Everywhere I go, I am an outsider. It's not because I am ignored by people, or that I am unable to interact with others, or that I am somehow a believer that I am on some other moral plane. No, it has nothing to do with that. From the outside I may be well-adjusted and able to conduct myself within the guise of a public persona with ease, but deep inside there is a dark knowledge that I am - and always will be - an outsider.
No one around me is like me. No one else inhabits the same space I do, nor do the same thoughts inhabit their minds as do mine. When I walk the streets, no one acknowledges me. No one speaks to me, unless it is a shop assistant's formality or a barman's grunt. The TV plays me stories about people I will never meet and of places I will never go and events that I never know if they even happened. I read stories on a screen from people that are living lives better than mine, but then I question their existence. Even in my work I sit at home and manipulate letters and numbers on a screen in exchange for money, unaware of what purpose they are being put to or upon what lives they may have effect. The reason for this is clear: I'm living in a simulation. Everyone around me is a construction in that simulation and are here to play a part in the reality that I know surrounds me. The second they leave my senses they vanish, only to reappear when they next have to, being informed by the system that runs the simulation that they are needed. I exist alone, surrounded by others who don't realise that they don't.
Someone once told me a story about how they had encountered someone once to find out that they had been suddenly killed some weeks ago, but that they somehow persisted, unaware of their demise. The story affected me deeply, making me realise that this was the basis for all life around me. Then I took it a stage further because the theory seemed to beckon me towards it: it's not true of just some people, it's true of all of them. Not one of them realises that they aren't real. They just behave as though they are.
But then the question has to be: who built the simulation? And what is it simulating, if anything? And what purpose does it serve, if any? I have heard other elements of the simulation ask these coded questions in the context of ' the universe', but I know that what they are referring to isn't anything other than an attempt to lift the corner of the cloth to let me peer underneath if only for a fraction of a moment. It's to let me realise that I am the only real fibre that truly exists, and that all around me are simply objects programmed into a reality to which I am exposed.
If the 'universe' has no first principle, then neither does the simulation. Neither does it have want or purpose. It simply exists. The nature, methods and questions of its creator are ultimately meaningless as they would be beyond all that I can possible understand because suppressing me from doing so are the myriad elements of the simulation that conspire to keep me busy. A job I hate. Bills I pay. Sports. Television. Cinema. Political factions. Warfare. Time. Money. Art. Ageing. All this time the creator chooses to occupy me, whilst at the same time failing to acknowledge my existence.
Everything is there to simply distract me from growing wiser every day. My only hope in any of this is to rent the nature of this 'reality' and break it down. I have a secretly written thesis on these thoughts. I keep it to myself. No one will know about it because there is no one else to read it. I am so alone in this reality that I need to make a principled effort to break it, and that way an intervention is required which may draw me closer to the creator of all that is around me, and that which distracts me.
So to get that attention, I need to do something that the simulation will have to react to.
Three miles from me is a railway station, crowded with the figures which have been assigned to populate my world. Somewhere inside it is the thing I've set in motion - the signal, the catalyst, the key. I don't need to see it. I only need to wait in front of my TV set, patiently. The clock moves through its empty seconds, each one a step closer to the moment when the creator will finally have to acknowledge me.
A playlist for the album can be found here.
Titles conceived, composed, arranged and performed by Mike Dickson
(c) 2026, Black Cat Music Factory