The Isolation

Isolation is a strange thing. I had no friends; the people who I encountered when out and about in public were like ghosts. Questions they asked would be answered as directly as possible by me; I didn't care for my appearance. Attempts to be friendly were appreciated but not exactly responded to enthusiastically. I felt alienated. I led a parasitic existence, a lifestyle like one of those people who are called hikikomori in Japan. I had parents who took care of me, though I had been traumatized and terrorized by modern society to the point of constant paranoia.

If there was a glimmer of hope, it was on the computer networks I mastered the operation of from the couch where it appeared that I was doing nothing. I was building an empire of no-one, a monument to my monstrous side which threatened to grow into something in my plotting mind, to somehow become something that could save this sphere we call Earth. This I told myself to avoid feeling hopeless, and contributing to my ever-blossoming flower of noise and art would make my heart sing for the briefest of moments.

There is the slow trauma of despair that creeps up on one if one experiences one terrible thing after another in life. It's not the magnitude of the things that happen, it's the constant occurences that creep into one's life and imprint themselves on one's mind. The letdowns in relationships, the uncomfortable places, being lied to, the drugs, being manipulated, being slowly whittled down to...nothing?

I never would let myself get to the point of being nothing; I didn't even think it was possible to be nothing, so I simply trudged on doing what to the casual observer would seem like very little. Except to me, it meant a lot. My "brains" were primed to be the fangs that would sink into the minds of the world, they were an undefined army; indeterminate entities that existed as art and as creator, perhaps even being self-creations, possibly having created themselves.

Behind the wall of encryption, work was done. The nature of this work cannot be described in full, but various things were attended to, various communications were made, various art was made, monstrosities on the web were developed. What was often communicated through art was a sense of detached terror; it was almost as if that when the art came out, that it came from a place I didn't feel, that had its own life beneath the surface of my conscious mind. No one could make me feel it, nothing could coax it out except the creative act itself, or the appreciation of a created work of art. At that point it was merely observed, however. It was as if the heart had cut me off from itself out of spite and anger at me for what I had done to it.

There was a constant influx of easily prepared food, sojourns to drive-thrus that served vegan options, trips to the grocery store where I avoided the gaze of others. Outside of the wide world of the Internet and my house, I was alone. The places where people would go to to meet others had dissipated, especially in the recent years with the COVID-19 pandemic. People spent time with family; friends didn't mean a thing to many as the web of interactions was all before them on their social media accounts, meaningless communications sent back and forth, algorithms radicalizing people into paranoid groups.

Being isolated, I could do as I pleased in my isolation. I had an income, the nature of which will not be revealed here. There were few to hold me down, so I could soar through digital spaces unfettered. The Internet had become consolidated, but I was creating unconsolidated places, temporary places of freedom obscured under veils of encryption. Ideally, I thought, not one of us would know who the other was, and so it would not matter if we were infiltrated: we didn't even know who we were or who we were talking to. It could be God for all we knew, provided He weren't dead.