John’s Greatest Fear
John woke up. He stretched his arms above his head and slowly rose and yawned and looked around groggily. He blinked a few times while reality came into focus and slowly got up out of bed. It was around 2:30 in the afternoon, but to him it felt like morning.
He had organized the clutter piles in his room in such a way that with a few careful, dainty steps he could get himself to his bedroom door and exit. The daylight hit him and he squinted. It was unpleasant.
The world in the past few weeks had become increasingly hostile to John. Not in an overt way, but rather in a very subtle way. Every time he blinked he would see echoes of his vision in his mind like shadow puppets of reality itself. He always had this concept of not knowing whether opening your eyes or closing them was worse. You see different things and the veil on reality changes. He thought about this while he poured a cold cup of coffee and microwaved it.
John settled back into bed with his coffee and opened instagram shorts on his phone and began scrolling. Everything was scary and foreboding. Flock cameras, ICE Agents holding normal Americans at gunpoint. Strange videos of the mentally ill calling out in warning of the coming doomsday, some of them satirical, none taken seriously. He wondered if they had any sort of secret knowledge but immediately brushed it off and realized it was better not to be like them. One of them claimed to be hiding in the remote mountains of peru away from government, but a quick peruse of his profile revealed it was only some sort of gag. Strange videos of people saying scary things, and scary videos of people saying strange things. All interspersed with mundane videos of dogs or goats or the like.
John took a quick break and looked away at his fan and realized that It looked funny. Why are fans made that way? Who designed it? He was sure a thread of reality accounted for that. The fan probably had a serial number and a plausible origin and every documentable fan-like aspect of it was accounted for and all the math added up. But for some reason it struck him as odd. Cars as well. It reminded him of a video game. Sometimes when he would drive he would wonder what happened to the cars that went around the bend away from him. Had he any way of accounting for their continued existence? Any way of knowing whether there wasn’t some sort of culling outside of his field of view? It was all a dream. Some kind of trick. He imagined his mind trapped inside a computer or cloud or some incomprehensible multi-dimensional array, simply testing him. How scary can it get before the ape gives up? How much surveillance, how many foreboding messages, before the ape gives up? For now, he only has a suspicion. But when he comes to realize it’s true, his loved ones will glitch and sputter in front of him and disappear in some cloud of pixelation or something impossible to predict or comprehend. He will wake up in his true form, an alien to his own mind, and the beautiful nurses will soothe him and calm him with soft voices and thank him again and send him home again. He’ll think about John and how he wasn’t really ever a real thing but he’ll still feel bad for him. He’ll learn to recover quickly. He’ll think about how he has the weirdest job in the world. And it will be confusing. This was John’s greatest fear.