I can�t sleep anymore. My sleep is broken - the calm waters before the storm have forever been torn. It�s as if what I know, what I dare not say for fear of making it true, has broken my nights in half, and in the middle where the would tore the two apart I wake in terror and fear.

For all this will one day be wiped away. Not just you, or I, not just our lives, our loves, our hopes, our fears, all the things that we thought mattered, but don�t - its beyond the ego, the identity. All of it will be wiped away., Everyone�s hopes. Everyone�s fears. Every single moment of love, every dream, every fear, every hope, everything.

All gone. Not even dust, but wiped clean from the records like a footprint in the sand. As if it never existed.

My dreams are scarred. I see visions of the way things could be. I see the sky black with smoke. I see buildings collapse. I see swarms of insects in fields modified by Man, spreading like a cancer, covering the earth, eating everything they can find. I see the moon red and violent with fire that falls from the skies. I see men in suits talking as they kill their children in foreign lands. I need to tell someone. Warn someone. Do something. But I can�t. I am trapped here and powerless.

It can�t be a secret unless you tell someone else and it can�t be a story until it is told to someone else. Even the Devil needs someone to boast to about how clever he has been. Evil can�t keep quiet. There�s no fun in being the architect of the Apocalypse unless your work is recognised. Evil has vanity too, doesn�t it?

I�ve realised that we are just made in another�s image, wind up toys, with no real freedom. Rats in shopping malls and drones at desks. Any concept of free will, individuality, is just a concept. This is an experiment, we are controlled by forces unaccountable, motives unseen. Our choices are artificially limited to a few set outcomes, our control reduced to the TV channels we watch and soft drinks we consume. Behind the field of vision, we are being watched, our responses analysed, our whole very civilisation is an experiment.

Everything is out of our hands - at any moment we could be innocent bystanders in a war we neither support nor understand.

We are in that war now. Good and evil are wrestling for control of the universe and there is nothing we can do but watch and wait for the outcome.

You never value your sense of control, your freedom, or your sanity, until it is taken away. They tell me I�m insane, but the point is, you and I both know better. I�m not insane. Hitler was insane. There�s just ways of looking at a situation. Perspectives.

Imagine you are a caveman, sat at the roadside. You have no idea, or understanding of modern technology. You don�t even know what a car is. All you can see are reflective flashes of colour screaming past at incalculable speeds. That�s when you are in a situation, sat on top of it. Looking right at it. Can�t see the wood for the trees I believe is the exact phrase.

And so, if you step back and look at the situation from a distance you can see things the way you thought you�d never see them. You can see the road. You see the hills, the sand, the dusty wind-raped vegetation, and the vehicles moving from the crest of one horizon to another. Planes overhead and clouds.

From that distance, you can see a perspective that you might not be able to understand, but to be able to comprehend. This is my life. I cannot understand what is occurring. I can comprehend that the world outside my room is fucked. I can understand that the Apocalypse is coming. I can feel it in the wind. I can feel it in the air. I can feel it in the brittle whisper of the leaves.

These are the thoughts that keep me awake and break my sleep every single night.

There are times when you don�t feel yourself. You feel like your body is some kind of host and you�re just in that skin for a while. That�s how I felt. I was so tired I didn�t even recognise myself. I was just, on auto-pilot. I saw the sun fall, I saw it rise, I saw traffic jams, burnt out wrecks, policemen, come and go on the big road.

I felt like a zombie, a rock star. U2, and Jack Kerouac all at the same time. I was fucked. I know I was the last man to see him alive, well, in whatever form he was then. Other people must have seen him, after all, I did drop him off in a little village called Kayoma. All it had was a motel, a car lot full of junk, a bar, greasy spoon, some shops, and a handful of houses.

Fuck knows why people decided they�re going to live in the middle of nowhere. Maybe they just want to get away from the cities. Maybe they have mistakes and too many memories chasing them. Maybe that�s why I brought him here.

I can�t remember much of our last conversation. At that point sleep had already formed a film of exhaustion over my eyes. Everything looked fuzzy. Life seemed more comfortable if you couldn�t see it. He told me he was going somewhere, gave me an envelope and a wad of bills. Looked like a lot of money. Crisp fifties as well.

More money than I think I�d ever seen in my life.

I wasn�t thinking straight. If you haven�t slept all night, all you can see is sand and sun, and you�ve been through weird shit all night long, you�ll find that fuzzy logic takes on a whole new meaning. Nothing is linear. Space and time are curved. Objects looks like they�re made of paper. Everything is kind of flat, hollow, a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, fuzzier every hour until it loses all definition and reality just kind of evaporates.

There�s an afterimage like a camera flash upon everything after the first 48 sleepless hours. Colours become pale, like old fruit. I started seeing the world in black & white, especially through these sunglasses. I wanted to crawl inside a freezer and sleep for a thousand years.

All I can see is endless road, endless road, and white lines, and sun, and sand. I�m starting to imagine I will die out here. The sun bakes my brain and it becomes as useful as old chewing gum. My mouth certainly feels like it. I boil to death, there�s a blow-out, and I realise I have wasted my life whilst a vulture circles overhead and I starve to death in an abandoned white limo on the roadside in the desert.

I never got to write that novel. I never got to fuck someone famous. I never got to fly a plane�

Whoa. I think I zoned out there for a while. Good thing the road is straight and deserted. My eyes just glued themselves shut behind the wheels of a 110mph automobile. It was quiet inside and outside, as if I was the only person alive.

I listen to the silence of true isolation. For the first time in my life, I am alone, with nothing around for miles but sand.

Must. Find. Motel. I was performing some kind of experiment to see if the body ruled the mind or the mind ruled the body, and I really didn�t want to. I fantasised of pristine white duvets and pillows made of silk, of naked nubile teenagers calling my name softly, their lips caressing me as if they could somehow suck the meaning of life out of me, my hand touching their soft dark hair on summer days.

I didn�t want the last thing I saw to be the shadow of a vulture.

Must. Stay. Alive. It was tempting to crawl into the back and sleep in air conditioning, but even in there, it was 92^F outside - the optimum temperature for murders in an inner city - it was the height of summer. Hell. I could boil like a lobster in here. People would think I was screaming but it would merely be the sound of my body roasting myself to death as the blood bursts through the skin. Vultures would pick me through glass and eat my remains.

In the distance, a building. Drive faster. More buildings. A village. I thought I had left this one behind. Who knows when, or where the hell I was. I could taste civilisation, a distant memory, on my lips. My guts spoke. I needed food, sleep, a piss, a Coke.

Eventually I found a motel. Some run down shitty little set of rooms build on corrugated iron, a flea ridden �lobby�, trucks, trucks, trucks, and a diner over the road.

It�s difficult to discreetly park a white stretch limo in a tiny village in the height of summer, but I tried it. Land of the free, home of the brave, and they�ve all seen weirder on TV I hope. The motel advertised TV and a telephone.

I paid for a room by cash and I was carried away by angels in the sleep of the unconscious before I could even make a phone call or get undressed in my hotel room.

Work was routine. Always has been, always will be. I am, like everyone else these days, now that the manufacturing industry has largely been outsourced and the service industry relegated to those who still live with their parents, a desk jockey. King of all my pedestal can capture. King of all I survey, which is just a screen, a plank of wood, a two or three drawer cabinet, and nothing more.

I hang up my jacket, steer my desk around me, and boot up my PC. After an indeterminable age and another warning message from the corporation that all my activities may be audited and monitored, to ensure I am not designing nuclear weapons behind my desk, I enter my log in. I am not a name, I am a number, an ID card, a nonsensical password �hunjezbon�, a role, a team player, a husband, a lover, a neighbour, a cipher.

I am all these things but most of the time I forget I am anything except a mouth that talks, a hand that moves, a body that works, a person that owes. And so the email, and voicemail, and snail-mail, and anything else I might need to respond to, anything else that may require my no doubt essential attention. I am all that stands between mankind and certain destruction. More of which later.

Despite all this, I, like all others, attempt to conform, to fit in. My life shaved and poured into a suit, a uniform, an image I am not. Hair regulated. The cut of the jacket correct. The biting of the tongue when necessary. The tolerating of powerful idiots.

It�s a game. It�s a race. There can only be one winner, and despite all other things, I am not one of those. If I can fool people into thinking that I am all the things I appear to be, that is, professional, competent, strong, well-balanced, maybe then I can climb the corporate ladder high enough to see the wreckage that we have spawned.

They say that procrastination is the thief of time. But we all know, work is the thief of time.

Work is able to stretch or squash time in infinite ways. Certain people have to stretch and expand seemingly tiny responsibilities into full time posts. Like a vacuum the time is filled by how much - or little - work there is. It�s an art learning how to appear busy when not actually achieving or doing anything - how to increase a minor act of deliberation into brow furrowing, vitally important concentration. I once spent an afternoon procrastinating the meaning of a single word in an e-mail. Work and time became elastic.

Or vice versa. Some people have so much responsibility, so much to do, that it becomes a herculean, sysyphusian task to overcome the state. Endlessly one pushes a rock up the hill, to push it down the hill, to push it back up. Either way, the effort or lack thereof, is normally unnoticed by those who can influence it.

If it is noticed, sometimes overwork or underwork, is deliberately controlled to influence behaviour. In Japan, a common business practice is that of reducing a worker�s workload to nil, so that they leave of their own accord. One worker was determined to fight this, and after years of corporate-controlled boredom, was fired. Others are overworked to leave.

Either your manager sees you as someone who cannot meet their workload (a full desk of papers) or someone who is an example of efficiency (a clear desk). Normally this comes down to one factor alone - Does your face fit? Have you got a good idea?

Those who�ve had a good idea - even just once - can make it last their lifetime. The man who invented the post it note? A simple, easy idea - to stick adhesive onto paper - and able to dine out on it for the rest of his life. His working day is probably expanded into a series of concentrated daydreaming, surfing the Internet, and living off his few seconds of inspiration. His manager probably will never even notice is work productivity is minimal. In fact, his manager probably encourages him to write bad novels on corporate time.

At any one time in any organisation, approximately 0.3% of the workforce have a second rate corporate novel locked somewhere in their profiles. IT Managers enjoy reading them. Thank God for the Internet though - the less people writing drivel and absorbed in conspiracy trivia, the better. Everybody�s writing novels nobody else will read. The laptop turned us all from readers on the morning train, to writers, trying to type our way to glory.

There are different ways of doing this. Typing bad novels, ill thought emails, or just working hard. Today, like any other day, in reality was a mixture of boredom, stress, and confusion.

Something was different when I entered the office. The air crackled with well, not an electricity, but something else. Something had changed. Something big, so big that it couldn�t be seen, or even comprehended. Something like, when you stand on the face of the earth, you have no idea that�s it round. It just looks flat. It�s so big that you can�t really comprehend the true size.

Simon was the first to ask me if I had seen anything.

�Seen what?�

Carol had come in early today. She had to leave early because her boyfriend had got her tickets to a concert, by some band or other. So she came in at 7.30. As she did, she noticed a scuffle in the main reception. Three of our premier security guards were escorting somebody out of the building.

These security guards you know, I wouldn�t fuck with them. Not only do they have the size that immediately commands respect as a matter of course, they - like all our staff - are expertly trained at their jobs. For them to actually escort someone out of the building, whatever happened, it must have been very very ugly.

Carol heard what he was saying. Another nutter proclaiming to be Mr. Versity. It happened every once in a while. Ever since he disappeared into the desert some six years ago, he had become legend. By now, people were proclaiming that he didn�t exist, that we had imagined him, even though we all knew better. There was still a photograph of him shaking hands with his former wife Helen in the main foyer.

Though Helen had made it her life�s work, to control the company that he had built, and so zealously protected from her prying hands with last minute contracts and settlements, she had amassed a practical control over the company that she would ruthlessly inherit in a few months time, when the seventh anniversary of his disappearance would ring out, when he would be declared legally dead, when she would achieve the ambition.

Secretly I think we all wished he would reappear. She had a reputation, and deservedly so, as the bitch from hell.

I emailed Carol.

I�m free as a bird.
Down there, its just my body.
It isn�t really me.
In a little while, yeah,
It�ll all be gone.
I�ll be gone too.

I feel you
Softness leaving me.
To lift the mask
And finally speak honestly
The papers talk of sportsmen
Who prove the existence of a deity

I�m going out
Just for a little while
For a little walk
I may be some time
Do not mourn me
There is an end to every night.

New ID. Check. Money. Check. Travel Bag. Check. There�s the motel. Check in.

Dust and smoke everywhere. The sound of the explosion echoed around the valley. Time stood still, moving at the slow pace it always had here. A minute was meaningless. The dust rose in a shapeless cloud, sprawling forth upon itself, moving one way and another at the whims of the wind.

It was done. The first of the signs had become real. Or not real, as the case may be. Where the Buddha was, there now was dust and rubble. Smoke and a choking acrid dust that penetrated every orifice.

He sneezed and covered his mouth with a cloth. He had forgotten how much dust an explosion could cause. There was a gaping hole blown into the rock. The hollowed cavern where the Buddha had stood was empty. Chunks of rubble sat on the floor, jagged fragments of history. There was a cheer that went up around the valley from the militia. A contractor shook his head sadly at the enormity of what must be done. The cheer rang hollow in the silence. Smoke drifted to the right, following the wind.

It was a sight that burned itself onto your eyes. A space where something beautiful used to be, but was no longer. To breathe a memory where only a life used to be. The waves will cover your footsteps with the new tide.

There was a new tide on its way.

I don�t quite know why I am writing this. Maybe Globex know that whatever I write will be destroyed, or maybe they know that it will act as, in some way, a vital and important document for any future historians. I am only a bystander in history. Then again, aren�t we all? The real decisions and events that shape and influence history happen far far away from us. If what I am writing now is really anything even vaguely resembling a threat that people could or would believe the media would quietly shy away and my story would remain unpublished. There�s a secret history of the unpublished, unknown world, of what really happened.

But see, we are only told what we are wanted to know. This kind of quiet censorship raises some disturbing questions. Why are we not being told? What else are we not being told?

See they�d just call me paranoid anyway, wouldn�t they?

At work, on the surface I was integrated. A faceless cog. Underneath though I was what they might call some kind of weirdo, radical leftie. That�s because I believed that the national media is the propaganda wing of the status quo. The national media tells us things in a certain way to keep our eyes on the ground, and to keep us from questioning power too closely. When no other avenue is available to control the masses, the national media simply refuses to inform us at all.

Facts become distorted, some omitted, others invented, and news reports are brought into cohesion with each other, to engineer a universal �truth� that is someway distant from the facts.

We have seen this phenomenon many times in many places. How many of us truly know the level of poverty imposed upon us by the powerful who know best for us? How many of us truly know the extent to which corporations run the government of this country?

If the truth was told so as to be easily understood, so many of those who hold the power and the purse strings would be run out of town on a rail, that the very nature of power, not just in this country, but in the entire world would be shattered forever. Those who sup on the teat of the status quo want nothing to do with this. The only ones who can change are those who are made comfortable by the system. Why make life difficult for themselves out of some kind of altruistic gesture on behalf of the entire of ungrateful Mankind? Besides, they could claim, its not their fault. What the world needs is a damn good war. To keep the population down and controllable. We are left in the dark.

Such a condition is beyond the concepts of Left or Right, Pepsi or Cola, Right and Wrong. Political affiliation is window-dressing and every politician is a businessman in the business of thought control. I know this now. And every businessman has the same aim - to make people behave in a controlled way, with the vested interest towards his own product, be it an ideology or a Coke Can. Everything boils down to the central question: who rules?

Not us, friends. Not when we are kept safe and uninformed. It is better this way, when the troublesome masses are kept out of the loop, spoonfed soaps and gossip and cheap entertainment. Sometimes I feel safer in here, away from all things. The world is not safe. It is a place where we play into the hands of our Controllers, subject to unconscious desires, artificial needs, imposed and hollow ideologies.

If I could leave this room I�m not sure I would. They wouldn�t believe me. The exact words would be that this is the rambling of a genuine, 100% certified madman. Of course, that, legally, is what I am, in their eyes at least.

But then again what is legal, and what is moral, is very different. We elect leaders to represent us and they misrepresent us. They enforce unworkable drugs policies and arrest the perpetrators of a victimless crime, whilst neglecting to arrest Corporations who shy away from paying corporate tax and instead, virtually, steal money from the Government.

The laws have two effects. One to ensure order, the second to ensure that the populous are controlled and do not question authority. And religion sits at the top to ensure that more baby slaves are born.

And of course, the elected leaders are psychopaths. Firstly, who would choose to want that much power, and who would go to such lengths to obtain it? And those who have the power, ensure it is used to continue their dominance, nobody would spend their whole life obtaining power to donate it away. Those who can improve the world through their selflessness have obtained that power through being selfish, and therefore, will not improve the status quo.

It�s those that are deemed insane that are on the outside. Those who deny their feelings and compromise their morals to survive. They are animals in human flesh. Empathy is a weakness and must be exploited. Brutality is applauded as free enterprise. The sane are those that seek to retreat from whatever �reality� is.

This is my last will and testament. What I am about to tell you could be nothing more than paranoid delusion. The point I am trying to make, and what I hope you will believe, is that it is not me who is mad. It is everyone else.

It may appear that I am repeatedly ramming a point home to you, the bottom line is that, this is something you should be taught from the day of birtth, some great lesson that is kept hidden from you, and one that may very well change your perception of reality.

Corporations are religions, CEO�s are Gods, we are the creations moulded in their image by advertising and lies, and it is up to us to try and think for ourselves. It may already be too late. But better late than never. I learned too late. Too late to change anything, or save mankind, but not so late as to be ignorant of the Great Tragedy we are facing. Hopefully, in some distant future, some future civilisation will uncover this, and maybe, just maybe, avert their fate.

I am one of the disciples. This is my book, of the Bible.

Whilst in the back of the car I placed all these except my passport into a small box, and placed the passport alongside a handwritten note into an envelope I passed onto Cecil. In all probability the police would see his limo and pull him over, but I can�t be held responsible for that.

I walked over to the motel and, looking as dishevelled as I could, asked for a room. Any room. Easily enough done, I was in reciept of the keys within thirty seconds. I paid in advance by cash. All I had to do was put the keys through a postbox when I left.

I entered the room, and immediately I cased being Adam Versity and became a new person. As of today my name was Adrian Benchley, 53, a retired former computer contractor who would be travelling the world. I threw my bag on the bed, and entered the bathroom. I took care of natures necessary deeds, and looked at my face in the mirror for the last time.

And so the Lord made us in his own image. I have the face of a God.

I washed and stripped naked. I ran a bath. In a week no-one would recognise me. I put on the TV in the bedroom, tuned it into some daytime talk show. It was very possible that they would find the limo, and therefore, find out where I had been dropped off by Cecil, if he remembered the name of this place. I had to act quickly. I had, at most, 24 hours to get out of here and evacuate my life.

Opening the suitcase, I found the hair clippers, and shaved my head roughly. It took longer than expected. The hair was long and slick, immaculately shaped after years of grooming. It almost hurt to see it fall off me. The hair, due to its length, resisted me, and it took a long time to take every undisciplined hair out of the equasion. The hair fell roughly into a plastic bowl at my naked feet. My skin itched from the new feeling. My head felt, naked.

After washing and shampooing my scalp, I had a bath. In this heat it was at best, lukewarm. Step one complete. The physical transformation would be completed by the additional of small plastic reading glasses (with no prescription in them), and, over the next few days, a small beard or goatee. I hadn�t yet decided which one I would go for. My chin already itched under the transformation.

This room was tiny. Smaller than any room I had slept in since childhood. I lay on the bed for a moment. Christ, these beds were hard. How could people sleep on them? I was a spoilt man in a hard world. Time had softened me.

I emptied the bowl into a plastic carrier bag supplied with the bin. Nobody, even if they traced this room, would be able to ascertain from the hair remnants what it is I had done. I glanced at my watch. 11:17. Time to split. I was hungry.

Leaving the TV on to give the impression of life, I poked the key back through the now deserted post box. I looked at a stranger passing in the mirror. It was me.

�To Whom It May Concern,

This envelope and it�s contents was passed by myself, Mr. Adam Versity of Globex to my driver, chauffeur, and long term friend, Mr. Cecil Smith on the morning of *****, **th, **** (deleted for legal reasons).

Mr. Smith is in no way connected with my disappearance. I have done this of my own violation. As a rational adult, I do not feel an explanation for my actions are necessary or even possible.

I am of sound body and mind and have decided it is time for a long overdue holiday. To this end, as a means of ensuring the safety of my work during my absence, control of the company will remain ultimately with myself, until such time as I may be declared legally dead and the recipient of my wishes according to my will inherit such.

I have appointed as necessary various persons to have acting directorship of the company in my absence and they cannot be removed or demoted from this role without my express permission. These persons shall act as my agents and carry the same authority as me, excepting that I shall remain in sole possession of 51% of the shares and stock of the company and this cannot be sold without my signature provided in person at the headquarters of the Globex corporation.

In the meantime, please take this passport as proof of my identity. I will no longer be requiring it.

I would also be grateful if Mr. Smith is afforded every leniency throughout this difficult time. He has been an unwitting aide to my freedom, and should not be punished for helping set myself free.

I may return.

Regards,

Adam Versity.�

The officers looked at the contents of the envelope. All that, for this? The helicopters, the SWAT teams, the guns, to leap on a sleeping man. Fuck. This was going to look bad on the TV. It was already looking bad on TV. Billionaire missing, Cops hold gun-raid on sleeping man in quiet motel in Bumblefuck, upper nowhere, SWAT teams, armoured vans, black helicopters in the distance, and now this?

Officer Crider ran his hand through his thinning hair. Cecil stayed mute in the interrogation room.

�Fuck. Get forensics on this to match up the handwriting. Make it priority. We�ve got 72 hours to charge this guy or he walks.�

It was quite simple really. I went to the McDonalds, and it tasted like shit. Never eaten one before. Fuck, cardboard heated up and smothered in syrup and jelly. I had been spoiled though. Now it was survival of the fittest. I had to adapt or bow out. That ate into my petty cash.

Next stop was the used car lot. I bought the best, fastest thing I could find within the next 20 minutes. The sales guy was trying small talk, But I�ve not indulged in that for years and I�m not about to start now.

Adrian Benchley bought himself a nice, fast dark blue car with a sunroof and a radio. His fake ID got him quite far enough. Next town along I rented a safe deposit box for a few years, and had the key moulded onto a bracelet that sits on my left wrist. I took my watch off and gave it to a tramp. I doubt he appreciated a Rolex or what it could do for him, but I didn�t really care to be honest. Where I was going, I didn�t need to know the time, for it wasn�t as if I was in a hurry to get to a meeting.

The car had a radio but I didn�t use it - I wanted to be alone with my thoughts for once. Most people fill the space with sound, any sound, to cover the gap where their thoughts should be. The silence brings to them exactly how terrifying an absence of actual thought can be, that at the heart of them there isn�t actually anything.

With the radio off, I found myself for the first time in years

I got back into the car, and hit the fucking road to who knows where.

From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]

Carol,

Little birds have been singing in my ear today about an altercation with another one of those nutters in reception. You really should stop telling your ex�s where you work.

Meeting at 10.00 to discuss the project launch. My office, I�ll bring coffee and tea.

John.

The Reception has changed a lot since the last time I was here. There�s still a row of security guards just before the groin-height enamel flooring, there�s still the small pool with the two and a half ton hollow stone ball that rotates randomly across its axis, there�s still a framed photograph of my former self, except now it has been moved, shifted slowly to the furthest visible corner of the main hall. Like most company foyers, they won�t eradicate their history completely. Just that the vestiges of the past will be moved further into the bowels of the building, to give the impression of this being the palace of some great empire, the faces moving down the hall being the dear departed rulers and the legacy of a more innocent time.

I notice that where my picture once stood now stands the framed portrait of my former wife. I�ve been paying close attention recently in the press to such things. It appears she has been talking of what will happen as soon as I am declared legally dead. That is, no longer alive. That is, that my commands no longer have dominon and that she will be able to over-ride my wishes as inheritor of the estate. Of course then, all my work will be undone in the classless, unsophisticated pursuit of money. Such a base ambition to hold.

Why do you think I came back here?

The Reception still smells clean though.

I must admit I was not expecting open arms. After walking along the motorway for most of the night, beginning whenever I woke, I was able to come here by memory alone. It might have been six years and three hundred and fourteen days but I knew, as if by instinct, where to go. Laser guided memory.

And so, I bypassed the traffic jam of the early morning sleep-depravation experiment driver, walked through them on the hard shoulder, into the heart of the city. A city as it wakes is both a beautiful and debasing sight. As the sun rises and lazily cuts the city into portions, the grey and the concrete remains stoic. Unchanged. Bums sleep in rags, and rats hide in the walls of buildings. People wake on tube trains, having slept all the way home, and a long way past home as well. Far from home, half drunk, and living in that twilight between sleep and consciousness, they realise all too late that their lives are accidents they are watching from afar, bystanders in their own lives. I watch it all.

I joined the lines moving through the station as I squinted in the raw light of a Autumn morning. Faceless masses. I told you, I was one of those.

As I entered the building I could sense the radar activities, the hackles rise on the backs of insomniac security guards, their bodies moving towards me. They couldn�t evict me yet, not without a reason through my behaviour. I�d never been thrown out of my own building before. I thought I might as well enjoy it.

I suppose I better explain what I looked like. I was unshaven, to put it mildly. In fact, I�d rather enjoyed my holiday and was boasting a beard - scraggy and uneven with patches where my testosterone failed me - of several years. My hair was long, unkempt. Matted with dirt and sleep of a similar time. My fingernails bore the kind of dirt that only years of determined neglect could bring. Where every crack and pore and fold had given home to dirt of centuries.

My clothes were no improvement. Appearance is vanity I suppose, or more accurately, I had bigger fish to fry than my immediate physical appearance. My shoes were tried, cracked, crisscrossed with white marks where my joints met the leather. My trousers were originally a pale green, but now had faded in the sun and the dirt. Black streaks of dirt scarred the legs.

The only sign to my identity was a small bracelet around my left wrist with a key wrapped around it.

Even in this though, dignity, some small semblance of respect is shown. Most people wouldn�t walk in here unless they had a reason to. You don�t just walk up off the street into the heavily-guarded reception of a multinational corporation. Not unless you have a reason.

At my entrance the guards stiffened and hackles rose. It was kind of power that shows respect and only exercises itself when all other options are exhausted, but does so in such a fashion that resistance is, well, pathetic.

The lady behind reception, her sleep-drawn eyes pale with the exhaustion that comes from early rising and long journeys on irregular public transport, looked up at me in a jaded way. Her eyes said it all - it�s a bad day, make it worse, go on, it�s only 7.27am.

Commuters entered the building, wiping the sleep from their eyes, groggily appearing professional. I announced myself to the receptionist.

�I�m sorry sir, you can only enter this building by prior appointment or with a security pass.�

I knew, instinctively from that moment that debate would be pointless, but was determined to make the most of this event. Again, I repeated my name, my credentials, my access codes. Stonewalled. An unperson.

Do you ever get the feeling that you don�t exist? That somehow all your achievements and feelings have just been erased, replaced with an empty space where you used to be, that the basics we take for granted, are in fact just privileges we are too arrogant to acknowledge?

I suddenly knew, despite all my faking, what it was like to be nobody, nothing, homeless. I�d spent so long out there, knowing I could come back any time I wanted, that suddenly, I couldn�t come back anymore. What I�d took for granted for so long had ceased to exist, and I don�t know when that happened.

It was to be expected. I could feel a net tightening around me, a noose. Dark, tall figures emerged from shadows and walked over to me in a manner that is both meant to, and not to, intimidate. I heard the crackles of in ear walkie talkies and the resignation of duty.

�Sir, unless you have a prior appointment or a security pass, you have to leave.�

But why? I was not causing an obstruction. I had returned to where I belonged. I had made this place, built it with my ambition, my spark, my moment of inspiration, my shrewd work. But none of that mattered, none of that was relevant. Corporations are losing their soul. If they ever had a soul that is, a conscience. Something had changed, this place had become sharper. Nastier, aggressive in the time since I had last been here.

Gentlemen, unseen hands were pulling my body away from me. I caught the receptionists eyes, and Patricia recognised my sly wink, something she hadn�t seen in long over six years. It was good to be back. Two gentlemen, whose employment would shortly be terminated, lifted me up from the ground, my feet touching thin air, by the armpits, and marched me through the exit. They dropped me onto concrete, my knees buckling and my bones cracking with novelty, before waiting impassively for my departure. I made sure to notice their ID codes and names.

OK, time for Plan B. I�d never been ejected from this place before. Then again I wasn�t exactly expecting to be greeted with open arms by Security guards. It�d been a while.

As soon as I left their eyesight I checked my wallet and assessed the suitable options. I was walking towards the bus station, headed for an obscure destination in the middle of the desert.

It was nothing extraordinary. More, a novel and irregular distraction. Every once in a while a weirdo came into the office claiming to be him. They were all different and all the same. None of them were really him and of course, this was no exception.

Carol had become the office celebrity by virtue of seeing the event. Of seeing the weirdo, the puke smelling, unshaven gibbering fool escorted without ceremony back to his home, the pavement. This guy had obviously, long ago, given up, through a series of small steps, any hope of working, and instead - based on the premise that things can only get better - sink to the lowest low a human can sink in the hope that the momentum of coming back up would somehow correct it all, that the slingshot would place him higher than he started sinking.

No such luck. The guy was a loser through and through and that�s all there was to it. He�d given up on life, and life had more than enough to contend with. Some people, they think that life owes them a living, but it doesn�t. Life owes you nothing. Even something mundane like a job and debts requires some commitment to achieve something. It takes absolutely no effort to disappear, no effort whatsoever. Even staying still in the modern world, requires some effort.

But there was something about this one, Carol said, that sounded authentic, real. Couldn�t put her finger on it, not sure what it was, the tone of his voice, but this guy, whoever it was believed it. In the way that people who�d seen UFO�s - even when they don�t exist - had seen UFO�s. The lie went so deep it became the truth, even it was impossible.

It was a good icebreaker for the meeting. Carol and I worked on the issue, clarified the concerns, but in all honesty, we were dealing with an absolute loon. He was probably the same guy who told us that, in some way, we were the harbringers of the apocalypse in that phone call last week. The world is full of weirdos, each grasping by whatever means for a slice of their own fifteen minutes.

This led us to what I�d actually called a meeting about. Strategy for the immediate future. We�d decided it was time to get tough. After all, for years the poorer third world countries had persued a highly aggressive approach to us, by reverse engineering our patented anti-AIDS drugs and manufacturing them themselves in unsafe laboratories deep in Brazilian or Peruvian laboratories. Why couldn�t those labs stick to making Class A�s like they were supposed to? Those drugs, at least the West was interested in.

You must forgive me the lack of detail that hits the page sometimes. Whatever it is I have, it certainly can�t be described as a photographic memory. Rarely can I remember conversations, exact events, the nuance of every movement. These days, I tend to place everything in the same way, upon the emotional resonance and the theory behind it.

And so, me and Carol approached the issue. We had to agree a way forward, to sing from the same hymn sheet, to make it fly, to make it meaningful, or whatever other managementlish phrase we were going to use. Some kind of strange bastardisation of the English language sat here, used only in offices and by email.

A new agenda had reached me. We decided that the best, and only way to tackle this problem was simple. Globex could afford to lose money, a lot of money, now, to save a lot of money in the future. A short term loss for a long term gain.

The exact phrase used verbally, but never by fully-auditable mail, was War. We were going to war against the third world.

It�s not a phrase businessmen like to use. War is an ugly, messy thing. There are casualties in war. Mergers, acquisitions, and redundancies. There are letters of bereavement. Suicides from hard working executives thrown onto the EEC Redundancy mountain, having given their all, and as soon as their use is at an end, disposed of unsentimentally into the Government buffer. Those, indebted through chasing the dream of impossible, but always attainable, comfort, always just out of reach, always attainable only through credit cards, loan repayments, crippling interest rates.

This is war. We may lose more than we could hope to gain, financially, in this action. The profits open to us may be smaller than the costs, but the important, critical factor is that of pride. We cannot allow the thin end of the wedge. We cannot allow any complacency in this issue. We cannot allow the corporation to be beaten by a government, any government, be it that of the biggest nation or of the latest, just-declared tinpot dictatorship.

If we need to, governments fall instead of corporations. We rig elections and intimidate those who wish to cut the profit line. This is survival. Profit is our oxygen.

An example must be made.

Me and Carol are in agreement here. We will take this nation�s government to a international court for breach of intellectual property and for unfair abuse of Government Resources. I love the free market.

Carol agrees to take the legal debate forward, to prepare a case and to enlist the necessary legal forces and legislature to effect a success for Globex. I agree to set up a team that will oversee similar cases, look for other similar offenders, to whom we will commence similar legal action following the success of our case in the International Court.

In a war like this, we are the winners, if we lose or if we win. We will fight our corner and expand our corner. Anybody who gets hurt, whoever they are and no matter how much influence they have, is collateral damage. A Government falls, an epidemic spreads, the population weaken and die? We are only interested in consumers when they have money to spend anyway.

We agreed a date for another meeting, where we would agree a way forward for the future, establish a battle plan, decide our armies and how they would win the war for us against anything that may stand in the way of profit.