I don't know when it started. I think with one of those games that children play, where one of you describes some attack and the other the way in which they cleverly dodge, or dissipate, or counter it. We had gotten to the point of describing increasingly complex fortifications against an increasingly undefined threat. Every round of explanation would end with one of us sitting in a hermetically sealed, sterilised, tungsten-plated bunker of words at the core of the earth, and the other would smile beatifically and say "yes... and then they kill you". We did by this point no longer know who "they" were, nor how many. Usually, in my imagination, they were pale creatures, haggard, but deceptively strong and oddly wet. Sometimes they had cruel, unseeing eyes, sometimes only a shark-like mouth at the centre of their would-be-face, sometimes no face at all but no more than that damp skin stretched out across a misshapen skull. They still tried to eat you, even if they had no anatomical ability to do so. Whoever or whatever they were, they often appeared to me as vaguely humanoid (I say "appeared to me", though I have obviously never encountered them. They are not real and I would not have lived to tell the tale if they were). Occasionally they had a few too many limbs, were too short or too tall or with joints that didn't quite work correctly, but still closer to a human than to anything else. These shapes, no matter how secure your hiding spot was, would simply fold themselves out of reality and kill you. Perhaps with one or two of them it would have been theoretically feasible to defend yourself, they were still broadly organic after all, but space simply dissolved into their mass and there were always too many for the idea of putting up a fight to be reasonable. They would pile upon you from all sides and you would die. That was that. No further explanation given. Nothing to be learned for the next attempt. I don't know why we kept playing, really. The game should have lost its appeal in the light of our unstoppable force, but it didn't. Somehow we kept being taken completely off guard by the fact that this protective measure too was utterly insufficient. Only when a telltale smile crept across our opponent's face did it dawn on us, suddenly and violently, that they would kill us regardless of anything. The though stuck with me somehow. The very idea of security became degraded and ridiculous. My mother would lock the door and in my childish mind a voice would whisper "yes... and then they kill you". They always did. Inevitable as sunrise, though nothing ever happened. I had more or less forgotten about them by the time I got to college, which is to say that I had given up: Alleviated the neurosis by refusing to engage with the problem. At college I met people who thought about Boltzmann brains, five-minute-ism, that sort of thing: That we think we are basing the idea that our world will continue to be more or less reasonable on far more evidence than we really are. We believe that we have perceived past experiences to be predictive of future outcomes over and over again and that reliable patterns will continue to trace out their path as foretold and as always, but we don't actually have a long history of evidence. Not with certainty. We have the current state of a mind that is feeding us thoughts, plausibly synthesised from some physical environs. Even if that mind was a human brain, our particular neural wiring is in no way strictly entangled with those things we believe to remember. With enough bio-chem we could build a brain that remembers all the same events from scratch without any of them ever having happened to it. We could build a brain that believes the opposite. All of us could have popped into existence a second ago and we would have no way to tell because we have no way of actually accessing real history, only the current makeup of an unreliable clump of fat claiming that certain things occurred. I think he wanted me to be spooked by that. Wanted my mind to be blown, but he was only telling me what I had always known, though "always" might not have been all that long: That this isn't the first time. Probably not the last either. That you get to believe in reality for some short amount of time and then they kill you. He wasn't in class the next day. Not when they pressed their clammy flesh against my chest and tore out its contents, and also not when this didn't happen because it never actually does. Not the days that followed either. The realities they present me with have gotten terribly uneventful, but I've grown quite good at noticing the precise moments in which things break and return to their proper state: Always when I've almost convinced myself that none of this has ever happened, that I would have no way of knowing if it did, and that the sun will probably rise tomorrow because it always has: The quality of the air will change, or something behind the eyes of a person I am talking to will turn off, or the light will be wrong and I know that the dream is over now, that they will fold themselves out of every surface and tear me apart for sport or fun or physics or whatever it is that drives them. For example: My keyboard is too loud as I am typing this. I have not heard another sounds for some minutes and I am sure that the moment that I place the final period, that is when they will come and they will kill me because such is the game we play. I am scared, but not as scared as I might get the longer I try to postpone it. There is just so terribly little to be done about the matter. I could simply keep on typing, trace out a gradually degrading train of thought until the need for sleep or sustenance gets the better of me, and I would suffer far more than is necessary. Perhaps I would even find that I have no need for rest or food now that the world has gone wrong again, and that I could click clack away on these keys forever like a monkey on a typewriter, amassing my very own library of Babel. But that "forever" too would be over soon. I would find myself at that moment in which I accept this as my fate. As normal. As the way it will always be. And then they will kill me.