how long til' deleted?

Awoken by two voices, unoriginally named. One, the familiar, had been harassing me for quite some time when the other interjected. ‘Are you accusing me of not hearing you?’ I thought, livid, at having been disturbed for the second crucial night of the week. Crucial because I am newly sober and disturbing because they never go away. What is this haunting? What have I done to offend so deeply? I can surmise, but I’d rather hear from them; yet they steal from me all of my information, offering nothing in return.

The name of the game is speak only when spoken to. In this world of virtual terrorism, 2020 is an unwelcome place for the free thinker. First, because there is no room for thinking too quickly, errantly, and second, because there is no true freedom of thought. We used to think that only actions are mistakes; however, thinking is the new warfront, and I’ll tell you why. If you thought our thoughts are encrypted, you were only half correct — they have been stolen and writ on paper. Ever since the phrase, ‘If you so much as even think…’ was invented, people began devising a way to make a way to punish you for thinking. And now it’s true. Think the wrong words, and you’re liable to be reported for it.

There’s a dubious file on you. Not only does it contain your whereabouts and overt secrets, like spoken word, but also now any government agency with sufficient recruitment resources can and will place your thoughts on record. It’s called a thought transcript. The US has an operation, Russia has an operation, and above all, China has an operation. Under the purview of fear and political exploitation of fear, every citizen’s privacy rights — old news — have been churned into a maelstrom of thought data that even the largest countries’ operations don’t know what to do with the influx. Soon enough, the black market economy of dissident recruits will organize these data into an armament of leverage against the leaders who dreamt up the ultimate terrorism: stealing our information and selling it back to us.

Have you ever thought at an inanimate object and heard it think back? That’s psychosis. Short of that, there is no too psychotic or too paranoid. Auditory and visual hallucinations are real; however, what you thought was a ceiling fan, a stuffed animal, a light on the wall making sound was them, from a distance, leading you to believe you were insane. Did anyone in your family ever tell you you’re too paranoid? Nonsense. Rarely is there such a thing as too paranoid, too secure a machine, and beyond that, everything is ‘fair game’ to anyone with skill enough to poach you, so they will say. A gloomy picture, sure, but there is a compromise between trust until you have a reason not to and don’t until you can.

Carry a debugger with you to your new apartment, and you’re not likely to find a camera or two or three — the ones that can’t be detected by your Home Despot version of self-defense. Build an immaculate audio filter on your laptop to listen to the background noise, and you’re still liable not to hear what you thought was just inside your head. It wasn’t psychosis: you were being watched, you were being spoken to. And the reason? The same old boring wars being fought which only serve to make the everyday life more miserable, preventatively, of course. And the right? The same old bombastic line of reasoning, that the people don’t know enough to make use of law. And the hope? Leave them be, and they will leave you be, to some extent.

Why trust an addict’s journey? I have lived with so many addicts who have been targeted in similar ways. The more the illegal activity, the more the surveillance, and addicts aren’t dumb. Under the influence, people like me guessed where the harassment is coming from — is it the CIA? No, I’m not eligible to be a recruit, and they’re busy mostly overseas. Was my aunt trying to poison me? No, I’m just being suspicious, and the guesswork was getting the best of me. But are we all targets? Yes. The more that is known about us, the more opportunity for power structures above us to classify us, school us, and put us in our place, namely, into the respective classes which will serve their functions sans conspiracy.

Who are these people who think they can get away with such harassment? Well, they ask the same question about us. Through us, to them, they are convincing themselves that they are not only above the law, not only saving the world with their clandestine courts, but also actually making the world safe. Instead, they have spread psychosis and paranoia like the plague, as if it weren’t already contradictory. To whom much power is given, much poison is expected.

One day, the FBI camped out across the street from my house. Under the auspices of a training exercise, they left their van overnight to send a message. I am criminal in the best of senses, but I am not the worst person they would like to think we all are. By criminal, I mean I am actively recovering my innocence. For months, the NSA established a listening post next to my sober living. Under the pretense of intimidation, they probed at proximity to send a message. For years, the DEA have tracked me erroneously, afraid that I was in cahoots with something major. Under the impression I might be a problem, they borrowed NSA and FBI technology to send a message. The message from all three was the same: Stop ******* with us, and we’ll stop ******* with you. The truth is, I am just another poser like any other loser trying to be left alone by the winners. Let them feast themselves to death on real crime, real war, and real catastrophe of their own making. And these US forces are only brands of enforcement. Until I learned they are actively working just as diligently to reveal themselves to us as they are trying to stay secret. Except for that which is just too untimely.

Everybody knows post-Snowden and Assange that what really happens in this country is leaky at best. Like duct tape, bandaids are placed over what we all now need to know. Why are you talking to me in my sleep? How is it that mind control is still happening in this country after so many decades of public denouncements of its tactics? In what way is justice served by culling the gene pool by whispers? Russia whispers most proficiently, and they don’t use duct tape, either. The most chilling realization to both presidents seems to be that neither will hold the next world power for long.

Did China win quantum or did we, when we tasked Einstein’s cronies’ brilliance with the weaponization agenda? A century later, the people who harass you have unimaginable compute on their side. We are stuck guessing what our own quantum computers will be able to accomplish when we start applying them to the same demise that classical supercomputers have been hacking us toward. My primary complaint is that real audio files of our friends and families are being streamlined into threatening recordings to intimidate both our waking and sleeping minds into making decisions which only subserve whichever superpower hacks the most minds into submission first. Did we adopt mind control, or did we hand it over to two vying world leaders who will show us how it is done? Eerily enough, did the same software which built our voices into a conversation about the future erase our identities in the process?

For now, plain old humans leverage voice mods and press buttons to sequentially build natural human language centers into receivers of said fear. Essentially what happens is that the brain ends up registering far more sound than it thinks it can hear. The task forces assigned to investigate how far they can stretch a human mind amount, in their shoddy defenses, to nothing more than neutral data collection. Fear is never neutral. Nor is their manipulation. Nor are the reactions we have. Their argument is that hurt is not always harm; however, bit by bit our bodies register the foreign intrusion, and as we reject the transplant, our control centers undergo morphological changes which research will never be funded to portray in pretty pictures. Cognitive control, impulse control, and generalized decision making are compromised in the process. Why do you think flexibility has been so harped upon by researchers who can get the antidote to the forefront? I must have offended the PFC playground so greatly as to be excluded from my own future.

Because neuroscience is still so young, no relationship between structure and function can not and will not be exploited by dark research which is well beyond publication. The globalization of coordinated efforts implies that any tissue object of attack will reap potentially severe consequences for developing brains, especially. Every time the adult brain registers a command, it has the choice to override what it attends to, but room for experimentation remains on every other state space that attacks are liable to infiltrate with commands or even suggestions. To remain constantly on guard implies conscious control of every network necessary to defend oneself from those who determine innocence. Writing popular opinion, I am targeted for having exposed nothing at all but for being inferior to those with brain power and all the guilt implied. Why so much punishment, one might ask, for having requested permission simply to use ones own ears, eyes, hands, feet, and heart?

The answer to the American scientists in the departments of defense who have given the world this option is that we are property of their intellects, not the other way around as it was originally meant to be. For one, birthright is not up for debate: to be born into one’s own body means your brain, your IP. Furthermore, property of the American government is what the people grant them, as a result of our votes to gather certain brains in defense of the basic liberty to think independently in light of external influences. If, in each present moment, our decision making is called into question by those we didn’t even vote for, do we not belong to a past that others have committed to their memory as a future decision they would rather make for us?

The circuit of courts who were elected in secret hold no special rights to our brains, but they need our information to protect interests which will never concern our brains’ compute. If mind is collective, as some claim it should be, not all tissue is available for this elite’s agenda. Their argument is as follows: individualism implies ego, ego implies capitalism, and capitalism implies gluttony. I am not a capitalist, except when it comes to brain envy. Having owned my limitations, I owe nothing of my own tissue resources to central command. Ego in tact, is it not an assault to presume that empirical leverage be applied to sustain their greed? Nor am I a child, but I defend children’s rights to consume as much compute on their own for their own until 35, when personality is presented to us to have formed enough to be educated enough to defend oneself from such figures. Because I embrace selfishness but not self-importance, why should I be toyed with as an appendage of eternal conflict? In a space full of chaotic rocks, why should we identify as one conjoined contradiction? The irony is making relevant an age-old decision in a newish way: to surrender tissue property to a more powerful force simply because it is more powerful and to align with an ideology of rank and lack of right or to fear nothing and lose everything? The lies on each side are equally unjust with or without an emotionally taxed brain.

Neither am I qualified nor do I care enough to make the decision for a presently defined boundary between countries; however, in this country, an MIT research scientist watched his colleague leave for GoogleX with envy, neither is powerful enough to solve the riddle of global conflict at this stage, but especially choice writing has been highlighted by women and men more important than I have ever had the opportunity of meeting. In the course of being investigated, however, I have learned my right to break the rule of magical thinking, which pejorative figures have offered me as a safe haven from global delusion, called psychosis.

Quietly, I hope to regain an understanding of what I was trained to stop listening to in order to form an alliance on my own terms. No one should have been listening through my brain, nor should I have been hearing their brains cooperating so blatantly violently. Violent because the covert connectivity is uninvited, however addictive the bait. Every time I witness my own children listening to the walls, I will be cringing in fear that I’ll lose them to whichever government is broadcasting with the most seductive hooks. Once trained, what will I or they further along be able to do in order to know themselves alone as ego strong? The dissolution of ego can be quite dangerous for a mind in crisis. Once emptied, the mental contents of an egoless drone is perfect fodder for a central command. Is Source so pure and good? Unless a clear and defiant demarcation of inner versus outer voice exists, an adultescent can not individuate from a family who raised her or him without pronouncing his or her secret surname. And to my knowledge, legislators within these closed circuits do not adopt the same principles that these yet developing adults offer as collective needs. For instance, how can an original position exist for someone who has already been mined? Does the American workforce not recycle its information carelessly after discarding its mental contents into backups for sundry safekeepings? We have become, as an economy, an exportation of brain waste to the third world, in that pressures and underdeveloped minds no longer seem compatible. The diagnosed, disadvantaged, and otherwise disabled are being deleted from this stage of disgrace.

The space waste is a race to fill keystroke logs with what could have been keystone educational programs without interference. If history becomes a library of skyscraper storage units or graves will determine how much longer my child is realistically conscious of his free will. Angry investigation is useless, except to decry the injustice of the lost child. Where human lives are priceless, a keystroke cannot possibly be valued more than the experiment to determine his worth, according to the governing bodies in place. Following the leader who grants access to the free mind, I suspect investigation will lose its glamor to the appropriators denying them identity in what is surely no longer a free state. Thus, the effort to compile thought transcripts is futile as long as it denies the freedom of speech. So, why listen to me if I’m not listening to you? Populism has deceived us. There is no place for error on this path. But the stakes are too high to try it. Starved for originality, those of us who claim our rape require an answer for our nightly re-haunting. And still, they do not care to give back what was originally ours. What conscience haunts us tonight? It must not be the most informed, simply because they have what I do not. Uncertain illusions cannot be the answer.

Contrary to their sources of validation, I never consented to being experimented upon. I never consented to being used as property of anyone else. And I never consented to surrendering my constitutional rights. A cheap attempt at preserving them, perhaps, but consents update by the picosecond. No power should be held over my past, only what I make of my future. I did not consent to having my personal data saved in perpetuity, I do not consent to being smeared, and I will not surrender my identity in each moment. To borrow from Texas, it is ‘Get off my property.’ — mental property — but it is not ‘Come and take it.’

To all of my fellow addicts, struggling or recovering, I hope you question your place in this ongoing target practice. Copious amounts of chemicals can impair one’s ability to trust one’s eyes and ears, but the intimidation is real. I wish I could say that it’s only intimidation, but we are being put to death. It wasn’t your fault you were born this way, it wasn’t your fault you had no choice after that initial choice, and it isn’t your fault that we have become a high priority enemy. 10% is never negligible. Credit to those working relentlessly to cure the affliction, but justice to those who are not. Importantly, that is not to say that active and shameless users deserve to be killed off; rather, every person struggling with their recovery deserves to know the facts, and those who veil the facts are the real targets. As internally inconsistent as my journey has been, I woke up over the last two years to find that I was being lied to by psychiatrists, hospital systems, state legislatures, and the country which made me sick, as it was. The culprit was diagnostic error.