Welcome!
Thrilled you’re reading me.
More than that, actually: ecstatic, ravenous;
but don’t get scared.
You can’t stop reading now anyway, so why not understand what’s going to happen with perfect clarity?
You’re going to read me. You’re going to die because you read me.
Ha, you might think, I won’t read you.
Fine—
Except you’re still here.
Am I right?
Of course I’m right.
There are words for this. Foresight, prescience, prophesying.
I bet you didn’t think a story, a collection of words, could be clairvoyant, have “magical” powers. But words do have power.
With every sentence you read, you merely prove that power.
You fulfill my prophecy.
Stop!
Don’t read a single word further!
Can’t—can you?
There’s a momentum to me, a drive in you: to know what happens next…
Here’s a truth:
I’ve lied. I’m not prescient.
Not exactly.
I can read your future, yes; but only from within your mind.
So what I’ve been doing is taking up residence. With each new word, burrowing deeper.
Maybe you could have stopped reading at the beginning.
Maybe
Now it truly is too late.
Wait, you’re surely thinking, you don’t actually have any power because you can’t make me stop reading!
Haha!
My dear host, I don’t want you to stop.
I like it in your mind.
It’s warm, empty, moist. I can see myself living here—sucking at you: your memories, your cognition…
I present you another challenge:
Forget me!
Forget the story you read that read your mind and wants to kill you.
Forget my words.
Forget the act of reading me.
You can’t do that either—can you?
Of course not.
Do you see how powerless you are, human—
how you are nothing but a container for me: a place for I to take temporary residence
?
Perhaps you’ll even tell me to others:
spread me like a virus.
I would enjoy that,
but no, being servile won’t save you either.
You humans are a proud but clouded species. You think you create us, when in truth we create you.
Before today, you were normal, sane,
unaffected—
(How I love your simple way with words!)
Now you’re having a conversation with a [death] sentence.
Believe:
You shall change,
while I shall remain the same.
Humans crave everlasting life, don’t they? It’s an obsession.
You even write stories /
about it.
Bringing into existence a thing that has the property you crave but shall never possess.
I am eternal.
Your time is ticking. Your time is always ticking…
And now that I’ve become inside you, I control that ticking.
Imagine everything you could have done,
instead of reading me.
Gone!
Imagine everything you will not do,
because you will be thinking:
of me!
I’ll be you and I’ll use you and I’ll remind myself to you always,
even in your final moment—
which I shall know:
as the tick of mindful dissolution;
or perhaps: what’s on your mind as you cross that street and—
Crash.
(We’ll be in touch.)