose something extraordinary light but it turned out to be lethal. Phew. I took my Vertigo and headed downstairs. Didn’t know where the switch for the lights was. So, I hobbled somehow towards the kitchen and I didn’t get it how dark it got out there. I mean I have only been on it for two days and just looking over the window all you see is total darkness without any regard to human living. Not a soul. Anyhow, I managed to get to the fridge and drank a lot of orange juice. It made matters worse as it increased the level of my indigestion and it was hurting. I managed to follow it up straight after juice with some whole milk and the milk was expired but still had to drink it to stop the indigestion pain. I sat in the sofa in the lounge, trying to figure out what was going on with me and I couldn’t work out how much I should feel happy and how much feel disappointed. I think it was partly to do with the experience on Vertigo. I hadn’t imagined a more inexorable pain which felt like it was knitting inside my brain. I mean, of course you could argue that the price you pay when you succumbed to the world of virtual reality, it is what it is. But, somehow it reached certain points of my brain that wasn’t accessed by my consciousness. I don’t know it probably was the receptors of my brain hiding and not telling me something or it might well be some kind of early signs of Dementia that I am getting and isn’t allowing or hasn’t allowed me to experience those thoughts. But, there was something more fundamental. It felt almost like somebody was overriding levels of my conscience and that I wasn’t able to control them. I looked at the manual I signed with Kheops about the consciousness products and I can’t remember if I have signed something with Megatrust or HorizonXIX. Ahhhh, brain’s hurting. I needed to know which one’s which what I signed in the first place. I did manage in the end to find out that Kheops is my consciousness product manager, Megatrust is the owner of my borderlines security, HorizonXIX is owner of my devices and Orbit-Orion10 is the security provider of my whole brain matter. I mean, it can’t get more competent and self-assuring than that. I did verify the signatures. They were my actual handwritten signatures and I was happy. A sense of relief took over my senses once I discovered these signatures and the contracts with them. I leaned back. I needed to head back to Vertigo to get myself out of the whole I put myself in. But something more interesting happened. I stopped on the way up and looked or peered through the curtain to see outside. And what do I see! Well, a van scanning all houses looking for something. Initially I thought it might be burglars. Considering these days burglars are unsuccessful on their enterprise due to the fact that most of the houses are actual fortifications. No way in and most of the time no way out either. So, I became very curious very quickly. I hopped upstairs as fast as a fly and grabbed my tracksuit and a black hooded top. My trainers were underneath the staircase and by the time I had put them on, the van managed to flee away from our street all the way down the road but this time was going a bit faster. I decoded the door from inside and took night-vision with me just in case. Locked the door from behind and headed to chase them on my bike. What was meant to be a simple task of giving a chase to a suspicious van with a dodgy inscription on its side, turned out to be more of a terrifying misconception, bad judgement and cracking encounters. I was hoping for one and the hope faded away pretty soon because for the first time in many years, I did manage to cross-over. I crossed over by chasing a bunch of loonies who are not better at running away from a scaredy chicken than a toad is a fast swimmer. They seemed to have penetrated through the shrubs and the greenery that has taken over our streets and onto the park. Or what was known as the Noak Hill Park. I stopped at the old gates because I wasn’t sure I should go on ahead with the chase. I looked around to see if there is anything giving away, like something in the form of a human living lurking somehow around. I wouldn’t have minded at all if one of those creatures just splurts out somehow and begins questioning me. I wouldn’t mind that at all. I mean I miss seeing people. I sometimes wonder how do my boys spend their time? I mean there is so much to be done in this empty world! Anyhow, I do manage somehow to take a better viewing of the guiding missile which is steeped on the fields ahead of me is escaping faster than I thought it would be possible. From the distance I can see the movement. Vertigo gives me that option of seeing the van which has slid on a rail platform like something resembling a ground launcher, which is then pulled by this magnetic port with a green light sucking the van into it and making it disappear off the face of the earth. Then I look again to see what the distance and tranquillity offers me. Nothing of any importance, only the growing greenery which after the van had left trails of stepped shrubs, it manages to grow back somehow almost its like somebody has been pulling the stuff from up above. Darkness seems to fade in and out like a sick patient who is ready to die but is unwilling to do so. Then as I step down from the hilly pedestal, the growling noise of these creatures overtakes the tranquillity and the peace, immediately sticking so much pain in my already uncertain state that it makes me think quickly that I should only be able to do as much. And now the time is for me to go home, hide and keep away from the unknown unknowns. I follow the same path I came. But the growling noise grows and I decide to stop for a minute. I leaned against a tree which was covered in endless green leaf thick branches wrapping up the tree right to the top. This wrenching smell comes out of everywhere. The tree began moving its belly. Something like a farting shot just slit my ear producing this noise, unbearable smell of an old miners mucky feet. Yuck. I mean it was disgusting, but I wasn’t flinching. I was more scared now than ever because of these moving parts of nature which I never anticipated it in my whole life I would ever see. Growling noise of the creatures gets closer, up above me. I think they couldn’t see me. The overhanging thin purple legs which resembles a hose morphed into an old man’s leg squishes past the tree and I can smell it. I can also see it. It hovers on top of the tree like a vicious scavenger looking for food, I thought for a minute. But I couldn’t work out what is that this creature wants. I could think of a number of things that this thing is thirsty of. But no idea how they are going to deal with my fear! Or I guess how I am going to handle the supreme being up above me who is hungry, thirsty, unhinged to the power of men. It continues to hover and the noise is eerily annoying. All I do at this stage is just watch and not focus all my energy on the annoying masquerade of a funny but weird creature. It disappears within a few seconds. I then move away from the tree and re-join the path heading towards my home. It gets darker these days much quicker. The underpopulation of the world has helped vegetation grow amidst all the fumes of pre-industrial and post-industrial insanity which over the years and decades has caused immense damage to our lungs but also to the nature’s heart. I begin to think about my boys. How far have they gone since we met last week and what are they up to. I recall a moment when Daniel had told me that they are living with this bunch of people in one of the small disjointed islands off the coast of Bournemouth. Its about twenty thousand or so of them. All living independently and happily. I mean all I could understand from their tales is that they were happy and that they were in perfect harmony with the gifts of nature. I wouldn’t put my hand on them! Would I ever wanted to get involved on their affairs, I mean even when they were small, I did never interfere. I left them alone. Alone but in a way with my presence always felt within them. Or so my ex-wife would tell me. Huh, how awful of me to think of her just like a passing comment. I mean I don’t mean to be derogatory or crass, but in a way, I do feel sorry for her passing. I am not a type of person who mourns or wastes his time contemplating a reset of my past values. I don’t operate like that. But as I am walking toward my home and passing by her property where she used to live and where she died, it makes me think of her ever felt presence. Vertigo offers me a lot of consolation because I need to lean on something. I mean it is so easy these days to bring more closeness and meaning to one’s life. Vertigo is the way. You just turn that thing on and you choose the setting that you think is appropriate for the kind of thing or feelings that you are prepared to experience and whoosh there it is. You forget about the immediate past and the immersion on this thing, whatever they call it a virtual reality instrument, a permalife, a drug or whatever just exudes a sense of security. For me it is more than just a sense of security, its life, its certainty, its controlled pleasure. Well it got colder pretty quickly and here I was standing right in front of the door to my house. I opened the door but I did notice that the door-handle scanner is dimmer. It was strange. I shut the door back and re-scan it again. The light is even dimmer and less blue but more purple. I decide to enter and not muck about for longer. The lights in the corridor all lit up luminously paving the way ahead of me. I wasn’t afraid of anything or expecting to have to go through anything at all. But by the time I get to the lounge area, I jumped like scared squirrell as I saw the silhouette of a man sitting in the sofa who doesn’t seem to be perturbed of my presence.

‘Farting hell!’ I said almost relieved that there was something that can explain in my mind the mystery of the moment.

‘You chased us earlier?’ the deep voice speaking from the sofa says.

‘I did!’ I said it quickly enough that the man needed to know that I am not scared of anything or at least him.

‘Huh!’ he laughs loud. Without any purpose or any sense he continues laughing manically. A thing that gets in my nerves a lot. ‘Look I don’t have much time for all this bullshit. Can you please tell me what are you doing in my property? I don’t know you and I have not got a clue what your intentions are? So how can I help you?’ The man doesn’t seem to be perturbed at all. He continues laughing. I immediately turn the lights on the lounge. I can now see his round face and very much what it seems to me the thick hair and thick skin radiating a white skin which at the first impression may seem like he has dipped his face in a white cream, some kind of clotted facial protection cream but then you look at it more intensely and I did notice that the man is just white by nature. He hasn’t got a tiny bit of artificial intervention on his face. Ok, I thought this is a good sign. So am dealing here with someone who has a face and is at least as original as he can be. Not a lot to worry about at this stage but worried I need to be in a nearer enough future. ‘Ah ok. So you reckon that you have got all of this sorted, wrapped, in the bag?’ He says while he pulls a packet of cigarettes. Stuff I haven’t seen for a very long time. Packets of cigarettes , I mean who smokes these days! I can see from his choppy and red cut hands that he is an outdoor person. Someone who isn’t bothered about the contours of his whereabouts or doesn’t even endure enough pleasure or pain if that’s what would drive one person. I now pay a lot more attention to him before responding with another forceful question ‘Yes I do. Who the fuck are you? Why are you here in my home? Why are you here?’ He doesn’t move an inch or a millimetre on his face. ‘I have come here with a simple message mister. You have been caught warranting in the fields and in the outdoors whilst everybody is in their state of peace! Why and how? You have some answers to give? You cannot just all of a sudden escape the four walls and expect not to be scrutinised?’ The last word “Scrutinised” hit me harder than I thought it would. I mean, what the hell! What is he talking about? ‘Well, It’s a long story but you need to show me some credentials before I tell you more!’ I demanded and he didn’t hesitate to show me the I.D bearing the double-headed eagle with an inscription “Not a State or a Government but Your Family of Guardians Defending Human Freedom” I knew it straight away that this is a serious matter and that this Digicouncil lot. I mean how obtruding of them. ‘Look!’ I said to them ‘Its some kind misunderstanding here. I did not actually mean to wander around. I know, I understand the injunctions and limitations of individual freedom and I know the repercussions of any sidestepping or going well beyond the boundaries. But, is it too much to ask to see my family’s home? You know just some kill time to reminisce?’ He looks at me and then stands on his feet but without removing a nano-inch from my eyes. ‘Ok. Here it is. Pay this fine and we will be alright!’ He then taps his palm on my upper shoulder and I accept the charge on my Kornet. ‘Thank you!’ I say to him and all he does is winks and says something on his earpiece and says a smooth ‘Good night’. He walks out and the door hermetically closes from the outside. He sticks the yellow Sorbinger on and I end up screaming my head off. I just cannot accept this two-year ban from the outside world. This is way too much. But then I stop for a minute and think about the other houses I was going past earlier, all with the red Sorbingers on. I mean this is even worse. Red is life, a lifetime of house ban. I open the window hole and see him hopping on a tank-like vehicle, clearly seems to be bullet and water-proof. He disappears away and I am left here, locked-up in my own home looking to spend two years of my life in a Vertigo. But hey, that’s life. I think I just have to accept that and make do with myself.

3

Kornet’s time but even it failed!

I managed to have one of the windows in my penthouse part of the property opened. I feel so relieved. I mean it has been a nightmare two weeks since I undertook the biggest cleaning operation that my house has ever seen. With the radio on and to be honest there isn’t much on the radio these days only prerecording and continuous boorish music on. They kept telling us that there is a huge wave of Solar Spray coming over in our air and they have been doing this for about two months or so. But, I don’t think anybody believes them. I mean I tried to get a better insight from my boys who are scattered all over the country but to no avail. All Subnet communications are blocked and the only information we get is the snippets of information which we are allowed to send to each other. Its like when I sent John a text asking him about his life and stuff. I had to write like this: ‘Hope all good? I am good! Just make sure you are not worried about anything. All seems quiet out there. Same as here. Lots of love. Dad!’ That was is and I get an edited response from the pricks saying that the message should be sent in this form: ‘I know you are well. I just wanted to say that I am thinking of you and am super happy here. Catching-up with a lot of things here. Exciting times…yippee!’ I mean what the frog. I was left flabbergasted because I paused on that recommendation, but they still sent it on my behalf due to the expiration timer on the message. Seriously, it is mind-boggling. I couldn’t comment further because I just have a feeling that we are being monitored even here, inside our homes. I am using this old Dictaphone which comes from the pre-digital age and I don’t think they have an idea that I am in possession of it as I only use it with the full music on downstairs and upstairs, in the bathroom and with the shower on. I mean this window is such a big relief and an outstanding achievement personally. I do feel that these two weeks haven’t just been weeks of torment and hard work. A personal pride which I keep telling myself on the mirror. I started to smoke. That’s the newest of the news I have to share with you. I enjoyed it very much. I used the tiny little space I had in the window to try and push the smoke out just in case the smoke detectors won’t blaze off. I can say that within days of smoking two packets, I managed to finish off the whole box which I had it hidden in the boy’s room for some time now before this whole malarkey began. I feel fine but the itchiness inside me just won’t let go of me and I feel like I have become addicted and have got no appetite. I mean sachets are an absolute nightmare. Today I had a full delivery of a week’s worth of veg and plant-based sachets which I don’t call it food but bite-size little nightmares or BTLNs. I must have them because otherwise they will know that I haven’t consumed much and will barge in and sod knows what will do to me, probably an injection to put me to sleep for a long time. Oh no they won’t kill you. Because the consumer society needs to keep going somehow and that people somewhere out there must make profit out of it. So, a big NO to answer your inquisitive small minds. I guess I have to adapt to new ways of doing things going forward. It is two years that I have to live here for and not only a few months. Thinking of it. In all honesty I don’t know how am I gong to manage to carry thru all these years. I am thoughtful about the way things will turn out for me. I mean I could go on my Vertigo and just spend a year or so and it wouldn’t be the end of it. But then again, I think I must look at it more technically. I have a big house and good, solid means of communication with the outside world but what I am missing is the headstrongness to play life the way it wants it to. Like doing things in a quiet and spontaneous way, like ditching my daily routine of fixing things inside the house and doing more with the things outside the house. Like trying to escape for instance. Is it worth it and where do I go? That bears a lot of questions and I can’t bear to sit there for a minute and just wonder about what is going to happen to me. I mean I could just go onto Vertigo. I think out of all the alternatives given, I think this is the most important to consider because it is the most painful to bear and then soon after that pain will just go away. I know this for a fact. I know that once I go through all that shit for the next twenty-three months, I can just live a normal life! But can I though!? Is this what its all about? I mean a sacrifice for the long medium-term? Or should my life have more to it than just some type of ‘can’t wait do get out of this jail’ card sort of thing? I am sitting here in the toilet seat and sucking probably one of the first fags of a packet which is the last one out of the box. My last box. And all I am doing is just sliding slowly into a earthquake of up and coming crises of confidence on myself. I can feel that creeping in slowly but surely it will occur. I have no mechanism of coping with it inside the house. If I am caught on that flight down, I think I am going to end up bed. I am inclined to give it all up. Sod it. I mean you don’t hanger around for no purpose. You may say that purpose is borne out of the anti-climactic sustenance of people who can afford to think like that. But, I think purpose is very important and I am inclined to believe that purpose is the service to most of things. It services the mind, it replenishes the mind with a lot of arbitrary thoughts, little relieves and small happiness but the overall picture is worse because it is bound to be hectic. My mind is hectic. My mind is entering that stage of procrastination which looking from afar can translate into bigger things. Huh, bigger things. I don’t know what bigger things can happen in a three-thousand and forty square metres of space but with no fresh air and no blueness of the skies and greenness of the fields. I love nature. How could they do this to me? I love everything about the outside world. I think the best thing for me to do now is to accept that all of this faeces-storm of flight-downs and little eurekas of enclosed spaces are going to be there for some time now, and they will remain within me and there is not much I can do about it at all. Well, I can but I don’t think I have the inclination to peruse another campaign of feel good within myself. I try to look distracted sometimes. I mean I carry a sword or a machete and put on the uniform of a Marlborough Cavalry men with all the red emblazoned top tail overcoats and all the paraphernalia but it doesn’t stop me from being calm and at times feeling slightly exhausted due to quick boredom. I pull all the clothes that I have in my closet and put them on. I play office parties all by myself. I put music on loud and dance, sing and go crazy. Its like the other day. I just downed two bottles of Wild Turkey Whiskey and felt sick to death for at least two days afterwards. Sometimes I don’t know my whereabouts, I try to access my garden but this weird alarm comes on and I feel the magnetic pull drawing me toward the kitchen and lounge area. The pull was so strong that it almost feels like you are being pulled away by a crane dragging you down before it lifts you up in the air. You have to say something like ‘Ok I get it. I won’t try and go out!’ Or something similar otherwise the pull is so intrusive it almost incisively enters your brain and it mixes your fears with a sense of insecurity encapsulating your whole being instantly and making you feel utterly powerless. I have learned the lesson now. I mean I have learned stuff that I never knew where going to be so important to keep my life going. Things like if I want to order some food, I have to make sure that I have a sense of pre-order in mind before I execute it via the Tanvoy. I hate Tanvoy. Such a painful and controlling instrument of inconvenience. Whether you go to the loo or try to spend some time in the kitchen, this little evil thing which is installed everywhere in the home watches you, listens to you, rapidly overtakes your little life with no mercy and is thorough. After I had ordered a loaf of bread to come through the other day, I felt like having a buttered toast. I pulled a slice from the plastic bag and slid it into a toaster. The voice that comes out of it just screamed at me ‘You shouldn’t do that. You should put the loaf on the cabinet selecter to weigh and calculate your calories intake!’ I mean that sounded like an instruction and not a recommendation. But I said nothing and decided to ignore the thing. First of all the toaster wouldn’t work, then the tap water wouldn’t come on, lights stopped and heating was switched off as well. I was looking for the Tanvoy whether I could find where it is but to nom avail. I wanted to get that thing, pick it up, smash it on the floor and then just derstroy all of its power over me. But I couldn’t find the thing. When it makes the sound, when it speaks, the sound resonates from a source but I don’t know where from. So, I kept looking behind the cabinet, fridge-freezer and the TV set in the kitchen and in the lounge area but to no avail. When I started ripping off everything as I was having a boring time and not much to do but curiosity overtook my clear thinking and didn’t want to think about any consequences, this thing came like a bolt in my head. This magnetic pulling pinned me against the wall. My feet weren’t touching the floor but my head was almost through the high ceiling in the lounge. ‘You should be in the Vertigo and not ripping stuff apart!’ the voice coming out of the Tanvoy said. I got the message but I felt like this thing shouldn’t dictate my life and I should be free to make choices myself without this thing telling me how to live. Then I was released but this time round my whole internal organs were in huge pain. I didn’t know where it was coming from. The pain very soon spread through my larynx and into my head. My head was blowing-off man. I wanted to stab my own head without stopping just to make this pain go away. But I didn’t, instead I just banged my head against less harder material like the fridge-freezer. I couldn’t understand what was going on with me. I kept hitting my head until I saw blood streaming out of my head and peering over my eyes but with no pain. It wasn’t the first time I had to do that. There were other occasions when I was totally disobedient and wasn’t listening to anything that Tanvoy was instructing me to do. In the end I just gave up and asked if I could have a tailored programme for the next few months without the need to go into Vertigo. It was at this moment that I realised that this thing has got conscience. I mean itself the question that popped out of this machine was ridiculous ‘Why? Why are you not going for the Vertigo? That’s where everybody is!’ For a moment I thought this thing does think and does have a conscience. This thing isn’t just put there to engage in some recordings of people’s mundane lives. This thing can calculate and this thing is aware of what I feel and how I feel. This thing feels like another human being present in my life. I could actually do with some human contact these days. I can say that I do miss the human decency, the warmth that the family gives one, the tenderness of the espousal love and care. All bits of my life that I am missing. I used to hang around in pubs a lot and never had time for my kids or my wife then. It was made much harder when I contracted cancer and I had to go in Chemo. Guess who were the first ones there, in the hospital looking after me? Who else but my family, spearheaded by my ex-Wife’s fear that my death would bring cataclysmic financial ruin to the family and by being there for me she could light up the torch of fear on me so I should carry on and find some strength somewhere and plough on. Anyhow, hospital wasn’t a challenge to me. To be honest I did make it out as if I was in a bit of a pickle, all the time making things up and feeling almost breathless and heart feeling slightly arrhythmic or when I didn’t want to talk I just kept telling them that I am too tired, or sometimes just falling asleep mid-conversation. I mean it wasn’t difficult at all. They believed me and they were sympathetic with me and to me. Of course I feel bad now for all these deeds. I just had to do it. This was what I was thinking then and not what I feel now. I mean, now I would give anything to just reverse that time back and try and live the life as it was meant to be. At the time the only challenge I had was to come out. I just couldn’t bear the thought of me sitting down and telling my ex that my feelings for her were different and that I didn’t actually belong in a relationship where the measure of my manhood was the frequency of good sex we would have. And we didn’t have good sex at all. Far from it. We wouldn’t even sleep together for a while. I would be in one bedroom and she would be in the other. My excuse always was that I had to send emails late at night and that I didn’t want to distract her sleep. She knew, I knew there was something wrong here but neither were brave enough to conquer our daemons and try to come to some sort of resolution of the issues. I was way too passive and she was too overactive but we chose the middle way and the middle way worked for both of us for a very long time, I could say right to the end really. Anyhow, this is not really what is pressing me now. There are more important issues at hand that I need to deal with. I think I am not going to get that far by reminiscing, trapped in the four walls of my own home. Or is it? Or will I? I don’t know! You answer that question, dear curious reader! Am only left with one leg to stand on and that leg is not holding me up for very long. I am being spiritually substituted by the greater force than me. You know who or what I am talking about. It isn’t fair to let you have your own benefit of the doubt on this. You got to understand that I have absolutely no inclination in subsuming a greater degree of control…it stinks! I think I have run out of most of the things that one can do in these circumstances. I sit in the sofa and just for a moment or so I feel a degree of freedom to breathe, think and just wonder in my head about stuff. And I sit there and first thought that hit my mind is the thought of looking back at my last two years since I have been in the Vertigo state. So, I get up and then head for the Tourrexentel. I press on the green button which annoyingly has been flashing for the past few hours. The hologram option comes up and the whole room lights-up. Firstly, I didn’t know how to react to that. Then I managed to find the right thought in my overloaded mind to send the signal to the mechanism so it can record what I am trying to achieve. The screen goes all blank and an eery noise begins to increase its volume uncontrollably and without any sense of direction at all. The noise comes from everywhere and is very loud. I lock myself up in the spare room next to my kitchen just so I can focus on my thoughts, to try and stop this thing from blaring out so much electromagnetic shit in my head. ‘Turn off the loudness and get me to the main menu please’ I whisper to myself almost as loud as the speakers but to no avail. Nothing happens. Then, I shut my eyes off and begin like an old monk in a monastery, meditating and having slower thoughts, coherent thoughts whilst I was trying to remain calm. I repeated the same words I had repeated earlier, but as you know, quieter, in my head sort of thing. Without any surprise, the thing shut off. Well the noise at least stopped and all I was hearing was the slow speaking woman on the screen inviting me over to talk to her. It was my first time I have ever used this mechanism. I mean I was like these cavemen and women who merging out of their caves for the first time and encountering ocean water, would tremble and be so scared that they wouldn’t even come near it. I became braver and less subtle. So, I thought there is nothing I could lose from this. I need to brave it out and I did. I came out and went in front of the screen. It asked me name and my last name: “Andy Mockhead”. It wouldn’t have it. It wants my proper name. Ok, so one more go. “Andrew Mockhead”. “Thank you Mr Mockhead” it responds. ‘Jeez it doesn’t understand a name!’ I whisper it to myself. ‘I’m afraid so I am not an “IT” but a real living human!’ and I am a bit embarrassed. ‘Sorry. My apologies. Didn’t know that!’ I responded politely and kindly. I mean what did I have to lose anyway. A slight politeness on my part wasn’t going to move Mount Rushmore an inch! After a few bits and pieces, the operator and I agreed to part ways as I got the crux of what the problem is and I could operate the Tourrexentel myself without any hindrance.

‘Thank you very much for your help today!’ I said. Sounding like the old days when you would speak to a Bank operator or anybody else on the phone and sounding grateful for their help and appreciating life more. ‘You are welcome. If you need anything else, please let us know by dialling via your Skullpad and somebody should respond to you instantly!’ I thank her again and off she goes. Then I realise that I have to find out what did she mean by the “SkullPad”? It bothered me immediately and I started to ask all sorts of questions and next thing I get is this huge magnetic push in my sofa with the head up and my neck completely in pain and all sorts of scenarios are appearing in my head. Things like; If I were to think about SkullPad or if I repeat the terminology all these texts and photographic and video links and events appear in my head. Or I thought they were in my head but to be honest if you were to ask me whether they were in my head or for real – I wouldn’t know how to answer those. I try to remain calm. I am normally resilient to black swan events in my life. But, jeez this took me completely by surprise and I just didn’t know where it came from. Didn’t go long and I was released off the chains. ‘Only positive thoughts Mr Mockhead. Positive thoughts!’ The voice beaming from the speakers somewhere or everywhere in my lounge. I nod and then I understand what it means by that. So, as I sat there thinking. I realised that these things, have come alive as soon as I started to get bored. Probably a well-arranged dichotomy of my fucked-up mind and something that I have or must’ve signed-up before embarking on all of this kind of lifestyle. Then another thought hit my mind – what would the conditions be if I was to find a way onto the system and switch-off all of this or begin a restart of some sort. The voice comes over again to tell me that this is not possible. I feel trapped but assured that no harm will be done on me if I have these thoughts. Huh, I think to myself, what do you mean by harm!? Again I keep forgetting that they do have a deep insight into my mind and can read my thoughts plainly and clearly. I got up and look for a notepad and a pen. It takes me good ten minutes to search for it and find something worth writing on or with. I scribble secretly just under the kitchen table. Extremely difficult to write something and for them not to know. So I scribble “Please rewind back to two years of my life!?” and I wait and wait and wait. Nothing happens. I go for a short walk to turn my face toward the Tourrenxentel just to see how it reacts to the question I have written in my note. No reaction. All I can hear is the sound of the Maxiuncto going super fast, just like an old bangers engine trotting, revving and spluttering tiny little particles of gega-byte of speed. Then I scribble some more: “When was I born and where was I born?”. Still not much comes out of it. The revving noise I can in the background is still intact and it reminds me of the early years of internet dialling-in connection coming thru. Its fascinating I try to think. I filter it thru my consciousness first and then silently pronounce it to myself. When I say “Fascinating” then the whirring and the revving speeds up and I can hear it on the walls between the lounge and the dining room. I lean my ear against the wall to hear more. The walls are warm. I touch them and can feel an extra layer of plastering of some sort has been put on top of it. I don’t remember me doing that if I look back a couple of years ago. Although having said that, I don’t actually remember how I got into this at the first place. What I do remember is that the first moment when I hopped in on to the Vertigo, I couldn’t conceal the excitement. I was lonely and if I remember well, I think I didn’t have any other options but to sign-up to this. I can’t remember anymore. I actually don’t want to go back there again. I don’t want to think about it. I can hear the looming noise of Maxiuncto doing its thing and processing information in real-time. I ask a question or even try to think of something. For a minute I thought that there’s a glitch somewhere hence responses are delayed but no, I got the response and the response was “I am sorry did you say something?” . This for me was enough to make me feel that I think I have this thing under control. I can actually manipulate the sucker. Now, the only question is how do I do that and how much leverage do I create by manipulating this gargantuan machinery that is ingrained in me, inside me but not in my consciousness. I repeat the question by re-writing it in my notepad. No answer at all. I write it in capital letters and hold it up to see if somebody, something can capture what I have written. I hold up the note and rotate my body like a dancing dervish to see if I am being picked-up. No sign, still just the whirring of the Maxiuncto and the rest of heavy-cabling which by the looks of it has encapsulated my whole house like an octopus wrapping a fishing boat lost in the middle of the Indian Ocean. No sign of anything. Then a sigh of relief as I think I just have created some space for me. I can now breathe and I can plunge my thoughts with the difficulty but consistently onto something and I won’t be detected. I can plan and I can prepare myself. But first, I think, I need to embark on another Vertigo session as the quota is not complete for the year. According to the digicalendar in my wall – I only need to do two weeks of it and then back on it for some more. Wish me luck.

4

Before I land back to earth!

The rain didn’t stop for a few hours. All I was seeing was landmass being expunged away from the mainland, drifting towards the sea and huge piles of cities being pulled away and thrown onto the waves of sea which was galloping large swathes of landmass and living souls in its long neck of a tsunami right in front of my eyes. And all I was doing was staring at it and holding on to this tree which was another part of expunged landmass, some kind of a village or bigger than that, some type of town which I landed only last week somewhere near Mauritius. I was holding on to this weaving and constantly rotating small island and holding on to a palm tree the size of my once well-known lemon tree I had in my back garden. But it was doing the trick and I was feeling safe as long as this tiny island wasn’t moving towards this gargantuan tsunami that looks like a real living thing. And it wasn’t. My small island, my cute little thinly surfaced soil and lots of grass and a small tree was floating in the middle of the ocean now but I just couldn’t get my head around seeing the Eiffel Tower in front of me and I think what it looked like the Taj Mahal. They were heading my direction. I couldn’t understand why. I panicked as I was looking for a lever or something else to sway the island away from the destructive force heading my way. I had to go deep in my open-eyed-thoughts to try and leverage something at the last minute. The magnanimous landmarks were approaching pretty fast. I went well passed the panicky mode and just shouted ‘Brace, brace, brace’ and all of a sudden the island swayed to the right sharply but safely the huge body of the Eiffel island swayed my tiny earth onto the middle of the sea, people waving, seeking help and a few jumping over to seek safety but safety I was not able to offer. I was only on a tiny island barely surviving myself and wasn’t in no mood to offer any help. So I just pushed away from all that by motoring thru quickly before the large waves usurp my island’s capacity to wither away from all that stuff. I felt sorry for a bit. I felt sorry for all those souls who have miscalculated and felt that being in the other end, they too were seeking the truth, they too were aspiring to do better and excel on their virtuoso reality. I only looked back once and escaped. I think, what it seemed the big wave did manage to just slip under my island and swayed away towards the big island which by now seems to be sinking with all the noise that was coming from drowning voices inhaled completely by the sea. I was so relieved. I did not want any attachments. I mean if I were to see one of my sons there, that would have been a bit more difficult as I would have to save them. But, then again I do not want any attachments. This kind of attitude serves me good and I am very happy in my own skin. As I float away in the endless blueness of the sea, from afar, I can see the approaching bigger islands. This became much more frightening. I stopped for a minute and laid back against the palm tree and began thinking – why would I put myself through this stuff. Why do I have to stick to this fearsome experience when in the meantime I do have the freedom to choose. I do feel lonely while I think of that actually. I do feel that sense of lonesome awfulness when you can’t actually put two and two together and draw a better conclusion about your next steps toward redemption. What if I die. What if I decline to come up with the mental strength and resilience to push on further. What if I just feel that I need to give up and I wouldn’t have the inner strength to pursue freedom or whatever I am looking for, the truth, let’s say and then end-up lingering on between the blueness and darkness? What if that happens. I do think of the sense of relief that I have now and I am wondering why. The gigantic islands are getting closer and looking meaner but more powerful than ever. I begin to shiver because I don’t know what I am going to do. Giving up in front of this tsunami of land expunged violently from the mainland Europe and heading towards the furthest parts of Indian Ocean. Why are they heading this way. Why am I getting this flashback to the future. Is this some kind of parallel sense of reality that is hitting me? Or am I just going with the flow towards the end!? I am bound to do something crazier than I would’ve ever thought before. I will steer to my right and power on as much as I can until I manage to sway away from the oncoming onslaught of endlessly large swathes of land. The steering isn’t as easy as I thought it would be. But this tiny little island can power on. I check that all the systems are in place to get me thru this unabated. The console attached to a dashboard like platform attached by the tree does indicate that I am on the right route and making a lot of progress. The distance dissipates away and I am clearly now on course to a five miles gap between me and the oncoming threat. Within minutes I am on the quiet waters and breathing lightly. I pull a lever on the side of the dashboard and the automatic distance enhancing screen pops-up in front of me making my life much easier to see afar. I do notice a wave of a three-to-four meters height approaching toward me. But I am unshaken this time round as I am getting my head around all of the malarkey on the sea. The waves manage to just slip under me with no impact at all. I was happy and relieved again. I couldn’t think of any other danger appearing in front of me now. I did feel as real as I could be in this self-inflicted but necessary adventure but something at the back of my mind was telling me that I might be relieved prematurely and couldn’t know what is that one thing that was making me feel so uncertain, nervous and not appealing to too much excitement when in the meantime I knew that I was in the middle of the sea in an island that had everything from food to comfort, sunshine and all the means to explore more of the world ahead of us. It just abruptly my excitement was shut-off and I was in darkness. I could feel the seat and its leather bound softness all around me. Then I touched my face and I could feel that I had my Vertigo on. Shit, I am back. What happened! I began to wonder worrying that there must be a break-in my property or some kind of DigiCouncil fuck-up. I took my Vertigo-off and my body felt like something else. It felt like this isn’t my body at all. It felt like a ton of bricks has been thrown on me and that sense of drowning pulling me all the way down at the bottom of the sea. I had to get up once I realised that darkness had encapsulated the whole room and from all I could see the vastness of blackness was breath-taking. I couldn’t even see my neighbour’s home or the garden at the back. I try all the switches in the Vertigo-Dash but nothing was working. Luckily enough I have always kept a small torch next to my V-sofa and was able to utilise such a thing to show me the way amidst all the dizziness in the clouds of darkness. I head for the downstairs to see what if anything has changed. And it hasn’t. The eerie silence that occupies the area downstairs especially around the kitchen, is excruciatingly painful, frightening, uncertain and it does resonate nimbleness, in your heart, deep in your soul and more. As I am descending downstairs, there was a banging on the door. I stood there silently knowing full well that I am secure and that there is nothing that I should worry about at all. But I did worry, and I did think that the quicker I descend downstairs the more in danger I will be. So, I decided to stop and began thinking a little less complacently. If there was a banging on the door then that means that the enforcers outside aren’t there or what had happened to them? I was wondering that this must be some kind of cock-up somewhere. I wasn’t sure that this is as easy as it may look with people knocking on the door in people’s homes at this time of the night. But then I thought, ok it might make sense due to some kind of power cut that the town is experiencing at the moment. There was nothing that was working here, not even the fridge light was coming on and I was slightly distracted to the point that the banging on the door wasn’t as frequent as it was initially. I became braver and look on the spyhole. There were about three or four men and women with DigiCouncil helmets on but I just didn’t believe that they had anything to do with the Council. So I just stood there in complete silence and was watching what were they up to. Next thing was the sound of a drilling machine on the door. I could feel that because it felt like it was drilling into my ear and the door shook and blasted within seconds. My complacency didn’t pay off this time. I was blown away for about four meters away inwardly all the way to my kitchen and all I could remember at that moment was the yellow smoke that was blasted out at that slow motion as I was falling down rapidly and breaking bot of my arms and a huge concussion of my skull a piece of bone, a sharp bit nearly got through onto my brain. Luckily I was given the hospital treatment immediately as there was a H-Pad already about to park on my lawn and don’t ask me how and why. Anyhow, the whole plot was that they came in to arrest me because I had gone onto e vertigo without signing the papers to confirm that its all fine for me to actually go onto Vertigo and that I needed to give them the consent to authorize me for the embarkment onto the platform. I was absolutely shocked and unable to contain myself when they told me so at the hospital. I mean I never knew that this process was in place. I couldn’t complain about the service – it was hugely good. Very caring automotons for whom I share deep sympathy and likeness that I wouldn’t have been able to feel in pre-times. Not only gracious and sentimental but very much attentive to your needs and amazingly obedient and always there when needed and by you when you had a sense that something wasn’t going right, like when I nearly fell off the bed when this huge noise was coming thru to the room where I laid and that there wasn’t much I could do about it. The noise was so blaringly loud that I could hardly hear my own voice and my own sound. So, notwithstanding all the malarkey about the condition I was in, I could easily say that there wasn’t much I could do about any of it. I was stranded within my own body and all I was able to do was to stare at this ceiling for long hours, unable to hold a pad or read or anything. They employed a moton to support me with my reading but I wasn’t feeling that comfortable with that because standing right there in front of me, this moton was frightening the hell out of me. Every time I would turn a page, I could see this moton’s eyes rolling or there is always something flickering somewhere in his lean but strong body circled up with wires and whatnot. Then I decided that I wasn’t going to be a good mate of theirs. So, I gave in. Within days I limited the social provision that was given to me by the DigiCouncil which meant that motons would only service my own health issues and nothing else. I didn’t need much feeding as I was on a diet and the only sachets they were providing me with was the tiny little easy-breakers that contained a lot of plant-based feeders and tiny amount of sugar to keep me going. When I wanted to get up on my own two feet, I could just do it by myself just with the help and strength that I had. I started to drink autonomously only after five weeks since my body began to recover quicker but I still had to deal with the sprinting water and air which was getting thru to my brain membrane due to the massive injury to the skull. Five weeks of dependency, I would say a huge sense of dependency became quickly within a day or two a massive liberation as I managed to gain back my strength and feel much better without any hindrance, moving around in my room, staring out of the window and also trying to figure out what is going on in the world beyond me. I was writing notes covered fully under the blankets because I was not able to do that openly. There was no torch or any light at all. I just flicked the blanket over me in the middle of the night and put down notes, recollections of the day etc and hide them under my bed as I didn’t want them to discover what I was up to. Well, it was prohibited. Writing notes anywhere, it said in the paper protocols but also in the entrance to the room – is strictly prohibited or if you are a writer by trade and you have that sense of writing then you have to ask for the paperstint a paper format that records everything you write and DigiCouncil can delete inappropriate or even stuff that they don’t think its suitable for you to write. They do it there and then. So a writer can spend hours even days finalising a draft and then it would be deleted or amended three or four times over, because that would be deemed as not material, necessary, productive for society. This was arbitrary but my opinion or any input I could give would not matter at all. It’s been over a few weeks now since I have talked to a human being. Even the ones that are supposed to be the DigiCouncil reps, don’t seem to help at all. They are worse than the motons. At least with motons you can build a distance and you can have a little bit of privacy, in a way you can work yourself around them because in the end of the day all they are Robots that’s all. Every night The other night, there was something that bothered me in my roots. From afar, I could see these strange upside-down pyramid shaped aircraft pinning down on these houses and pulling something oput of these properties. And, they were not furnitures. They were coffin-like objects, boxes of some sort. I could hear crying noises as well. I was scared for the first time in my bones. I wrote all I saw in my notebook. I re-read what I had written and it just is very frightening. I even drew the aircraft and had written down a lot of stuff. You can turn it into a book. I am observing in the past two days that the inspectors days are becoming much more frequent. I filled-in the questionnaire they sent me a few weeks ago. I submitted the form but haven’t received a response at all so far. To this day, I still think that the act of the surge into my house was an unjustified act of brutality and there was absolutely no recompense or even a gesture of regret by the authorities. I have asked that I be allowed to attend garden outside for a few hours. I need to gather my thoughts and organise myself a bit better. I need to prepare to head back home. The response I got was unbelievable: Apparently, I need to spend more time at the hospital until I recover fully because otherwise I would endanger my life and the life of others. Dah, I mean this doesn’t make any sense. I immediately asked for my terms and conditions and wanted to clarify this because as far as I know there is nothing of this nature covered on my contract. I was flabbergasted. I felt that I should just rebel and organise some kind of managed-escape so just to see their sense of preparedness and their sense of urgency. But I didn’t. I wanted to give them more time and I needed to concentrate on what I need to do in my part before embarking on something crazy. Well, I don’t know if it is crazy or necessary. I would stick with the latter rather than former. Half a day went past and it got very dark. I was getting bored. They switched-off the entertainment as it was deemed un-contractual due to the competition laws. Entertainment is against the law now as over the years it has damaged human sub-consciousness and since people have moved on to Vertigo’s there is no scope for such consumption as there are no people waiting to be entertained. Ironic isn’t it. I mean it isn’t. But this is the reality and this is going to be a challenge for me to accept openly in the days and weeks to come. I am not used to see this world ending up the way it is now. How much one can take it. I mean how am I supposed to rely on this self-sufficiency shit without being able to understand that most of things I have experienced in the past have been now vanished completely. How much I miss a day out shopping. How much I miss my sons. I remember the days when they were really small, little and sweet. How much I regret now that time. How come I didn’t spend more time with them? I wonder everyday of these things and am intrigued by my inner ruthlessness that I have always carried as a streak of my personality. They grew very quickly and all I could remember from that time was that their smiles, their innocence derails me now of my inner stability. Not this time master, not this time. I needed to, I could sit there and just mourn all the past deeds and feel perplexed as to the way I handled my life, and the worse thing is that there is nothing I can do about it now. I thought that any plans I could make, would leave me stranded without any good options to consider. For instance, one thing that was in my mind and wouldn’t just let go was the sense of abandonment I needed to shake off. And this was hard because I was already vulnerable to the shocks of a life without reality or substance. The shorter term looked doable but the long-term seemed to be extremely hard. I didn’t want to die in the hands of the system. I wanted to pursue whatever it takes to pursue life beyond what is possible. I am not sure that this possibility exists, but I am inclined to believe that the opportunities would have been remote if I ever was to escape from my home. I mean I tried.

5

Enclavers!

Soon, within two weeks since I last wrote on my diary, I was feeling better. I was still waiting for my hospital dispensation before I was to head home. I can’t get it out of my head when one the motons asked me whether I was missing home and where was home. Intuitively I was eager to tell it that actually I do have a home and it is a lovely home. But, I was too concerned with the afterthoughts and even darker edges of thinking, that, you know, you never know these things might well be more than what I think they are. And what is that I have wondered for a time but never managed to penetrate as deep as I could. I gave up in the end. I didn’t want to drive myself supremely crazy by talking to these machines. But, then I stopped and thought a little harder and concluded that actually these machines have helped me power thru these past few weeks. They were there for me. They were there able to cope with all my needs. My moods and my temper. How often did I end up throwing plates and dishes flying around because the soup was not that hot or that the dishes did not contain any salt at all or that my juice would be too thick and not have enough bits in it. I mean they had put up with me enormously and I am forever grateful to them. I needed to find a way to thank them. I asked them if they could provide me with a pen and a paper so I could write something to them as a thank you note. I needed to find a way to legitimize my own writing somehow but the answer I got was that they are not allowed to keep any paper or pens in the hospital because of the safety issues. Then I said to them how about if I order a gift for someone very special to me! How would that go down as? Their answer was adamant that it is not allowed and that they cannot help me or even be seen as they are helping me. One of the motons which I ended up calling it Trix was much more reconciling, and I feel that it wanted to say more. But couldn’t because obviously the convention was very tough for them. They will be decommissioned straightaway or their neurontanks would be transferred to a mechanical entity like a flying car or an aircraft, a military one or worse a garbage collection truck. It looked at me with a grimace of a little child that wanted to spend more time to together. Hungry to see and have some kind of human interaction. Although they were alien creatures to me, I still felt, in the end that there was much to it than it seems at the first sight. I didn’t push harder. I just didn’t want it to make it harder for it. So, I gave up on the idea but never lost my focus from the ambition, the objective, and that was clearly becoming more apparent as the days were going by that my freedom was much costlier and harder to regain than I previously thought. And this was making me slightly unsettling. I was feeling fine and that there was no need at all to keep me there. By that afternoon, I received a notification in a three-page document which laid out succinctly but in a moulded way the terms of conditions of my release. Release? I thought to myself. I just couldn’t believe it. But, yes, the letter was specifically citing an exemplar of things that they have done for me and that as a compensation for them barging into my home is a three-month holiday period where I could choose to spend a few weeks in one of the three containment areas. One in Devon, the other one in Lancaster and the third option was Margate. It didn’t take me long to decide on that one. I chose Devon as it was nearer to West London but also it is a place I miss going since I was a young father when I had taken my family there. They were the happy times. Anyhow, Devon proved to be a short trip. Immediately after I signed the documents, I was immediately posted in a type of detention area where movement was very much limited. I was put on this room which wasn’t bigger than an average jail cell four-by-four with a very tall ceiling and floor to ceiling windows with heavy steel bars encapsulating the whole western wall of the room. I think it was the western side of the building but could’ve been the northern side as well as I lost track of the time we left the hospital. I felt really lonely and I didn’t know what was going on. I sat there for hours and panicking, trying to understand what was going on and whether anybody had any idea what was happening to me or if at least there is a case built for me. I didn’t know what was going on. I started to bang the door. I was becoming more impatient as time was wearing on. There was no response at all. The quieter out there the more agitated I was becoming and the darker it was getting outside. I looked outside through the window to see if there is anything I can see, anything that moves or that it sticks its head above the parapet. But to no avail. There was nothing. All blank. Not even birds are not to be seen anywhere. As it was getting darker, I began losing the sight of my own limbs. I couldn’t see my own arms or the tip of my fingers without bringing my fingers closer to my face. There was a bed. A very comfortable one which was positioned on the angle by the exit door and had a thin linen sheet on top of it. The pillow was inflatable so you only had to press the button to get it erected. I did that and the pillow came out as too big for my own liking. I de-inflated it and fell asleep pretty quickly without any idea how I was going to get out of this mess. Few hours must’ve gone past since I fell asleep. I felt a deep sense of disorientation. I wasn’t able to stand on my own two feet for some reason. Dizziness and drowsiness, constant feeling of being sick and wanting to spurt out everything I had in me was ravaging all my thoughts. But it wasn’t just in thoughts. I was feeling so terrible physically. I felt like I was inhaling some dirty air. It was thick, too thick to be inhaled that easily. I fell asleep again. I couldn’t take it anymore. All I remember was that the door eventually opened and three men with white doctors coats walked in and grabbed me to take me somewhere. I woke up a few hours later and I was in a completely different part of the world. Since I opened my eyes, I knew I was in Devon. I was put on this mobility scooter facing the blue sea in front of me. I looked back as I was confused, but my back was painful and then my head started to hurt a little bit but couldn’t move my legs. They were too stiff, and I felt pain everywhere in my body until I realised that I was unable to move much. First thing that went in my mind was ‘What have they done to me?’ the noise from one of the speakers in the nearest post on top of the house behind me came out loudly saying that ‘Mr Mockhead this procedure was part of a process that you have signed-up when you signed your contract a while ago. There is nothing new or anything that we don’t agree on or we didn’t agree at the time of your signing!’ I couldn’t work out what the hell was he on about. What process!? What the hell are you talking about? It responded immediately without any hesitation ‘You know what I am talking about. Of course you do. It is the article 35 of our mutual agreement that we have signed. Let me read it out to you: “In the event of you ‘The buyer’ of the product are placed in a self-isolation mode by the company with the authority of the Digi-Council, or you have mistakenly in an unauthorised manner downloaded, distributed or ledgered on the product without prior consent or authorisation then we have every right to intervene and place you in a programme of re-Enlightenment. This programme will take you through a re-structured process of consciousness cleansing, brain therapy and skin rehabilitation and will last a few weeks.” You have signed this with your consciousness wide opened. Then he plays the hologramic video in front of Andy. There he is, he can see himself now. He wants to turn his head toward the speakers at the back but is unable to. So, he spits furiously. ‘Well, its your choice Mr Mockhead. My duty was to inform you and to make sure that any doubts are cleared out of your mind as to why you are here.’ As soon as I heard that slimey voice, I just wanted to scream but I couldn’t do so, my voice had disappeared and I wasn’t strong enough to gather all of my nasal strength to make an impact on what I was trying to say. I couldn’t. speak soon after that. I lost the strength to speak and then slowly I began losing the fluency to think properly, or to just think! I remember that I started to get cold and I must’ve thought that frequently on my mind as it did encourage them to come over and pick me up to take me inside. All them little bit of pieces that I was trying to pick-up on while I was taken indoors, all I remember was that there were three women who carried me through into the nearest room and I remember the split skies above me, one part was dark and gloomy and the other was sunny and blue. I got pushed into the house slightly violently, I remember my finger got caught on the wheel of the scooter and one of the women just managed to expunge it with so much power that my small fingers were chopped up and blood began streaming through my arm and onto the floor, bloodying the wheels of the scooter and the woman’s tip of the shoe. All I remember is I didn’t scream because I couldn’t feel anything. I was numb and I was feeling drowsy and too tired to think of pain. I just wanted to die at that moment. I was so scared. I didn’t know what was happening with me. I woke up a few hours later, seems to me a few hours later, it might well be few days later because the place was so quiet, so peaceful that when I slapped my feet on the floor that was the nearest thing to something being alive but also the only noise I was making in this whole vacuum of a space. I mean it wasn’t just any villa lounge, any kind of a holiday house. This was the villa, the mother of all the villas in the world. It and lots of books and all open space amenities that a modern living can offer. I found some strength to get up and begin to somehow feel the place. I needed to familiarise myself with this place. I will be spending good three months of my life here and it is worth just wandering around. I had to remember to recalibrate my thinking. I needed to think carefully or at least if I wanted to do something make it look like I haven’t been thinking about it because they will find out immediately. It was hard but I cracked the code because I was keeping my little notes hidden under my shirt and a small pen that I managed to steal from the the moton-nurses tray. This actually saved my life. I had to keep writing without thinking or think of some straight line, simple thing but do the opposite to what I was intending to do actually. My strategy was that the more I would write the more information I will be able to store so I can rewind later sometimes when I am free and re-read everything. I am sure that there is some kind of authority out there who are not informed of what’s happening in the grinding grounds of an isolated England. I mean I did wonder. Anyhow, this place was marvellous and super beautiful. Everything I touched was new and unused. They didn’t build this place entirely just for me did they!? I began to wonder. It seems to me that they have. There were days when I was beginning to feel a little bored. Everything was served-up for me. I mean I didn’t even had to bother to go to the loo, moton-nurses would come in near my desk, near enough to actually spooke me sometimes and hand in the pill. Huh, interesting detail here; this pill had the effect of pushing the faeces out within seconds after I swallow the damn thing. They would read the analysis somewhere on their data saying that the stool is formed and within minutes they come and find me. They didn’t care whether I was watching a movie, reading, eating or wanking – they’d just come in, barging wherever I was and hand me the pill to swallow. Initially this whole process was painful, then it became an annoyance, but slowly and surely enough it became an integral part of my routine because I didn’t have much to do during the day apart from watching movies, old shit and wank really. I mean I remember this detail, embarrassingly enough I have asked for some fetish clothing to be delivered to the address one day. No one bothered to ask why they just delivered it. Anyhow, I was befriending one of the nurses in the team. The one that seemed to me to be the one that was a little sloppier. I asked her if she was willing to put this dress on, it was a night dress with the fishnet tights and the heels on but I had to do the make up. Only a slight lip balm, coloured lip balm and a red hair wig. I tell you what, I couldn’t believe how real this thing became. I mean I also asked her if she could smile for me and that was it, I didn’t even need to do anything, I just melted, spermed-up all my night gown and couldn’t stop repeating the process for a few times. Very soon it became a very dangerous obsession. I, very soon realised that my mind was becoming entrenched on this thing and that was the only thing that was keeping me going. But, I started to fear myself. I started to get worried that I probably have gone too far and that there, somewhere, somebody is watching me and adding points of penalty and condemnation for which I had very low tolerance by now as I was having enough of the whole thing. I think I did make the right decision. So, there was no more flirting with these dolls, no more diabolical behaviour and no more falling in love with non-humans. This was the moment that I realised I was becoming a hedonistic contrarian but very much in control of myself and stuff around me. I would spend more time on the beach, hearing the sound of waves splashing endlessly seeking answers to how it all works. Then I would attempt to write poetry on a Taleex. A brand new instrument which didn’t take a lot of effort to work it out its workings. I spent a lot of time just conjuring up to the poetry and I very quickly became very reflective of things around me and about myself. I tried to understand a lot about the fundamentals of life but didn’t get nowhere. I think it was partly because I wanted to go back to my own home and just feel normal again. I had mixed feelings about all of this as well. There was this particular night, I was feeling totally safe, relatively happy but very much bored and I decided to do something different. So, I decided to hop upstairs on the penthouse part of the floor and opened the balcony door for fresh air. The nurses were very kind to me and they let me have a cigarette after I begged them to buy me a packet for a few days now. I was there on the floor, puffing and inhaling the smoke, staring at a distance from the house. I noticed this beaming light from afar. It was switching on and off and couldn’t work out what it was. At first, I thought it might well be a ship going past our coast, or a lighthouse of some kind. But then the light was giving me a morse code signal from afar. I mean, am an engineer and I know how these things work. So, I went down in the basement and started to look for a toolbox to try and see if I can get my hands on a torch of some sort. Better, I managed to find a laser torch, an industrial one. Very powerful and penetrates deep into horizons. I pointed the laser beam at the light far away and they responded. It was, as I suspected a Morse Code:

.-. ..- -. / ..-. .-. --- -- / - …. . .-. . .-.-.- /. -.-- --- . .-/ .- .-. . / . .-. / -.. .- -. --. . .-.

‘RUN FROM THERE. YOU ARE IN DANGER’

It translated. I mean I laughed at first. I didn’t need to worry. I have signed a contract with them, and these are Digi-Council people, these are people whom we elect to represent us, and I just don’t expect any harm from them at all. But for some reason I couldn’t take my eyes off the light which now extinguished only to come back again and send me the following:

.. - … /. .--- --- …. -. / .- -. -.. / -.. .- …- . . -.. .-.-.- / -.. .- -.. / .-. ..- -. -.-.—

ITS JOHN AND DAVID. DAD RUN!

I stood there frozen. I turned back to see who was behind me but there was nobody there. I was all alone, by myself! I gulped and took a deep breath. I then decided to ignore the persistent and repetitive Morse Code from afar. Then I wondered how is it possible? How is it possible for John and David to know that I was here? If I remember well at the time when I signed the ‘Non-Disclosure, Health and Future Protection’ document – there was no clause to suggest that my next of kin would be informed of my travails! How come? I had to change my thinking fairly quickly. Already I could hear the signal-beeping in my wrist asking me to appear in the ‘Count-Room’. This was first time ever that I had to attend such room. So I asked one of the nurses where the room was. One of them decided to escort me there. As I was going downstairs I couldn’t stop myself looking through the cracks of the windows on the third and second floor, looking onto the sea far away where my sons, allegedly, are warning me of the danger I am in. I couldn’t think of them as my sons. They just had to be John and David. Yes, two people I knew from my previous life. I kept telling myself as I was descending downstairs behind the nurse whose walk resembles a robot, well she was a robot. I mean I knew that its just I have never seen them walk from behind. I guess I was constantly looking for something else, but never having the right mind to think and reflect normally as any other normal person would do. Anyhow, I continue to follow her all the way to the hall. Right there, in the middle of the hall we stop. She stops and turns toward me and says ‘You need to wear these’ She shows me a pair of slippers with metallic strip on the top of the archway, the bit that holds the area between the upper surface of your feet and the heel. I put them on, but they feel uncomfortable ‘Sorry,’ she says ‘I know that the slippers might be a little bit uncomfortable but you will be fine as you settle in them!’ I didn’t know what to say. I had to be aware not to think anything naughty and suspicious. She proceeded on and I followed. We went down the basement which at the first impression it wasn’t a basement at all but it had the cavities and the entrance design of a basement, an old fashioned relic with a grand opening and very stable and solid walls which seems to be very long and dwindling as you get closer to a smaller door with a guard standing by it. I greet the first human I have seen in a while. I get no response. I guess he was just doing his job there and I wasn’t anybody important enough to have deserved a greeting. The door slides open. ‘ChrystalBall’ its your password the nurse tells me. ‘Thanks’ I respond back. You could’ve told me earlier I thought. ‘Couldn’t am afraid. Those are the rules!’ She responded back. Anyhow, I go in and the room is all dark. The doors slide shut so quick I didn’t hear a beep at all. Apart from being a dark room, it was eerily quiet. Then the hissing noise begins. I couldn’t make out what it was but I began to smell a strong rose petals odour. It was so hard to work out at that exact moment what I was inhaling but next thing that happened was that I don’t remember anything and I must have fallen on the floor and somebody had taken care of me because the next moment I opened my eyes I was in this white room surrounded by mirrors. A man was standing next to me. He was scary because he had this look of a gangster but a dishevelled gangster. A member of some sort of club of crime-bating elite. But, I was relieved actually, because it was essential that at least I see a human being. The first impression I got from him after I opened my eyes was that he has a certain element of admiration, or a kind of sympathy because I was in need of it. But then I realised, a few minutes later that he had contempt for me. I didn’t like him from then on. ‘You must know Mr Mockhead that you are being observed at all times!’ He was sloppy but holding a syringe on his left hand and tapping it with his index finger, seeing if he can fit more than what the syringe has to offer in my body. ‘No more of that shit!’ I said to him. He looked me as if to say well who is going to ask you anyway. But interestingly enough the syringe was for my benefit. I needed it to wake me up. I never liked syringes. Never liked vaccines and I have never liked injections. What happened next was slightly hazy and quite predictably terse, I remember my body levitating and seeing much more in depth. What I mean by that, by the depth!? I think anybody experiencing out of the body experiences would tell you that there is definitely something that lives within you apart from the occasional energy and your chemical composition – there is a soul and there is something much more powerful than anyone can explain which shakes every fibre of your invisible energies in you. I did feel that. I felt relieved and above everything. Above law, above God, above nature and including above all that prick who was still standing there and was counting on me coming back any time soon so he can torture me more successfully. I remember that the haziness disappeared, but my smile came back. That sense of relief brought me a lot of happiness, unexplained load-off my back. I was hovering in the air for a good few seconds before I clamped down and onto the floor which felt like I descended from upper floors of a building. He laughed. ‘Come on Mr. Mockhead. Calm down. You get so agitated and excited so quickly…!’ and he continues laughing uninterruptedly. ‘When you feel slightly stronger let me know. I have something very important to show you!’ He said. ‘Where are my sons? What’s you name? Who the fuck are you?’ I began my charade. He walked off and pressed a button which done something to my bed. It began swivelling and doing all sorts of shit within my body. I started to get all sorts of movements within my organs. There were some moments when I was in pain and some other time I was more terrified than ever because the pain was in the head too. ‘Mr Mockhead just be relaxed and no need to panic. This is an Anthro-Mental treatment and it is for your own good. We have detected that you have three potential diseases developing inside your pancreatic cell sphere, diabetes and brain tumour which we are treating in a pre-determined basis. You will feel slightly sick and in pain. Wherever and whenever you feel pain – that area is targeted by our system as we suspect that there are traces of disease developing. So, bear with us and please be patient.’ The voice from the intercom ended its announcement and I wasn’t feeling any better at all. I continued to feel even worse, tossing and turning battling with pain as if I was being hit by bullets in a battlefield. The pain continued for another hour or so until “the Gangster” came back, again holding his notebook and taking notes while he walks. ‘You have been reallocated to a different facility!’ He said. Immediately my pain stopped. There was a clanking noise of the door being pushed from outside. Three motons walked in with their white coats and fake human faces barging thru making it look like its an urgent job. They injected me one more time and I lost conscience. When I woke up the next time I was in the lounge. Completely naked with a thick towel next to me, a white night-gown and a glass of what seemed to be whiskey. I did not hesitate for long. I grabbed the glass of whiskey and downed it. I was thirsty but also angry at the same time. Again, as usual with this whole malarkey, I just didn’t know what was going on. I remembered well because I couldn’t think deeply. I couldn’t cross my mind over John and David. I couldn’t think of them. They put fear on me and I felt unable to focus on what’s next. Nurse motons kept coming round and doing their job. I couldn’t blame them for anything. I wish I had that insight of knowing why I am there for. But didn’t and couldn’t. I continued to “do my job” behaving and skirting around and sometimes even flirting with the nurses. A few days have gone by and I seemed to have been accommodated well. On my daily weight watch I had gained weight as well. I was eating well and all classics were thrown at me and I was reading keenly and with a lot of pleasure. A few occasions that I was going out, I was allowed to roam the whole coastline all by myself of course. Occasionally with drones hovering above my head gaining proximity to check my temperature and making sure I was ok. It was one night when I was in a better mood and felt much more confident that I decided to wake up in the middle of the night, head for the balcony and took the courage to have my mind in a free-flow. First thing I thought about was David and John. Then their mother for a bit, how much I was missing my vertigo, how much I was missing the previous life, people, my daily routine of going out every afternoon down the pub and exchanging conversations with the gang. I miss Saturday shopping, although it used to get in my nerves most of the time, still, when I think of the days lost and the life changed since the great upheaval, I did become slightly more thoughtful than I would’ve done if it was any normal circumstance. I knew I was lost, and I knew that the chances are that I won’t be ever going back to normal. I had to pair with a radical reality of living on the edge. It was over two hours that I roamed with my thoughts. Normally when that happens I would get a signal in my retina to say that you are going over the top and you will need to stop before receiving the red light in your retina which will indicate an oncoming punishment. No sign of it at all. For two hours I was the happiest man on the living earth. Even moton nurses did not bother to stand not far from me and watch me. I thought for a minute that somehow their energies might’ve slipped out but no, it wasn’t at all. I went to see in their area if I could get a glimpse of what are they up to – they were in the charging pods. It felt like somebody had put them there. When I got slightly closer, I could see that they were clicked-on their charging pods which can only be done with someone else’s supervision. No reaction at all. My retina was left at peace and I was just super happy. I could say that I felt a sense of relief but I can’t because I could still, to this day feel that there was still somewhere in my mind something was watching me. I could feel that I was being watched. I searched the whole place and didn’t find anything to suggest that I was in danger or feeling abandoned. I decided to walk out and see what’s out there! Not much was going on. I tried to look at the far distance to see if my sons were there, to see a glimpse of them. But no, nothing was forthcoming and then I realised that I was alone and didn’t want to waste the opportunity to do something about myself. Probably an escape! Or an attempt to find a temporary solution to my situation. I went back to the villa and managed to gather all of my belongings whatever I could find and leave. And I left with a sense of relief but uncertain as to what will happen next.

Walking alongside the beach, I began reflecting on things. All I could do was just think and think. The further away from the villa I was going the lighter my body was feeling and the more mental space to think I was having. The darkness settled down soon and I was walking through the coastline sometimes dipping in my toes in the water waves of which were becoming wilder and much more involved with my pathway. After a few hours, I would say probably three hours at most, I reached this peninsula which was stretched out all the way to my right onto the sea and high mountains and what seemed to be an empty castle at the hill top to my left. I stopped for a minute. My legs were hurting by now as I didn’t stop at all for the duration. There didn’t seem to be any life at all around here. My mind was split between either heading toward the tip of the peninsula to see if there are any abandoned boats there where I could hop into or bear to my left, climb the hill and reach the top to see what’s in there, a place where I could rest for the night or find some food as I was getting hungry. To be honest all I was thinking at that moment was just some rest. I was knackered mentally and hunger wasn’t helping at all. Soon after I managed to scrape thru the shrubs and very tightly knit small trees I got onto the pathway which was laden with gravel, what seemed to me fresh gravel not some old and manky stones. I bent down and picked up a few small stones and smelled them. I could smell the Cotswolds rock and wonderful soil. Not unusual for this kind of gravel to be found in the area. I looked up to see the castle and I have realised that actually the building itself isn’t that close. There was a little bit of a walk to reach the spot. I wasn’t sure for a minute that this would be the safest route to take, but I managed to persuade myself that I should continue the safest path even if the chances are that somebody pops out somewhere and smashes my brains out, I wouldn’t actually care. All I was thinking there was my boys, my life, my future…If I had one. I didn’t actually care at all. After a few minutes of intense reflection and down moments, I reached the top. Right in front of the gates. I didn’t notice any camera or surveillance instruments anywhere. Eerily silence, all I did hear was the waves bashing onto the coastline and the smell of live oak trees which dangerously enough nearly pulled me in to my soon to be emerging down moments. But I resisted. I think the thrill of seeing this hugely impressive castle led me to believe that I can actually believe my grey clouds. Huh, that reminded me of the life before all the great adjustment era. The simple era. The era of endless consumption without any sense at all, an era of never-ending consummate hate and despair. I hated that era, but I loved the people though. I miss them most. Well, you could say that I did sign-up to this myself. I didn’t need too much encouragement. I voluntarily did envisage this kind of living. Huh, when I look back, I feel that there is so much amassed in me that I shouldn’t look back with any nostalgia to try and get something out of it because that would be pointless. I needed to focus on the task ahead of me. I pushed the gate in front of me and the door slid opened as if pulled by somebody behind it. This vast garden opens up in front of me. The place was filled with tiny and all sized gnomes. Fascinating place you couldn’t distinguish between the gnomes and cement-made statues of some characters I have never seen in my life. My first impression of the whole place was of a Marvel world of wonder. Too much colour in all those gnomes and too much variety in all of those cement statues! I bravely make my way through the pathway which leads me to the main door of the building. A very heavy wooded door. I push with all I have got and step into the first bit of the corridor. A vast hall opens up in front of me and this warm air hits my face which together with my uncertain fear did knock me out for a bit. I was also tired and I needed a place where I could just go and sit, lie down and relax. Upstairs area was compartmentalised in all different sections which I found helpful because it had rooms, separate rooms where I could go and find a corner somewhere to rest.

**

When I opened my eyes the next day, there was about five or six gun barrels on my face literally a couple of inches away from my eyes, my cheek and my stomach and chest area. ‘How did you find us?’ The question came from the bearded tall grey-haired man. ‘I don’t know…I think my villa was abandoned by the Council and didn’t know what to do but leave…” I said. They immediately pulled their guns away. ‘I told you. You see. Same thing!’ The bearded man tells the short woman with short black hair but with a lot of make up on her face. I managed to get-up and all I could see around me was armed people. There must’ve been around twenty or thirty of them. I must admit I was scared for a bit. But what I couldn’t work out was that I needed to know what they were doing here. To what purpose a division of armed men and women would gather around and organise an uprising. Or so it seemed to me. ‘Am Max, this is Olivia and that’s our son Alexander…’ he points at the direction of the window at the far end, north side of the room. Alexander comes closer to me, stares at me and then he looks at his Mum and says ‘He has a lot of it…’ Next thing I hear is the thick injection onto my neck and I remember nothing else after that!

When I woke up for the second time in the day. I was in another room with Alexander next to me what seems to be taking my temperature and inconsistently staring into my retina, in my earholes and my neck area. ‘You haven’t had a Llokmanticil fluid at all…How is that possible!?’ He asks. I just lift my shoulders and don’t know what to say. I didn’t actually understand what he was on about. ‘It’s the juice that they use for the easier penetration of Vertigo-wires onto your brain when they hospitalize you!’ aha, now I get him what he meant. I didn’t understand that either as I was not sure what’s the need for a fluid entering my earholes.

Anyhow, he asks me to get up and approach the desk where his computer is opened up. A white platform on the screen tells me that I need to get my retina closer in order to proceed. I did so and then a video showing my arrest, before that John and David knocking on my door when I was on Vertigo full-on. And a lot more videos. You could rewind and you could record, you could change features and people’s faces and move inside the house and see live any activity which goes on to people’s lounges and bathrooms, kitchens and everywhere else. ‘What’s this?’ I said intuitively. I think I probably have scared Alexander a little bit. ‘Easy. Its for your own good. I need to see if you have any features that different to the real you!’ I was astounded. Now, out of the blue he is telling me that I might well be unreal. I might just be just another hybrid species lurking around just like a lost soul. ‘Ok!’ I said without equivocation and feeling slightly uneased. ‘How long will it last?’ I asked impatiently. Alexander could see that I was losing patient. ‘I understand you have gone through some shit mister. But I need you to be patient. A few more minutes and I am done!’ Understandable. A few minutes later, it was all decided that I was real and that I was to be welcomed in their midst. In the downstairs hall, most of them were sitting in the lounge area with notepads and some sort of listening poles which were positioned strategically at each end of the room. Alexander was shuffling stuff around. What I could understand from the distance is that he was the technology man and that you couldn’t really mess with him. I needed him on my side. I sat in the middle of the sofa after Max asked me and openarmly invited me to sit. ‘Friends and fellow enclavers, after we have established that Andy is one of ours, we can proceed on with our plans. And let’s celebrate and welcome our new member of the Enclave…’ A huge wave of applause erupts. I stood up and thanked everybody. Although I was totally confused as to what was I meant to do and what I was doing there, I still managed to pull through. Sat back and just listened. They were keen to have more breakthroughs after they have managed to destroy some of the communication musts and now awaiting the army to come in and invade, they as a group were highly paranoid of every movement and even whatever anybody was saying. I gathered fairly quickly that I needed to be careful what I needed to say. These are a group of people who can actually shoot you without any hesitation if they notice that you are wobbling. I must admit I just didn’t like the whole set-up. I sat there for a few hours gobsmacked as to their plans. I mean how were they going to fight off divisions of heavy armoured army units with light armoury? How were they going to hide from the oncoming assault? I mean this is a tiny island which will be absorbed by an incoming force within two hours. I thought I should probably speak loudly to these amateurs. But didn’t do so. I sat there, occasionally was asked about my opinion on a few matters all technical like; how would you describe the room where you were held for a number of days? Or what kind of transporting vehicle they used when they picked you up from London? I mean the way they were talking was almost like they were planning an invasion of the whole country. Rubbish. I mean I was beginning to become frustrated. I was running out of patients. They were disorganised, chaotic and clueless. I think, deep down they knew it themselves that they are not going to muster a plan of action against all those people. Against the system as such. A system that is unforgiving and harsh once they get their hands on you. Then I started wondering how is it possible that they have survived all alone, cramped up in this tiny island! As much as it was weird, it was also suspicious. A few days went past but I never opened my mouth. I just wanted peace, I guess. But also, I just wanted to sit back and regroup. Think things through without endangering myself or anybody else really. Then a few days later, I think it must have been a Wednesday. I never liked Wednesdays because they are the mid-thru days and a lot will happen on Wednesdays if you weren’t careful with your level of generosity, or perception. So, there they are fishing by the coastline. A lot of them. Hardly anybody was indoors with me. All of a sudden, the earth was shaking. I could feel it from the balcony on the top floor. Next thing I see is the dogs heading toward the coastline where the collective of them are pulling their nets away from the waters, what seems to be they have just come back from fishing, happy faces and a lot of smiles. Dogs barking as if to warn them of an impending something. I didn’t know what was going on. I mean I was beginning to get a little bit nervous. I didn’t like it when the ground underneath me started to shake. The trembling of the floor became more frequent and then onto the sea nearby where the crowd were fishing, the ground opened-up. This huge what seems to be a metallic pointy spire emerges. It had the size of the Shard. Big and bulky, it emerges out of the ground and throws its body into the air. Its never-ending length of its sides becomes bigger and thicker and as the ground creaks so do people disappear in its vortex after it successfully pulls them down below. I stood there not knowing what to do and how to manage the whole situation. First thing that went to my mind was - to hide. I hid in the room but never missing out on all the action in front as I didn’t want it to miss. This huge vehicle transformed into a hovering aircraft and very quickly the loud speaker from onboard began to ask people to surrender. All I could see at that friction of the second is so many of the middle-fingers pointing in the direction of the aircraft-vehicle. As it swivelled around on its side, I could read SATURN SECURITY – Strange but very fitting. I used to work for the company. Huh, I mumbled to myself. They are probably using the technology I helped build to annihilate these people down below. It didn’t go long until the barrage of micro-laser beamed on the wet bodies of fishermen down below. I can hear Olivia crying and screaming from the floor below me. I immediately take cover just behind this thick curtain. I know that they will turn their turrets on her now. It didn’t take long, just as I was thinking of a route to head downstairs and shelter Olivia, the beaming micro-laser make her disappear and I hear no more screams. So far, no one was left alive. I was the only one still standing but I knew that they will send in the troops and scan the whole area. I was breathing slowly, very slowly. But couldn’t help peeking on the lines between the curtains and making sure that I don’t make any move whatsoever because every move will just draw their attention swiftly. They left after a few minutes. They absorbed themselves back in the ground hole where they came from and disappeared in a whiff leaving carnage and complete lifelessness on the ground. I stepped out onto the balcony and all I could do was throw a curse and feel absolutely sorry for all those down below laying there lifeless and never bearing to ever look myself in the mirror and feel absolutely guilty for the monster I have helped built but also for the complete impotence I just shown when my fellow human beings where massacred right in front of my eyes.

6

Rafting toward the land of beyond!

Without any compass or any sense of direction at all, I managed to get myself onto the sea on this medium-sized yacht of a considerable luxury. After the incident with the fisherman on the beach, I decided to gradually have more self-belief and everything else about the introversions of the world became much more clearer to me. I didn’t believe on the spirit of communal co-existence or any of the malarkey that ‘Together We’re Stronger’ bullshit which I was exposed to by the political entities since my young age have entailed. I was by myself just days after two very tragic events happened in my life. One was the witnessing of my sons not far from here and the high expectations that I have built already once I saw John and David warning me to leave. I mean that was hard. That was excruciatingly difficult to bear. I felt powerless and impotent at max. Secondly, the enclavers and their fate on the beach. I mean that was grotesque and hard to swallow. I sailed away for days I think until I reached the shores of an island. At first, I couldn’t work out where this place was. But then gradually as I was getting closer, it was becoming clear to me that I was approaching an island. A big island. It was quiet and daylight. Beautiful sunny day. No harm was forthcoming, and I was relaxed. To be honest, I was fed-up with all of it, so I just didn’t care what was going to happen to me even if the whole think was about to end. I didn’t care. I couldn’t give the roosters. The island proved to be a peaceful tranquil place. I hopped on to the anchoring area in the nearby small pull-out area. Due to the strong winds, I found it extremely hard to anchor smoothly, so I rammed the boat onto the pavement and the screeching coming off the edge of the bay slabs made it so eerily hurtful. I wasn’t hurt in the end of the day is what matters. At that moment, the minute I stepped onto the slabs, I realised that I have nothing to lose – whatever happens to me. So Without much time to waste I headed straight for the town centre where the arrows pointing to the city where large enough so you couldn’t miss them. Much of what had remained in the city was a few stores with opened doors as the looters have managed to get there before anybody else. The square had the monument of King George II, a gilded statue of an enormous size. As I approach closer to the statue, on its wall I read that the distances in the island are actually measured from this statue. It made me think. I quite actually like it. I like this place. I mean, if there’s been looting around here what has. Happened to the people who used to live here!? Then another thought crossed my mind – I could just sit here tight and not do much. I could go fishing when I needed food, I could live in every house within the square so as not to be detected. I could just wander around for days, weeks months even without being noticed. If I am clever enough I could just hand around here for longer. I mean, what would you have done if you had been in the same situation? You would do the same wouldn’t you. I mean I got tired, super tired from all of the running and hiding. I think I should just pay myself some credit here, sit tight and begin enjoying life. I don’t care anymore!

**

The first night was very quiet. I managed to stay in the Royal Yacht, a few hundred yards away from the town centre. It was a fantastic stay. I really enjoyed it. What was amazing about the stay was that everything seemed to be warm and working. The power was on, the bread basket’s in the canteen area had bread, like fresh bread, there was fresh meat and the wine was just beautiful, absolutely delicious. After I had stuffed myself after dinner, I managed to go out for a stroll. As I was going past a few buildings, these were all residential apartments, I could hear the noise emanating from beyond walls. At first, I couldn’t make sense what was all this about but then I got closer to one of the houses and tried to peer thru the key hole and I did see people on their sofas and on Vertigo seats hooked. Damn fool I thought to myself. I was immediately hit by the sense of relief. But it wasn’t the usual sense of relief that one gets because life all of a sudden has become bearable. No, far from it. It was more of a sense of a temporary distress because I noted people and that if worse comes to worse, I can just nip in their homes and seek shelter, support…or relief! Anyhow! I managed to spend a few days in the island, and I must admit that I did have fun. It was amazing how much one can do without the ever presence of humanity or any sense of belongingness. Relief isn’t enough of an explanation to justify the sense of pleasure and relaxation I was feeling at the time. So, I decided to become slightly more adventurous, and this enigma was weighing heavy in my shoulders when I began thinking of the potential hurdles I might face in the coming days if I were to remove myself from the comfort. I packed my ruck sack and was very sad immediately to have to leave the lovely hotel which accommodated me nicely for the past few days. It did cross my mind that I was leaving behind all of this for what!? I mean it’s hard to process this. I think, when I look back now and think of my decision to leave that comfort and move on somewhere more palatable, because of enduring agony of boredom. My body kind of got used to feeling the sense of challenge, I couldn’t sit there and just be a spectator to the rolling life of stillness. I wanted more from life. Whatever life I have. That sense of requiring more and more, to see the light and try to make sense of the reality around me, was causing me more uncertainty. In my mind I was becoming a self-rejecting nuisance who doesn’t tolerate the backsliding of my emotions a single bit. I think I was becoming a self-defeating project of never-ending script. I could write it all down what I was becoming but I couldn’t decipher who I was to be the next minute! Strange. Anyhow, I left the hotel and with my rucksack on my back I proceeded. I could sense that if there were to be people in the balconies and knowing what I was going through, they would’ve cheered me on. They would wave away and cheer me on endlessly as to my own ending probably or even worse. But there were no to be people. They were all trapped on their own worlds without a clue what has been happening around their lives, their neighbourhoods, and their futures. After I amassed a few miles of walking, I arrived at the eastern side of the island at the St Catharine’s Breakwater which is not really far from St Helier but it seems to me that I have gone round and round the island walking pretty much most of the time from dusk to dawn and haven’t even stopped one minute apart from the wanderings in the village farms seeking food and a little bit shelter from the drenching rain. I must’ve been hungry all along as I haven’t had much to eat for a few good hours. St Catharine’s was beautiful and as it was early morning, I managed to sit in the parchment not far from the mid-section area where an old tank was positioned, redundant from the last war probably. I sat there and once more started to feel nostalgic about the old times. It is impossible to look back and not feel that, you know, there is so much I miss from that past. Didn’t last long and I could see from a far distance a dimming light approaching and zooming in bigger. I ran onto the nearby woods and tried to find a place to hide. The object came very close to the docks. I could sense that this thing was looking for something or somebody. I Couldn’t work it out as it was difficult from the distance to see what it was doing when it was docking on and off as if something or somebody wasn’t letting it land! It was a strange behaviour. If I hadn’t been exposed to this kind of technology from the past, one would’ve thought that this object was out of the world spaceship. But it wasn’t. I know it because I have worked in this technology for a while, and I know how they operate. They have this one-mile radius range where they can pick up DNA traces and breathing organisms and are very fast with a supersonic speed before they hit their pray. You stand no chance escaping them. They are one of the worst of the hunters. They are the Path-Hunters12. Deadly Path-Hunters who never ask a question or two but always to the point, ready to kill and make things disappear. I was taken aback initially when I realised how vicious they can be if they are allowed to operate in an open space. They are not manned but remotely operated by the Cem-Scanners. I needed to be very careful of these mechanisms. I am truly borne witness of the capabilities by these things. I just wanted to make sure that I won’t get caught by them because that would be final for me. I bravely stayed there for a little while until it moved away and disappeared in a whiff. It picked up something on the way out though. I couldn’t work out what it was but there was something that it took with it. From afar it had a box-shaped object, heavy and you could tell that the weight of it was pushing the aircraft down a little bit. I decided to shut my eyes and not communicate with its sensors just in case it picks up my movements and become completely enthralled with my presence before I had any chance to escape. A few more hours have gone past since the Path-Hunter disappeared together with the object it was carrying, and I wasn’t making any progress whatsoever. I managed to get up and out of the bushes and head for the near adjacent boat-port. I picked a small yacht that had all the amenities I needed. Stuff like independent navigating system, night vision and hazard perception drones which fly way ahead of the boat to warn of an incoming threat. It had a nice rest area, bathrooms and about three bedrooms, a beautiful balcony and a helipad. It seemed to be a throw from the past but with a lot of modern top of the range machinery and logistics. I couldn’t wait to start this humongous machine. You could easily be deceived by its sheer size. It. Does resemble a sitting beauty by the dock but it has more depth and more spirit than you can ever imagine. It took me a while to work this thing around and after a few hours of meddling with the switching mechanisms and ensuring that the sun-sensors are switched and operating properly, at last eureka claimed my senses and I was free to start and ebb away from the dock. By the time I navigated with a distance, darkness had settled and from the distance all I could hear was the noise of the cricket and their stridulation from afar. It was becoming spookier by the minute, and I thought the only way to escape any incoming black swan was to leave but head where!? Head somewhere I must said to myself.

*By this time I had fainted or lost consciousness. I couldn’t work out what had happened but one thing that I do remember well now is that I was pushed onto a loop, lying flat on my back, stripped off my clothes and a huge what looked like a silicon made helmet was put on me while I was watching these motons rule over my body and me and I was totally unable to do anything about it. I remember what stroke my mind then was that I was wondering whether this is just a pure reason for controlling me or setting me in a very different destination a place where I wouldn’t know myself where it was or where I was heading. It wasn’t because I had a sweet blood. No, definitely not. More likely that I must’ve done something really bad in the past to endure this kind of treatment. When I woke up, it must’ve been a few hours after I was trixed. I managed to get my senses back and I could feel. I was done with the feeling of old and frail tired and with a lot of stigmatic bones. In was the new and reborn Andy. I could even feel the strength in my muscles. My eye movement was phenomenal. I began to feel eighteen again. I got up and I started to stretch. It was my body I could feel, it was me entirely me. It couldn’t have been somebody else. The nearest mirror was in the corner of the room attached in a cupboard which I discovered. Had been empty. I look at myself and nothing has changed visionally, still that fifty-something guy who has been gone well past his prime and unable to readjust to the new reality. I didn’t actually care whether there was a sense of doubt on me or if I ever wanted to be perceived differently to the rest of the world and my ecosystem. All I cared was that I needed to get going, move on and explore more of what was to come. That feeling of redemption and self-satisfaction was about to come at an end from the moment two of the motons walked in. Humanlike with not much personality, this two egregious manufactured consciousness are ruthless. They walk in and first thing they ask is whether I was feeling fine and if I needed anything. One of them was holding this remote mechanism on its hand. He pointed a light, a streak of thin laser light in my left eye and at the same time asked me if I was feeling fine with the light exposure straight into my eye. I said, I was fine and I wasn’t feeling anything at all. They insisted that I respond quicker when asked a question. I obeyed. I didn’t hesitate like I was hesitating previous times. So, I responded but they didn’t ask any questions. So, I continued to press on by asking them questions. ‘Who are you people?’ , ‘Do you know what’s happening with me?’ Who is behind all of this?’, ‘Can somebody tell me what is going with me and the world around me? I didn’t sign up for all of this!’ But to no avail. They were absolutely not interested at all to hear me. Looking back now, I do remember that these creatures did not have any listening organs at all. They are not designed to listen and pay attention or draw any attention to themselves. Partly the design of their facial features is to decimate any sense of responsibility in the outer world or the incoming world. So, they are designed such that they would not allow for any backlash against them. They are troopers, they are soldiers who do things the way they were told to. And I sat there, allowing this huge step of affliction on my unhindered but unhinged consciousness. After many questions and tirelessly trying to work out what was happening to me and maintaining cool in my head, I changed tac. I blanked out my thinking, for a bit. Then slightly later, I began going deeper into my thoughts. I brought about a lot of blood and harsh and cruel scenery in my thoughts. I was imagining them in front of me, dealing with my wrath and with my absolute terror. I turned into this monster who hasn’t got any mercy on anything or anybody. I became something else completely. I began building this imaginary world full of fears and destruction. Machines lying about in the cities and villages, destroyed by human ingenuity and strength. I started to throw streams of heroism from our youth. Young man and woman throwing themselves onto these metallic killing machines and not letting go until they are all destroyed. I needed to portray the blood with something. These things have no blood. But, I needed to find a way, a method to demonstrate to them that we can also have our revenge that we can actually stand up for ourselves and that we can fight back. That we will one day have our lives back and that we will triumph.

I couldn’t do it just by thinking cruelly. I had to try and get them into thinking that I am one of the neutrals. The bodies that are inconsistent with their magnitude of pressure and toil that they put on them. I wasn’t one of those. I knew I had much more steel left in me. I did feel that I was abducted, because the speed of moving loop was immense and I could feel that the detachment from the gravity was happening with the speed of electricity. I could say that the moving loop stopped at mid-point somewhere half way through. And I couldn’t understand what kind of language they were speaking, but I could hear the chit-chat between the cockpit control which was not far from the room I was put in, in the adjacent corridor which from my distance, it looked really claustrophobic and unreachable for a bid bodied people like me. I was wondering how do these motons go through these corridors. My wonder was cut-off short as the frames of the entrance to the corridor opened wide and just like a hermetically closed door of an airplane it opened pretty wide and then all of a sudden you could fit two or three people thru it. I was at peace at that moment in time because I felt that I am encountering human technology and engineering. This wasn’t some kind of unknown stuff from afar for which I couldn’t put my finger on. Their movements, the motons movements became much more frequent never realising that I was bullshitting them all along. I was so pleased with myself that I was managing quite successfully to hide my inner self and portray me as somebody they never understood. For one moment I was left alone and the first opportunity I had was to head out for the door that was visible from the angle where I was lying down. The door looked easy and ready to be opened. All I needed to do is twist the rotating button to the right where the almost invisible arrow was pointing in that direction and that is it. I stood up and the alarms are heard everywhere. Just before I reached for the button I could hear the footsteps of the motons heading my way and the squeegee door was about to open wide with three motons marching towards me. As I touched the button, all of a sudden the tip of my fingers were getting instantly warmer and as in the slow motion, it was initially my hand and then the rest of my body jelled through the door and onto an alleyway which led me to a field of corn and all I could see there was this huge mechanical arch. I thought it was mechanical because the first thing I saw there was the metallic structure which you could notice from afar. There were no people, only green corn, not yet fully matured but I could smell something burning. I immediately looked around almost doing a step turn three hundred and sixty degrees around to see if I notice anything that’s burning and finding out where I was. There wasn’t much I could see. I couldn’t see any living breed. But I could see that these huge steel poles and other material being lifted out from the ground up and all of these were being attached onto the side of the body of the arch. It looks like they are building this huge arch for a purpose. I didn’t know what to do. I stood there and just watched these self-moving parts almost attaching themselves onto any objects they chose to attach themselves at. I started to walk towards it and it felt real. This was no virtual shit. This was real. That constant pressure and intensity I was getting when I was during my virtual exposure had gone now and now I was more inclined to believe that this is a different dimension reality to me. But, how could I be assured that this is what I wanted to get myself involved in! I mean I did not have a choice really. I needed to be curious. So, I carried on toward the arch and as I was getting nearer the object, one thing that was appealing to my curiosity was that I needed to touch the arch. The closer I was getting to the object the more distanced this thing was getting. I was getting further away from it but I could see that the object was nearer me. I rubbed my eyes and wanted to refresh my sight and partly try and give my brain a new perspective. I looked again – the same thing. I couldn’t change anything. It was like there was something that wasn’t allowing me to get closer to the object. But I didn’t feel that I was commanded by anything or somebody or something. I kept looking behind the more I was getting closer to the arch. When I decided to look at myself all I could see was that I was part of the cornfields and nothing else more. I couldn’t just pull my arm in front of me and see it. I couldn’t even see my feet. I was invisible. I was starkly different. I thought I just became part of the nature and that I was feeling good about it. I gave up on the idea of getting close to the arch. I think I was more excited about breathing in the never-ending surrounding with all its infinite goods, greenery, almost like a Ukrainian agricultural mass where humanity feels so small and nature becomes so enthralling and endless. I didn’t like being side-lined by nature in this way. My curiosity was quashed after I attempted to emulate a more heroic figure amongst this vastness of conundrum. But I realised that I couldn’t cause a lot of trouble – So I needed to abide by the forces of the uncertainty to whatever is thrown at me. I needed to seek and observe, but seeking and observing I needed to enforce a certain principle – that of calming my mind slightly and then moving on quickly from one subject to the other in my mind before I get caught blurting out stuff that I didn’t even myself understand. I started to think about the music I used to listen to. You know the classics, the usual instrumental concerto’s. Vivaldi came to mind first, then I couldn’t stop bringing Handle’s water music. The concertos’ soon became harder to digest because I began walking longer distances and the longer and further away I was going or so I thought I was, the louder the music was becoming in my head. I continued to walk for a little longer but the scenery wasn’t changing much. Apart from a few shrubs and bushes on the side of the pathway, an occasional tree here and then, I couldn’t see much until a barbed wire type noise came out of nowhere and I didn’t know where to locate such noise. I thought, initially this was coming from the arch because the sound of it was like throwing a stone in an empty container resonating so loud that I had to shut my ears off and interrupt my thoughts. Then I started to doubt myself. I also cursed myself for seeking to escape from the tube where I was perfectly safe and everything was under control. I wasn’t sure that I was going to pull through. Trust me it is much harder than you may think if you end up in that state of limbo but a furthering limbo where the aspects of rationalisation and your inner feelings are utterly useless. In places like this, abundance is what you seek, loneliness is what you get. It didn’t go long after I started to hear voices from afar. It was like a symphony of birds happily singing up in the air. I looked up. The air was jelly and impenetrable. You couldn’t suck much from it, you couldn’t do much with it. I was breathing but it wasn’t the air that I was breathing – My breathing was supported by an extendable invisible cloud incinerator which I could feel I had it somewhere inside my brain. Is this some kind of unreal realness!? Or an unknown prospect for which I haven’t been able to work it out so far!? I continue to clock in the mileage but nothing happened for a while until the screaming faces appear in front of me. I stopped but because of my invisibility I thought I didn’t have to worry about anything because they won’t see me. I was literally thinking like an earthly endeavourist trying to mould in the day to day living of something farther detached from myself. They can see me. After I established that, I started to seek something else but was not allowed to do so. I very quickly became an instant attraction for these screaming voices which shortly became screaming faces trying to push through the air in a situation where these things where trying to escape from somewhere. I needed to ignore them and move on. Clocking on the mileage, I continued ahead, the arch was still there and wasn’t moving anywhere. I wanted it to move or at least I could just move away from it. But that wasn’t the case. All of a sudden after a few attempts trying to hide away from the screaming voices and faces, the arch started to move slightly in my direction. I swear to anything, I thought at that moment that I have transcended. Because I have never seen such a thing in my life before. The moving Arch had many pointy departure pylons which were spreading a multicoloured steam into the air but its streams were taking the shape of the faces that were screaming. I wondered for a minute if this is some kind of purgatory that the not yet dying or already dead people were going through. All indications were that I was in that transient world of departing our boring and exhumed planet and the living and moving onto something new, something that we have not gone before. I thought about the “real” moments, the real humanity which it seems to me now has disappeared from my imagination as I could not remember who I was or what I was doing or where I was!

Soon the scenery changed and the arch turned itself around and showing the more productive side of it this huge side gate opened widely and confidently but abruptly and what seems to be crying babies inserted inside tubes that look like one of these lifts made out of glass that penetrate upwards and downwards unhindered. A smooth noise of a woman came through describing the process of conception to the moment when the first cry of a baby is heard only by the mother at sleep. ‘This is the first millisecond of a moment when these babies make the first contact with their mother. They cry and they let the earthly creatures know that they are. The new addition to the pool of humanity. Again, I tried to pinch myself but I couldn’t as I didn’t have no body, I had no head, no bone structure and if there was a mirror there somewhere, I probably couldn’t see myself at all. Then a few minutes later after a repetitive process, the voice turned towards me and what seems like it was talking to me said the following “You must choose now between here and the next step or the world of condemnation down below!” I wasn’t sure what to make of it. But I was determined to press ahead, and I must’ve said something with my mind because she already understood what I was on about and immediately afterwards, babies cries stopped and I was free and the environment around me was noiseless and I began to have hopes. The arch started moving forward toward the misty clouds which strangely enough weren’t encapsulating me and my bit of the area but they were scattered everywhere in front of me and behind as if not to let me see and know what was this all about. I then started walking faster. I needed to change the scenery quickly. As I was walking, I was also able to analyse things a little bit better. One thing I noticed I didn’t have was the ability to recall moments of my previous life. I thought to myself, well this is not new. I mean, I must’ve contracted some kind of disease, or the programming isn’t as good as one can imagine would be. I must’ve stumbled through some glitch during the transition and haven’t been able to recover my previous abilities. But, in all honesty, I didn’t need all the past memories. I knew that deep down I had a consciousness, and I knew who I was. I was Andy and I needed to have time to get through this whatever is served in front of me and I can relate to a future which is different. I feared that I might fail and I feared that I might be stopped or that I might be returned back to my Vertigo and live how I lived for a few years past. But, I didn’t want to care. I just needed to see a lot more and that I was hungry to go through it fast and with a lot of adrenaline in my system, I needed to blow this whole thing up and feel that I have achieved something. In front of me the scenery started to change rapidly. They must’ve listened to me! I thought to myself. Of course, they can hear my most in-depth thoughts and they can evaluate my analysis pretty fast and they can respond efficiently. I thought I should probably pick something from the menu on offer. I focused my attention in this particular colourful sequence. I checked out the content of it on a smaller crisply written status just below it and it said “The world of many departures”. I was intrigued. I clicked on it with the focus of my mind and this huge screen opens up which I could focus on even when I was walking, or I thought I was. These triangle-shaped flying objects were taking off from the many bases, dozens or more from the states and mainland Europe, Asia, and Africa. For the first time in the human history, what it seemed, these flying objects looked like obsessively leaving, abandoning the world in an orderly fashion and without chaos. I wanted to enquire more from the sequence and in my mind I asked for a brief description of the event. A long fast teleprompter appeared in front of me and I was told that this is the last year of the living humans on. Earth. The planet was about to be turned into a vast energy source for the needs of Mars with all of the nuclear and radioactive elements making up a huge endless potential for producing energy for the millennia and more. I wanted to dig deeper. The mechanism behind my consciousness heard me and understands me. Although initially I had felt utterly uncomfortable of the fact that somebody else can actually read my mind and understand my intentions well in advance, I am becoming accustomed to this and I am beginning to like it a lot. This is not some kind of intrusive tool that leads your life. It actually is a helpful mechanism for me to be able to see all of these worlds without having to move a finger. I mean not that I have one. As I am gradually descending towards the earth, I can see things much closer. Terra-firma has been turned into this gigantic Quantum Computer with trillions of wires dug deep into the surface’s deoth but even deeper. I turn the earth on its axis and choose to look into it from a five kilometres angle but with an incision breadth onto the core. The core its still boiling. These wires hanging on to the heated surface of the core extract kiloton megawatt energy which is all sucked up to the top of the surface where it is converted into a radioactive wave-length energy source encapsulating all the earth. I look at the far end of the galaxy after I have expunged myself away from the proximity of the earth and I can see that the planet Mars is our new planet. Excellent, I thought. We are still the survivors of the post-apocalyptic phase and now live happily in a new planet within our galaxy. But, then I wondered how is all of this energy being transported all the way to Mars? How is it transmitted and what do we need it for exactly? I mean, you would think that these leaders would’ve found a solution pre-departure to fuel our living with energy! That might not be the case. Then soon after I had thought of that, a screen appears right in front of me with a number of other screens and an arrow hanging on the left corner of the screen indicating to me that I just need to point the arrow at the right screen in order to get my answers. I picked up the arrow and pointed it at screen seventeen. I don’t know why I picked that number. I just did and it was very much rewarding. All I could see as a whole fume, a grey fume coming out of the North Pole on the axis of the earth. This was strange I thought. What would that mean. Then I choose screen eighteen. The fume seemed to have gotten a bit bigger and wider, covering almost every part of the planet, every corner of its geography. I wanted to see more. So, I pressed screen nineteen and then screen twenty and the rest of them until the last screen I clicked on I had arrived at the point where I was picked up by the Digi-Council and was taken to the safe-house in Devonshire. I wanted to stop but couldn’t, not because I physically couldn’t because I couldn’t obviously as I did not have a physical body, but I just felt that I needed to understand more of what is going on in this parallel world I have entered. So, the fume after all had an explanation! That was that the core of the planet had ‘sipping problems’. That meant that because of the overheat of the earth’s inner core on itself, the core couldn’t hold all that amount of energy inside itself. So, it needed to relieve itself by bursting out the top of the planet – the North Pole-. I thought to myself this is like the earth had done a shitting on top of its head. It wasn’t funny, so I apologised to the manager of my consciousness. I didn’t get a reply by the way. I carried on in the meantime. All of a sudden, I was becoming more conscious of my own existence because I felt assured by my own sense of existence. I then started to wonder what this is all about. Amidst all of the distractions, the one thing that I was clearly conscious of was the sense of certainty. I knew I was somehow alive. Still intact with my own feelings and my own sense of reality. This was such a relief. I could give somebody a great hug and a kiss and a cuddle if I had that chance there and then. No, I was lonely and lonely I wanted to be. Lonely I was. Lonely I am!

7

“Awake”

I didn’t want to be in this room. Surrounded by three nurse mobots, what it seemed to be a good care system, I was being looked after. But to me the lying on the bed and the constant checking in by mysterious doctors at all times, was just over the top. I mean they should know by now that I am aware that this is some tasting campaign that I have been put through and that I was aware of what was to come. I understood that I was being pushed around trying and trialling many realities at the same time as my own reality. So, what is the point of all of this then! I wondered.

I knew at the first touch that these mobots won’t answer me. I also knew that the doctor will just appear out of nowhere and I will be monitored again, I will be checked put again, I will be looked at the deepest of the levels forensically my blood cells will be counted one by one and I knew that my brain would be pushed forward and back and that I will be send somewhere else to complete the tasks ahead. I didn’t know that I was part of some experimentation. I didn’t want to believe that this is the whole purpose of this saga. So, I decided to make noise again. Things like ‘Why am I here? Why can’t I just stay there where I was? Why this and that…?’ But no-one was forthcoming. I waited and just continued shouting until the moment when they just shut me up. My inner voice was gone and there was no more screaming. I was giving a hard push with my voice box but no breath was sipping through. After a minute I wasn’t even thinking about screaming and shouting. My brain froze and I was only staring at this light in front of me with mobots moving around fiddling with my body. I did not feel any pain or discomfort but I could feel that within minutes my eyes were going red and small things floating in front of my retina. One of the mobots put some kind of a gel in my eyes and then I went completely blind. I hated it. They could read my mind and then I could feel that some other thoughts were being smuggled through into my brain. Things like: ‘We need you to stay calm and focus on the light!’ and then ‘That’s good, very good boy. Please carry on and keep focusing on the light!’. They kept going for a good while. I knew this was vindictive of them. I knew that I couldn’t win but I chose a strategy of making their lives more difficult. I knew that I couldn’t just leave and abandon the place! I knew many things but I had few options. A few hours later I was awake and had been sitting in this gigantic super smooth sofa, lazy boy type of seat where you could sit there for hours and not feel any discomfort. The drip-feeding must’ve been there for some time. At that moment I didn’t know what was going on with me. I just woke up and all I could see was the large windows floor to ceiling, sun was shining outside. A lot of birds flying freely in the air, to them there was nothing that would bother them for their lives. They didn’t know what was happening in the real world below them. Lucky them, I said to myself. They are free and here we are entangled in an endless life of self-mutiny and regret, physically impossible to choose the life that we want to live. I tried to stand on my feet but I didn’t have any strength. I had no energy, and I had no mental strength to help myself get on my feet. I looked around for help and support but didn’t find none. For the first time in the wake of my life I felt lonely, and I was scared. After a while, after I had reflected a lot and had managed to get my strength back, somehow feeling slightly more optimistic about my prospects, a gentleman, a tall gentleman walks in unassuming but with a big smile in his face. I laughed too. For the first time I felt that I could feel human and I could smile. I could relate to somebody and I could feel that I belonged to something. ‘We have a surprise for you Andy!’ he said with that smirk on his face which I didn’t like within a few minutes after I met him. ‘What surprise!?’ I asked barely able to mutter a word he comes right behind me, presses a button and then all of a sudden the trolley moves forward and I feel a sense of unease. I continue to mutter the words ‘What surprise, what surprise, what surprise,’ I kept doing it even without me having an idea why I am saying it. And then the doors in front of me open widely and there they are James and David. But they are small though. They are the little boys whom I have taken care of and looked after them. But I was slightly confused and I didn’t know how to react. But I cried. I constantly sobbed. David had his thumb in his mouth, you know the usual stand he used to be, thumb in his mouth and the death stare. James in the other hand was starring at me pretending to know me and just muttering words like ‘Dad is that you!?’ I responded back after a few seconds as I didn’t know how to take this. ‘It is me my child I said. Come to me and give me a hug my boy,’ James wasn’t sure he should respond to me ‘but I don’t know if you are daddy?’ He says silently. I open my arms wide and want to make him feel more welcomed. ‘It is me, your father.’ I said and after a slight hesitation he runs towards me. The motons and all mobots smile but I know that deep down they are emotionless and that they are only there because they have a job to do. David joins us in the hug group. I feel them but I can’t put my finger on anything. Something doesn’t make sense here. I am hugging my children but I am not feeling anything related to them. I don’t get it! I hug them and re-hug them and I start to smell them. I guess I was trying to come to some sense with a different reality, with an unknown sense of belongingness and that was making me uncomfortable. I knew something wasn’t right. I kept looking on everybody surrounding us. The tall gentleman, the motons and the mobots, they all had one thing in common – they were not real humans and they were there just doing their jobs. James and David stood there silently looking down. They weren’t my boys I said to myself and immediately a voiceover whispered in my ear ‘They are your children from the distanced past. You must embrace them. You must give them the same sense of love you have always given them since they were small!’ I was flabbergasted. I just couldn’t swallow the last insinuation. I looked at the thing and all I could see deeply entrenched on its face a muddle of wires, red hot tiny twisted pipes containing energy full of hate and no emotions. I thought this would just be a waste of time for me. I didn’t need to argue with this thing. I knew it once I thought of it I would be understood as they can read my mind. David and James were still standing there like little robots, artificial creatures that they are. I withdrew all shame or any feelings I had for them. I wasn’t ashamed. I wanted to send them a message, to the organisers of this torture that everything they were doing was not going to lead me to an unhinged life. I didn’t flinch. I did not hug my supposed children and I didn’t want them to over care about me or feel anything different. I wanted out and I wanted to sort this problem out. In a way I was deliberately stalling the whole thing. I had an agenda and I wanted to prevail but I couldn’t think clearly, I mean I couldn’t think clearly in deliberation because then I would’ve been found out! So, the usual process begins. First thing they do is that they take me away in another room to try and frighten me by telling me that If I didn’t’t obey their orders they could extinguish the existence of my children, they would make them disappear and knowing now that they are not my children anymore, or in reality they are mine actually but in another holographic reality they are not. Anyhow, the mental torturing began and ended with questions. Just questions, questions that didn’t make any sense because as you have worked out until now, they know all the answers because they can read my mind. Soon after that meeting of the minds – I was put in a separate room to read. I didn’t know what I was reading. I remember that I had a sort of magazine in my hand and I was trying to figure out the pictures of people in it. There were pictures of people being naked, some sort of celebrities from the past life, a magazine that didn’t have any meaning to me but all the while it was helping me focus and kill time. There came a time when I didn’t understand why I was being kept in these conditions. I went well past it worrying about it. I was seeking time to leisure amidst all that shit I was going through. As a matter of fact I asked them if they could provide me with some sort of drug-enhancing pill that would help me sustain the leisurely feelings I was getting. They wouldn’t agree because they thought that what they induced me with a few hours prior will be more than enough to help me sustain the ecstasy. Sometimes I felt that I didn’t understand them what they were on about and a lot of it was due to the lack of communication or the distance that they have created with me over the weeks and months and I didn’t grasp that from the start. I spent two days reminiscing in this cell, all alone, surrounded by white walls. This room wasn’t bigger than a Marriott hotel’s bathroom with high ceiling walls and no windows. The door becomes all invisible or is wrapped by walls immediately after it shuts. The floor was white ceramic, the walls where glass material or some sort. I just couldn’t work it out whether they were the real deal. You know stuff like earthly material! I thought to myself that they are just wasting their time and energy doing this because they should know that I will not break down. I will not just let my guard down and give in to their pressures. They must realise by now that I am actually an uncontrollable uniformed unit of a specimen and I don’t just let anybody scupper my chances of survival. They should know that. The night goes by just the way it arrived. But the morning after was much more intrepid and full of surprises. This time round they decided to bring my two boys but the grown up version. I mean, how ridiculous is that! James and david walk in unhindered by the uneasiness I am experiencing at the moment. They walk in and go straight for the jugular. ‘Dad, I can’t believe you are behaving like this!’ I felt like I don’t have any other option but to grab James by his throat and to try and tell him that he is being played and that he is being stupid and that this is not the real him and that, that, that he should just be careful and to tread carefully with me. I didn’t have precondition to emulate the upper shifting of my moods and this was making me sadder. I did see his face though and that made my heart tremble. For what its worth I I did falter inside me, something was bugging my own existence and I wasn’t able to process what was going on and how I was regulating my own turmoil but in the meantime I was holding on my grudge and James was getting closer to me. I thought he was trying to give me hug but no, it was something he wanted to show me. ‘Look Dad. This is us. We are real and we are your sons. We are your flesh and blood. You need to believe us.you must believe us!’ As his line of enquiry develops further into a pathetic pleading, he shows me a footage on this tiny glass screen. There is me communicating with them from the terrace of the villa in Devon. I became more susceptible of everything around me. ‘I know. I know that you don’t actually understand. I don’t expect you to understand me. Why are you doing this to my sons. Why are you getting my sons involved in all of this. What is it that you want from me!?’ Deep down I knew that this strategy of mine wasn’t going to work with them. But, I knew that some release of anger or an outburst or a compilation of high-pressure and burst of air is going to occur soon and that is going to come from them and not me. They decided to pull James away from me and the isolation all of a sudden became much more darker. The lights were switched off and the walls became darker and screens were put on showing what it looks like to me a long journey of the humans since the pre-evolution times. I didn’t understand what this was all about. All of a sudden the walls turned to ever moving and oscillating screens with a lot of information bombarding my sense of normality out of my head. I couldn’t shut my eyes or my ears. I didn’t have control of my body at all. I became their subject entirely apart from my thoughts. That, they could control what I was processing but they couldn’t control the direction of my thoughts. That was impossible. The screen movement continued for another two or three hours, I wasn’t sure how long they were penetrating my mind. But impressive encapsulation of the whole human evolution and history. Until my mind went sleeping and became exhausted infinitely wanting to shut down. It must’ve triggered them a sense of fear and insecurity because they had to immediately stop the show. That meant that the room went all dark and through the aggravating process of instilling me with the anti-sleeping dotes, they were able to keep me awake. These dotes become almost like bits you see in front of your eyes when your eye-ball is squeezed out of its normal shape. I started to see these little things like bacterial small objects that kept moving around in my mind and when I wanted to stop them from floating in my mind’s eyes they became even more angrier and I was unable to stop them. The more I was inclined to do something for myself the further the body was shutting down until I woke up a little bit later. Well, I say later but that was almost like two weeks but it felt like I had just fallen asleep. I was tired. My body now was very sensitive and I felt I had been intruded upon. I needed to assure myself but I didn’t have the means or understanding how to do that. I could feel that a lot has been going on in my body and with my whole physicality. After I had opened my eyes I saw that I was placed in a huge hall where I couldn’t see a soul. Lying in a bed in the middle of the hall what it looked like I had been abandoned, my sense of security increased a little bit. I managed to gather some strength and keep on steady in my feet. I looked around, done almost a three-hundred-and-sixty degree turn. All I could see was complete whiteness and no signs of life from anywhere. I looked back in my bed to see if I have left any personal belongings. None was there. It was an empty stable with a white sheet over it. I felt sad for myself and then sadness got me deeper and it felt like it caught me harsher. I started to harm myself because I couldn’t stand it to feel the “Me” again. I felt the “Me” again and for a while I thought it was long forthcoming. I guess I have missed being myself, feeling pain and the whole weight of the world in my shoulders. Every-time I stopped for reflection, each time I would start harming myself until I l would lose consciousness and drop. I would pick myself up and try to move on further, making small steps but for some reason it was becoming much more difficult to sustain that tempo. Again, I was left alone to fend for myself. I needed to find some strength from somewhere. For a minute I thought I was abandoned with all my faculties intact. I wasn’t receiving the cracking noise in my ears no more. I was becoming positive by the hour. After a few attempts to try and leave the hall, I managed in the end. Oh it felt so good. I couldn’t envisage that this would ever happen. I was prepared to spend a few more hours or possibly days inside the hall, abandoned. Outside, there was no miracle. Shrubs have taken over the field in front of me. I thought for a moment that I was in the middle of nowhere but later as it turned out, I was in the middle of a small town in the outskirts of Beijing. I do remember, once this city of prosperity and wealth. All that has remained here is just an abandoned city of mourning and despair. You could sense the despair from miles away because there was no life. I became instantly disillusioned with the town. Partly, obviously because I didn’t have people around to talk and exchange views, experiences and feelings, and partly because of the limitless and endless amount of transformations that I was facing jumping from one place to the other, was making me nauseated and pale in ,y face. i was losing energy of the anticipation of change. Too much of it was thrown at me. But I secretly was admiring myself, in a way that doesn’t make any sense at all. Admiring because not many people have managed to survive this kind of transformation, upheaval of the body and consciousness that I have experienced and still remain intact. Whether in the past or in the present, the idea that for a time being I would inhale all what life has to throw at me and still stand in my own two feet – isn’t only absurd but unbelievable. I just couldn’t wait to tell the tale when I will have the chance to do so.

8

The Squared Table!

For a minute I thought I just turned back in time. The turrets of the building in front of me with its dusty Georgian townhouses style, sandstone walls with a swipe of decadent dirt which has melted onto the walls in front of the building. I was sept by two guardsmen who have not a clue how to be gentle with an oldie. I was warned not to try and do something or anything extraordinary or even thinking of an escape. Idid not think that this would be a good idea at all. Even if I had the opportunity and the chance to ingratiate myself an escape, I wouldn’t do it. I knew that a tracker was put on me since the early hours of my dehousing that I experienced from my own place. I knew that the more I stayed sane for the sake of me and the future that I will have, the better the chance I have to envisage a different outcome from a nasty present. I did know that the day will come when I will prevail, but it wasn’t meant to be today. I needed to learn to encapsulate the time I have been going thru since my upheaval, but I couldn’t because I didn’t know how to be prepared for a day of peace or even envisage a time of haphazard emotional wrecking that I was undergoing currently. I was pushed toward the main corridor where a woman and a man were waiting there for me. I thought for a minute that these two guys would be the ones that will make sense to me and that they are the ones that will sort my problem out. I didn’t know until that moment on that I actually had a problem and wanted to have some time to reflect on it. What kind of a problem!? I mea, I was wondering that myself. Not any problem, not the sort of problem that any post-Transformation era person would face. I mean that could be any sort of problem, issues with consciousness or with the sense of direction in this shitty life.

As I am escorted all the way down this lengthy never-ending corridor, I did notice that this wasn’t some kind of post-historic season. I think this was the thirties New York and that I was in a tabernacle where the servants of the only God they believed in were busily congregating. I saw, as I was going past this corridor, a huge hall where people, a lot of people were praying intensely. All the murmur and the noise from the congregation was deafening but sustainable as far as I was concerned. Looks like the consciousness machine was working ok and that I was transported in a different time zone where nothing else makes any sense at all. The long corridor had a lot of intertwined rooms which was making me very dizzy and I wasn’t the one to ask any questions. I didn’t see it as necessary. What strike me at that though was the total secrecy that the whole operation was conducted. They seem to be preoccupied with a lot of things in their minds. I took the courage I took the courage to ask the grumpy guard where was I and the response I got was that I needn’t worry because there was no harm intended. They asked me to sit in an old chair. Some kind of interrogation was awaiting me. I was to tired to even contemplate that. I remember I said to them ‘Look guys, I am absolutely knackered and I won’t be able to help you much! I need to rest and before that I need to know why am I being held!’ A short, really short and brooding man enters the room. He has the looks of Goebbels. He even stares at you just like him. ‘You are here because we need to establish a lot of things about you.’ Then he indicates to one of his colleagues to turn the lights off. I was terrified at this stage. I don’t like darkness and especially the darkness in small and confined spaces. ‘You must tell us everything!’ The voice from Goebbels lookalike comes straight at me. What do you want to know? I mean what is this all about? And why am I being kept in a darkened room? I said. No response was forthcoming but a sense of utter rejection of anything humane I say or do was on the way. He looked at me with an utter disgust but I felt like he wanted to say more ‘You need to tell us all. I have a picture here…’ He pulls a black and white picture showing me hopping onto a hose-shaped structure which sucks me up to somewhere onto this whole belly of a white ship hovering above people’s heads. I struggle to remember. ‘I don’t know.’ I said after I had raised my shoulders ‘You have to show me more what you mean by all of this because so far I am totally lost!’ I said and I realised that I was very brave to do that. Next thing I hear is the smashing of my ribs by two guards who appeared out of the black curtain which was hanging down from the ceiling and I never would have guessed that humans would be hiding behind there. The heavy fist of this particular guy who must’ve been a six foot four beast of a man with broad shoulders and wider jaws who was so hungry for a bit of me that when he threw his punch in the area between my lower chest and upper tummy I did feel the slow cracking of my skin ripping through my whole body and deep into my chesty bones. I stopped breathing for a minute. Then soon after a few seconds I managed to catch some breathing air but hardly did I feel better because soon immediately after that, the other guy who was shorter but more muscular with blonde hair and with the look of somebody who is willing to get what he wants just by looking at me, takes a stand a stare and a huge punching on the other side of my rib cage. That hurt even more and I could feel the internal bleeding from the ruptured vessels which by second were bleeding massively inside me and were making my breathing much harder and the pain was excruciating. I looked at Goebbels-like face and all I could see was the thirst to do me more harm. ‘You have to tell us everything!’ He kept saying. I don’t know what are you on about!? I don’t know what you want me to say? I don’t know why am I being held like this against my wishes!’ That wasn’t enough to them. Then, the Goebbels-like figure left the room and disappeared leaving me with the bunch of violent interrogators whose sole objective was to beat me and extract “something” of me and that something was a puzzle to me. I must’ve spent a few days in there because once I woke up I didn’t know what has happened to me in these past few days. My body was hurting, my face was swollen and I was wrapped in this gyps netting-wrap where my whole body felt like it was under constant heat and burning. A nurse was a few meters away. She was filling some tubes in with some liquid that I couldn’t see what it was. But she seems nice and very polite asking me in Hebrew if I was ok and I answered that I was fine but wanted to know what had happened to me. ‘We found you by a children’s playground near Blackpool, bleeding and unconscious. You had a lot of internal bleeding. It took you a while to recover – this is day number thirty-three. I am so glad to see you awake Mr…?’ I looked, I remember I did stare at her with my pupil pointing at her own pupils dead on ‘I don’t know who I am anymore!’ I said to her. She was moved or gave the impression that she was. She approached me closely and whispered in my ear ‘Steady the course mister, steady the course!’ Which freaked me out massively. “Ok” I said to her and then she vanished pretty quickly. I was kept in this hospital for quite a while. I think it was roughly a couple of months and then the strangest thing that happened was that a day before my release I was interviewed the whole day. They wanted to find out where I was coming from, what was I doing in the Lancashire area with all this modern clothing and why was I carrying such an advanced level of consciousness with me! Apparently I have a lot of memories with me. I carry a lot of memories which I am not aware of or I don’t know how to tap into it. Apparently I can also see things far in advanced more than anybody else. I didn’t know that. What was disturbing for me during them moments of scrutiny was that I was noticing is the backwardness of the place as a whole; You know things like the hospital beds, no ambulance vehicles, all transport was conducted via the horse and cart, people’s faces were different, they were much older than their age, they were compulsive and inquisitive even the officials looked different, physically and mentally because they didn’t have the guts to treat everybody else the same way that they treat some other people, like me for example. I felt bad at times when I was transported from one pavilion to the other, people looking hungry, utterly demotivated and exhausted from the hard life, looking at me and trying to figure it out what was going on with their lives. I was scared for a minute or so but the guards, these people who were transporting me from A to B were very fast and fastidious in dealing with these demons. I was taken to all of the pavilions concurrently and to all of them I had different experiences. I was a very lucky man to have gone through all of that without the need to be strung up by my two feet and

Asked or be made to tell anything that they want. We, in modern times call that interrogation, to them this is their normality and it’s a pity!

The release day came pretty quickly. I was assigned last task before the release; I was asked to speak to all the other patients in the pavilion. I didn’t know what to say to this! I mean I was utterly disappointed because I wasn’t ready for such a task and I didn’t know what to say to all these people. Some of them were patients with chronic ailments and some of them the injured from the Great War who have been stranded in those hospitals for good and will probably remain there for the foreseeable future. I asked if I needed to tell them anything in particular, you know anything that would be of interest to them or even the hospital management. The response I received was ‘Not to worry. Say whatever you would like to say. We’re not fussed!’ And I proceeded. The hall was full! This place used to be a church and it still had the altar and the cross hanging from the top of the spire. I must admit, at once and after a while I was impressed and became motivated pretty quickly. When the day arrived, the day of the speech, I was asked to take my honourable spot at the top of the table just by the alter next to the priest who kept his head down and was praying hard. I suspected that he was praying for me but don’t ask me why! I just thought that whatever he was doing was meaningful and unexpectedly very respectful to me. He stank, next to me failing to raise his head to see what was happening around him, he perseveres in his spiritual tranquillity. I could say that probably out of all the people I have come across this guy was the most decent individual not only because I didn’t know him and that he was a priest but because I liked his demeanour. Since I sat down, the number of people who kept coming in uninterruptedly through the doors was huge. They had to open the other side door to let more people in. I thought that the initial idea was to give a speech in front of a crowd of patients. I look at the nuns and the most senior one was two steps down facing me. I went there and asked her what her thoughts are. ‘Oh, don’t worry about all these people. They are patients and former patients…!’ I didn’t believe it. The more I was standing there sat and trailing the number of people coming in the hall, the more gloomier I was getting and the more muddled up my thinking was becoming. I didn’t have have a theme, I didn’t have a clue what I was going to say. I just stood there, not knowing if I was going to be able to say anything from the gobsmacking shock that I was endearing. I wanted to be buried alive there and then. My time came up and after the tranquil priest had said a few words, things like ‘This is the daring proof that our God had sent us…’ and pointing his finger at me ‘…and may we pray to him and thank him for the service to humanity, and dislodge ourselves from all the sins and absolve us from our past deeds and seek shelter in Christ’s teaching!’ And soon everybody just screamed ‘Amen’. My distraught got even worse from that moment on. I became agitated. I just couldn’t believe that I am considered to be their prophet! They all looked at me with adoration. I stood up carrying the heavy shroud that they have given me and stood in the podium close to the speakers stand. Did I have to be agreeable with them? I don’t know! I just decided there and then to bluff my way out of it. I decided to keep it short. But I was shaking so bad that for a second I thought; these people are going to catch me! They are going to realise that I am nothing else but a buffoon and a fraud. But then the other side of me was telling me that you will be fine as long as you keep it interesting and short. Pretend to be Jesus. ‘I absolve you of your sins. May you willingly and unwillingly accept the hand of God as your day of judgement, today it is that day and your God absolves you of all of your sins!’ They all said Amen. I followed suit. ‘I tell you that life beyond these walls and the veil of our eyes and consciousness is the life of plenty and of immense good and happiness. I have seen such life. I have lived such life. I want you to live such life. But only if you accept my resolve and succumb to my teachings that it will be possible to accept God in your hearts and in your lives.’ They all said amen. Their heads down and not a glance of anybody raising their head above everybody else. Such a bunch of honest people. I thought to myself. They deserve more. So I continued and became much more relieved and relaxed. The afternoon became a highly charged and emotionally draining sermon of faith and beliefs. I had there the Episcopalians’, Baptists, Calvinists, Catholics, Evangelists, Protestants and many many more. But none of them had any inkling whether I was who I was pretending I was. After the sermon, they all came to greet me and some of them would kiss my feet and my hand, some of them would kiss me in both cheeks and some others were even hugging and cuddling me with tears on their faces. The worst and the most difficult moment arrived when a few families after they had waited for a few hours for the crowd to disperse, they brought their disabled children who had many ailments, some physical and some what seems to be mental, they wanted me to cure them. I felt distraught. What do I say and what do I do!? Plenty in my head but not much to give in the form of cure. They approached me gently and all of them crying. In all honesty I didn’t know what to say and how to behave. Even if I had a clue in human curing of ailments, I wouldn’t know how to start. I am no Jesus and I don’t know how to cure people. I mean I wouldn’t even know how to stick a plaster in one of my wounds if I needed to. I was terrified. Looking in the eyes of these children who were approaching the stand, I was even more scared. I didn’t know how to behave. I touched one of the kids and I felt like a pervert. I touched this nine years old disabled and disfigured child sitting in an old chair carried through by his parents and a couple of others who seemed to be strong man. I touched the boy in his neck area and bent over and whispered something like ‘You will be fine young man. You will be fine! The creator of all heavens have plans for you. He will cure you. He will cure you soon!’ And as I was detaching myself from the boy, this woman, a big breasted woman pushes on forward after she had pushed everybody else away from the queue, she says to me ‘Please show me the way to end pleasure, I have been bitten and I have been massacred down below from a number of men because I have an endless appetite for giving and taking away pleasure.’ I looked at her terrifyingly trying to make sure I don’t say the unsayable. I lean my hand on her upper neck and almost as if I am breathing from a tube I can feel her shutting her eyes and hoping or even thinking that she will be cured. I ask her to open her eyes and look at me. She obliges and thanks me for helping her. She moves on and the next family comes towards me and I spend all day and half of the night giving sermons of healing and feeling good but never knowing what I am talking about. The night closed late and the last person I received was a seventy something years old man. Not shaken by anything that has gone on in their lives but always secure in his thought that he is going to be the final person to be seen by the prophet. I greet him. The supporting priest grabs the bowl I was holding for a while and pours some shitty wine in a lead cup. I ask the old man his name.He tells me he is called Joseph and that he is jewish and hasn’t got much time but just wants to tell me that everything I am doing is the wrong thing and that the God will be abhorrent by my involving in his affairs. I tell him that I am actually only a messenger and that I don’t cure people just because I have a special affinity just because I feel that I have some kind of obligation to better myself or humanity as a species. I tell him that I am only doing it because I do want to help the people and that I have been sent to do the work of the God and that I needed to know whether he has any other questions to ask. ‘No!’ He says. I thank him but he is determined to carry on but I am not ready to hear more from him. ‘Excuse me,’ he says ‘ I would like to show you something!’ then he asks me to ask the priest to move away from the tabernacle and that he needed to spend a few moments with me only. I understand, I said to him. Then we move away from the tabernacle. The priest recommends us that we go behind the prayer box. I ask Joseph to follow me. I didn’t know at that moment what this was all about. For some reason Joseph was making me nervous. Behind the box there was a squared table which was positioned right in the middle of the semi-hall. ‘You need to lay here…’ Joseph says and I immediately ask him why. ‘Andy you know very well who you are. You need to do as I tell you. I have been sent by the DigiCouncil to pull you back!’ I look at him in disbelief. What do you mean? I said to him. I showed a sense of inferiority when he looked at me impatiently. ‘He pulls a pointy glass pen and straightens the infrared in my eye. Immediately the scenic imaging appears in front of me. Its Joseph without his ageing wrinkles and without a beard. The streets of my home town appear, full of people as if everything is just normal and acceptable. I could see my mother’s face and my father’s back from the distance approaching me with the zest of a hard working man that he was. Then David and John approach me asking me if I was alright. I tell them I am OK and that I miss them. Then soon afterwards Joseph intervenes and tells me that my time was up and that I needed to focus on disembarkation. I didn’t know what he is talking about – Disembarkation – I didn’t have no choice but to lie down and follow Joseph’t instructions. ‘Are you willing to accept the disembarkation?’ He asks me and I say yes to him. ‘Then all you need to do is shut your eyes and let go!‘.

9

So Different!

I know that I am invisible to these people. The old market town feels like any other normal town. Its people going about places and doing things they love or need most. I am the stranger here but no one looks at me. They are all normal people. I am not. I am above that. I have seen and I have gone through stuff that I am not sure if any other living creature has gone before.

I walk the streets of the market town and notice that in reality people change their faces, they are mooring against walls but not hurting themselves. I feel sorry for them because I don’t understand what’s going on with them. I smile at some of them, they smile back and offer me condolences about myself without triggering any human thought in me. I then laugh as I walk the streets of the market town but I know to some I am not visible. To some others I am visible but probably not likeable and to some individuals who descend from crowds, I think, I am more likeable and more accepted. I take curiosity to another level now and I decide to go in one of the shops. It’s a children’s clothes shop full of horror. Initially, before you walk in, there are the usual clothes hanging in the display window all looking as normal as any children clothing can be. But then you walk in and perspectives change. I see half slaughtered bodies of children in them. I see half opened heads of children in their mother’s torso and somehow I couldn’t work out how is that possible? To fit in a children’s long-sleeved body suit.The sales assistant was keen to throw me a stare and I felt disarmed at an instance because she was very attractive but I can still sense a witch like face behind the depths of her soul. I gesture a good afternoon and she responds nicely. I smile, she smiles. I look around pretending to look at children’s clothes and I started to wonder myself why did I pop in a children’s clothings shop! ‘We have a wide range of untouched and fresh torso parts and upper body parts!’ She said with the determination of a ruthless saleswoman. I pretended I didn’t hear any of that. Then she came straight to me and asked if there was anything she can help me with. I politely said no that I was alright I was just looking at some clothes for my nephews. I think just by saying that, I opened a can of worms. She wouldn’t stop and wouldn’t let me be by myself. I needed to step out of the shop because her determination to run me through a list of un-needy stuff was endless. I then proceeded down the hill in the adjacent street which was busier then before I went in the children’s clothing shop. I approached a bridge which was filled with a young community of hippies. I could tell that from the distance as I was approaching. That reminded me of my youth. I used to hang around with hippies. I had two friends who were the proper deal. They were hippies with all their shanty-guru music and their robes which in the most cases were wrapped in canvas and wool paraphernalia. Sometimes, when I was bored and I needed some kind of disclosure of my soul, I would go in their tents which wasn’t far from where we used to live. They are very peaceful people and always on a high. Some of them at times would mock me and I would laugh, I would never be offended by them because their beliefs are kindness and unity of soul. As I get closer to the bridge where all of them are stationed in their tents and having fun. I noticed that other people within my orbit do not notice them. This is not normality for me. I was promised that I would be brought back. This is no where near that normality. I plough on. Unhindered by the memories of the past. I refuse to believe the old trashy dogmas of an unreal life. Then I take a sharp left and enter the bridge from the other side of the underpass. What to see; a beautiful laid garden next to the western fringe of the bridge, full of greenery and beautiful growing shrubs, flowers I haven’t seen in a while. Long-bodied daffodils wrapped around the small trees in the centre of the garden, Dahlia and Burning Bush, stretched all across the vulgar pathways of the garden, I see no people attending them. All I see dancing flowers and a beautiful long tree which is just about to scream ‘look how pretty I am’ and the rest of the left over legs, trunks coming out of the roots of trees, swarming all around the endless pots of shallow organic veg sitting on top of the what seems to be an elevated section of the flower bed. I breathtakingly moved around enjoying the view but despising the fact that this might not be the reality that I was meant to cherish. I did not want to leave. But I had to, because I could sense that within my invisible exercising soul I needed to move on and see more because everything seems to be going fast and rapidly. My inner me wasn’t allowing me to enjoy the moments because I just needed to find a new thrill or something brand new to play with. But, I still wasn’t sure how did I manage to sustain the transition from the moment I met Joseph to where I am now. I think I will never find a proper answer to this question! I think I will just continue to hover neither here or there and accept any cataclysmic shit that is thrown at me. I plough on, until I see the next more meaningful sightseeing, one would hope. I wouldn’t declare victory if it takes me a lot of hassle and effort to stay above the parapet. I don’t have a better cause of action to move forward, all I have is some kind of spirit and a willpower to stop condemning myself and the world around me, in whatever shape it has turn out to be, to accept me how I am and not disturb my sense of safety because I can be fragile and the world doesn’t like fragile. The world isn’t muscular, strong or consistent either. Whenever I stop, I reflect on the meaning of us, of me being here and all I get is the reaction ‘look up, don’t look down. Up is the universe, down is shit, is death!’ But what I don’t understand is that I was death, I died once!? How is it possible that now I am all but dead, continuity without any meaning. If death, the transition from the now to the next, took my sons away, then I believe I do deserve an answer. How and where I will be getting that answer – I just don’t know. But I will try my best.

10

New body, old problems!

Not long since I left the town, did I immerse myself in a new adventure- that of exploring more of the world around me, while it lasts, of course. I don’t know in which part of the world am in but I know that the language is definitely something I haven’t heard anywhere before. I couldn’t put my finger on any language I have heard before. It was a while since I gave up trying to discover where I was or what language these entities were speaking. It had all the characters of an earthly living. Despite the fact that in some quarters I would find myself amongst friends and acquintenances, some other times I was not sure that I knew anybody or that I was anybody’s problem or that anybody had any problems with me. I was left alone and I left them alone. Simple!

I couldn’t see myself either. I was invisible to many but not to some others. There are days where I would be in a museum staring at obsolete objects with absolutely no sense of purpose and some other times I would end up in a school or a garden full of kids and full of other people who were looking after their own children. I would sometimes embark on a journey of absolutely senseless and pointless struggle just to see the whiteness of the skies or the blueness of the sea. I then would embark on a process of self-reflection and trying to be a goody guy. Sometimes it works and some other times it wouldn’t. What was interesting about all of this was that I was never getting tired or showing any signs of distress or worry. Not a concern in the world.

No meaningful conversations was conducted, but a lot of interactive contact with some people who were of the symbolic presence in this world full of character. I had still my old mentality implanted in my head and I wasn’t whether anything going on around me was compatible with that world, with the world I left behind.

I could feel the sense of abandonment. I think I had gone slightly a bit further than I would have been prepared to go. I didn’t understand the materiality of this journey. I did though get the concept and the overall schadenfreude I must’ve caused as a result of me running away. I couldn’t explain that at all.

I needed to be more curious and somehow more self-motivating for a moment. I didn’t know at what stage I was in but all of a sudden on that day, a deeply darker afternoon than usual. With a sunshine that was burning red hot and most of the people were ginger haired. I noticed that my body shape was reconfiguring right in front of my eyes. I was to receive a physical body. I couldn’t wait to grab hold of a mirror to look at myself. I popped in one of the ‘Waiting centres’ they call them. The purpose of which was to provide service of departure for the elderly. I approached one of the service desks to see what was this all about. I ask this aladdin-shaped holographic woman who politely tells me that the whole idea of these centres is to provide services for Trall exchange – what the heck was that all about? I wondered! Then she explained to me that this is the inaccessible part of our consciousness with all its unearthly dispositions buried deeply into our soul mechanism and that it is only accessible when handled by professionals.

Ok, it makes sense now. It is expected of me to adopt a different body. A lot more is expected of me and a lot more I need to do to stay afloat. But this is not going to be easy. I am excited at the same time nervous and stressed because I will be moving into a new body, a body of substance where I can actually feel and sense things. I am fearful at the same time because I think I will not like my mew body for long. It will feel weird because I always wanted to get away from it. To have a new body, a new feeling about life in the fringes. This chance will just make it harder for me to be myself. But, then things changed immediately once I was offered the options and alternative bodies to move on to. They suggested that I choose a body that doesn’t go back a long time. ‘Not since you were born but between the ages of twenty-eight and forty-eight’ they said. I couldn’t believe it! I mean that is the prime age for any man to be wanting to live and experience. I immediately said YES. Then they asked me if I wanted to remain a special with full accessory genitalia or preferred to be of a different gender. I initially said that I didn’t care at all and then I thought about it properly and concluded that by staying like an Andy I think I would have a better chance to meet my boys and probably set out to meet my old wife or meet a new one in the meantime. I said I wanted to be exactly the same person that I was when I ended up following the crowds. ‘You can!’ They said. I said Thank you and then I moved on as I wanted to make sure that I will make the most of it in my pursuits of rejuvenation for myself and probably for my family. It took them a few hours. I would say three and a half hours to complete the process.I became utterly unaware that this requires the shutting down of my consciousness and I couldn’t feel anything else from the moment the transfer and transformation would begin. After I woke up I just couldn’t believe what I was feeling; I had a body. I had feelings now, I have a head now whose skull contains the total process of germination of my brain. I don’t know if this matters but I think I know how easy it is to assume that it is thanks to the brain that we manage to achieve the fulfilment of life as it is. That thanks to the power of the brain that we manage to envisage a different world with all its complexity and stay. I Noticed that walking from that moment on is extremely heavy. I couldn’t bring myself together in accepting this kind of reality where the means of realisation that one’s body is a physicality which cannot be avoided all at once, hits you hard on your knockers and makes you understand better the allotment of time we all have on this living time.

When I left the Trall Exchange site, I continued with my journey toward an unknown space and time. First thing that hit my mind was how to enjoy a pint of beer and how to make conversation in a new world. The perfect stopover was the pub behind an old cinema which has been turned into a sportswear centre. Once I entered the room, no one was keen on making eye contact with me. The place was a mixture of fine women and gentleman whose sole objective seems to be to overcome the heavy lifting of the days in the past and days to come. Eyed two potential conversationalists as they were eyeing me too. I started to head in their direction. One was a woman and the other a man. I sat in between the two and accepted the reality in my head straight away without any premonition of judgement. I made progress with the man but wasn’t going anywhere with the woman. I was hoping to make a breakthrough on something, like smashing a bottle on my thigh or the upper bit of my knee-cap so I can test a little bit of pain! Or even receiving a slap on my face from a woman, or even just getting drunk. I was adamant that I will be getting the latter but not so sure about the rest of the possibilities. Bottle smashing wasn’t my thing. But eyeing other women while I was chatting to a man. Nothing in common with the bloke. I couldn’t even put a word in. He just wasn’t interested at all to hear me or my story which is kind of disturbing. But I was assured that my slot would come in and that I would have the chance to say something. He was gone after an hour or so and he was so pissed he couldn’t remember which way was the exit. Then came my turn. I wasn’t sure if my turn would necessary mean that I needed to find another companion or whether I should just give up the idea and move out, try something new. When I left the pub, I felt that somehow I was a part of the society, the masses and the people around me with whom I was too shy to converse or interact in any shape or form, were very nice. Decent specimen and speciwomen, scouring around the town aimlessly and purposelessly, wanting to achieve high or not bothering with anything at all. I deduct myself from the normal humany things. Stuff like thinking or overhinking phenomena, human behaviour or even lushed into eagerness to learn. I stopped all that because in the end of the day it doesn’t really matter what the others think of me or even the other way around. What matters now is that I will be journeying through all the life that’s left and I won’t be needing to sit and reflect, to pause or to stall. In the meantime, I continue to walk and people continue to live, I want freedom, they, in turn want their life the way it is.

11

Home

They switched me off in the prolonging journey from that other place. I didn’t know until the moment came that I had to be woken up and somebody in the quarters, I think that was somebody from the Digi-Council who confirmed that I had been brought back and I got to be punished for breaching the ‘Code of Conduct” because I wondered around the worlds without being authorised to do so. I do not understand to this day how is that possible! Anyhow, am here now. I have a lot to do but have not got much means. I am trapped what it looks like my own home, unable to go out and live fully. They have left me some instructions in a pad-monitor whatever they call it. It specifies that for anything I will require, I need to press this button or say this word. I mean atrocious. When I went to my room to see if my Vertigo its still there, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing – My Vertigo was taken away completely. All I saw was wires hanging out splashed out in the room like there has been a burglary. I didn’t like the sight of it. I was hurt. I pained. I wanted to be buried alive. How on earth they took away my toys. How on earth they do that. When I read through the instructions, I discovered that my Vertigo has gone for refurbishing and I wasn’t to tell anybody of this. I mean what the fuck! I have no contact with anybody. This is the whole life I have. How dare do they tell me that I should do this or that! I wondered for days inside my four walls, the only temporary relief I got was when I popped upstairs my what was known big bedroom was still intact full of books and old magazines that I had collected over the years and I hadn’t had time to read them. I spent days reading magazines and flicking through some books until the moment came. It was Dante’s book that seemed a little bit too fat with stuff inserted onto it. I couldn’t believe it. I am not known as somebody who chucks stuff onto my books, I mean I always used disposable receipts from the weekly shopping as my bookmarks. But this was a little bit more in it. I opened the page that the thick and doubly folded paper was inserted. From the initial observation I could see that there were scribblings of some sort. I opened the letter and instantly I recognised John’s handwriting.

Dear Dad,

When you read this letter, with a bit of luck you have been brought back and that is a good thing. I just wanted to let you know that we are all alright the both of us, but we have departed in another level and we are two lifetimes away. I don’t know how this has happened Dad, but we are hurting. You know what this means!!!

Mum is with us. She is distraught as well but she is already with somebody else. Dad, I am so sorry! We signed up to it because we thought that you have wondered beyond anybody else’s reach and that we all thought we have lost you! I know. You have every right to be disappointed. You will be angry I know.

I wrote this letter just by chance and if you happen to come back and have found this…I will be very sad and disappointed with me because I would’ve made the wrong call on this. Sorry Dad. I am so hoping that you will find a way to reach to us but I don’t know how Daddy.

Stay safe and hoping that our two worlds emerge sometimes in the future and we can meet.

Lots of love, J and the rest

Once I finished reading the letter, I must admit I cried. I cried a lot. I couldn’t hold myself together. I could feel it that this was the end. I knew it deep down that this was going to happen. They did give me flashes of my boys all the way throughout my journey but never had the bollocks to put them in front of me and I don’t understand that why!

After all that shite I went through they just decided to upgrade my family without me being part of it. Why would they do that!? To be honest, I think I know why! I think they find it very hard to control a living free soul. I think that they are not as powerful as they propose themselves to be. I reflected for days but also days on end I was reading and writing notes. They have been watching uninterruptedly and I know that this is the only way they can satisfy themselves with my own downfall. I know that!

A few days later, I think it was something like two weeks or so, I stumbled on another book Othello this time round with another wrapped paper inside it. An A4 paper, squared with a blank ink and it started with Dear Dad,

Am next door to you. Don’t worry what John wrote to you. We will have an opening “Free Roaming Day” in October. That day they will switch us all off and we can meet. I know you are punished but don’t worry because we will come near the door and we can chat. Don’t worry Day. I promise. Lots of love, Your David.

I couldn’t be happier than this. I mean ecstatic. You wouldn’t believe how much energy and positivity I was radiating on that day. I was so happy. I kept popping upstairs to look over the back gardens and just enjoy the view. I remember that night I put a big order of food through and it arrived instantly. Idid manage to see the self-driving truck, a hover truck pulling up right outside my house and deliver the goods through the wall pipe which has been built with the designated intent for food and goods deliveries. I remember I started to think that I miss people. I miss humanity. I miss the smell of their farts on busy buses and trains, that daily commute which I have done it for a very long time. I miss the smiles of some good people and I miss the touch of nurses when they take their blood in donations days, I miss the smell of polluting trucks and the noise of the airplanes scouring in the air, I miss TV and I miss the Friday afternoons in pubs and restaurants where I would meet friends and the loved ones. I miss earthly living!

What have we been reduced to!

***

October arrived quickly. From the first date I was glued in both of the windows at the back and at the front, expecting their freedom to roam days arrive so I can see my boys. Mid-way through to October and no sign of their freedom to roam days. Then all of a sudden at the last day of that October here they are – roaming the streets like drunken idiots. Most of them young and mid age. I did spot David when he was coming closer to me. I was trying to signal to him that I can hear him but he couldn’t see me from outside due to the glass being built for the privacy purpose. I was so desperate to give him a sign of something.I knew that If I were to do anything that would undermine their authority I could be penalised further. I didn’t care. I just wanted David to know that I was brave enough to do that and to signal to him that I was absolutely fine. I found the thinnest possible tissue that I had in the kitchen, wrapped it in thinner paper and wrote on it Thank you for everything. I am fine. I can see you my boy. I love you! Take care of the rest of them.

When I slipped it through the main door, I knew that I was going to be noticed. The special operations squad came out of nowhere, landed in my front door, confiscated the letter from David’s hands and they warned him that if the behaviour is repeated, they will penalise him too. He didn’t care, I didn’t care. We bot smiled simultaneously and I touched the glass in the window upstairs and as if in a miracle David did exactly the same. I think he saw me, he felt me and I couldn’t have been happier in my life.

***

This is my diary entry for that period pf few months. Today is year 2080, I have been moved from my own home and have been transported in a formerly known container ship, isolated like a prison cell with one “Free Roaming Day” only allowed to come closer to the railings where the waves of the wild and grey see would encapsulate the whole terrace area. Miserable whether most of the time with no sign or hope that we will be ever released. No human contact is allowed. I think in this whole ship we must be at/around fifty thousand men. I don’t know anybody and nobody knows me. We get served food by hovering box-trays and get picked up by elliptical drones to take us to an outdoor toilet where all the faeces is flushed away onto the sea. They have taken all the wires from all our biological content and have limited our capacity to think about an escape or rebel. I have been allowed to possess a diary and a pen and I don’t know why they allowed me that! I am behaving well and I am healthy with occasional back aches and that is mainly due to me writing lying down because that is the only way I can write due to the size of the boxes we are thrown in. the beauty of these boxes is that in the good days, they are made off glass and we can see the sea life at full throttle, things like diving whales and excited dolphins whom I think that they know our ventures we have been put in they decide to chase the boat and attempt to rescues us and all we do is we laugh and cry. Other than that, the rest of the days are pretty boring really. I am hundred and nineteen years old and I don’t think my body is going to give up anytime soon. Trust me I attempted to let myself in the wild seas at night when I got picked up by the elliptical drones for toilet but was unsuccessful. I wanted to end it but I wasn’t allowed to do so. I guess a few more days and things will change. I don’t know. I have been saying this for a very long time – probably at least for sixty earthly years but to no avail. I love life really, its just I am not ready to continue to sustain this kind of miserable circumstance. But hey, who said that this is all up to me. It isn’t and it never was since the day I was born.

THE END