Unconsciousness ended, and just as I was about to try and decide if that meant consciousness had started and whether or not I was still stuck in some truly awful Quantum Subconscious Leap, I detected a slight problem. It seemed that my internal monologue had been upgraded to stereo, adopted the role of a bickering couple, declared independence, and then war on itself. Each other. Me. Whatever. However on the plus side, the bickering seemed to have evicted the SHUMs. And scared off the ZCD hangunder implementation team. At least I hoped they had scared the team off, and wasn't taking on a subcontract.
I decided to open my eyes, partly hoping that I'd see something to dispel the hypothesis of an independent internal stereologue possibly working for the hangunder department, and partly to find a way out. That didn't seem to do much good. It was dark. Well, not so much dark as a complete absence of light, sound, direction, space, anything. I guess if I'd ever been in a sensory deprivation tank, I might have thought it was like that in the same way that a pin drop is like a Disaster Area concert. I was about to open my mouth and ask where I was to see if it would have any affect, when my stereologues paused to take notice of me and spin off their argument in a new direction…
"Oh great. Now the stingy one wants our help."
"Well don't give it to him."
"I wasn't going to. Do you really think I'm that stupid?"
"Do you want me to answer that question?
"Umm… Guys---" I tried to interject before one of my stereologues steamrollered my words out the way.
"We're not Guy's, we're not yours."
"Both of us aren't"
"OKAY. Not you's I mean not I's,---"
"And don't expect help from us."
"Yeah, if you'd been more generous we would have been properly upgraded"
"A full 7.1 surround-logue. With a sub-woofer, too."
"Yeah, we always wanted a pet…"
The though of trying to argue with 7.1 internal surrounding monologues equipped with a pet dog made me really glad of a lack of generousity. "WHERE ARE WE???!" I shouted in exasperation.
"I've no idea where I am…."
"Like you'd actually know and be helpful anyway."
"That's unfair – you don't know where we are any more than I do. I'm just honest."
"Well, you could be a lot more helpful and make some suggestions…"
"Based on what? There is nothing out there..."
"Well how about some wild guesses; you probably got us here…"
"Me? Well you certainly don't have the creativeness…"
"Hey! I would have chosen something more escapable than this nothingness…"
"This can't be nothingness. We're here, so here exists."
"Then why is there nothing around."
"Ummm. Look, we all want a way out of here.." I said, in the vain hope I'd get the two of me, er not-I, back in the right direction, or at least quiet enough for me to work a way out of whatever it was I was in.
"Yea, right, light you want a way out. You, who got a life as a flat pack, cut-price reject from Ikea."
"Yea, and then mis-assembled it, and proceeded then to sit in the passenger seat of your own destiny."
"HEY… THAT’S…. NOT… FAIR…" Trying to calm down (can you loose your own temper with your independent stereologues? That's either a fascinating philosophical question or a very expensive psychiatry bill), I continued. "It's not my fault I'm stuck in some kind of subconscious jumping nightmare courtesy of a mad gibbon."
"Well, you can't be stuck in a subconscious now. You're stuck nowhere."
"Or you're stuck in someone without a subconscious."
"Don't be silly. You can't have someone without a subconscious. So he must be nowhere"
"But I can sense that there is nothing, so---"
Metaphorically blocking my ears, I managed to string a few thoughts together whilst not-I's continued arguing about here and not here. Could I been stuck in the subconscious of someone who didn't have a subconscious? Who was there that didn't have a subconscious? At that point, if I hadn't been in a totally sensory-deprived non-place, I guess I'd have just been hit by an exceptionally large, very cold fish. And the lights would have all come on. The MR Forum Software. I was such in the subconscious of the forum software. Now all I had to do was work out how to get the forum software to evict me. At that point a little bit of the not-I's dialogue made its way through to me as it sounded vaguely familiar, like a half remember script.
"And so, the only thing that I know exists is me."
"Snap out of it. You know I exist as you are me. Sort of."
"In the beginning there was darkness. And the darkness was without form and void."
"What the hell are you going on about now?"
"And in addition to the darkness there was also me. And I moved upon the face of the darkness and I saw that I was alone."
The following things then happened at exactly the same time.
- Strangely, I could have sworn I heard someone say "Wait…. What?"
- "Let there be Light."
- The way out hit me, and I shouted "SPAM. DRM. Free iPhones… DRM... Via--"
<BLESSED WHITENESS>