Hello Holograms.

Circumstances have encouraged me to consider the curious case of the missing people. My world is emptying; there’s hardly anybody left. This doesn’t so much distress as intrigue me, because such processes are always interesting to observe and evaluate. What it’s doing in this case, however, is produce an odd sense that people aren’t actually leaving. They’re dissolving.

I’m starting to perceive myself as the only real person in the entire universe - that everybody else is some form of hologram that I have, by means as yet mysterious to me, brought into being to suit some purpose of mine. And when that purpose is served, they dissolve. I created all those friends, enemies, lovers, spouses, parents, offspring, siblings, colleagues, neighbours, landlords, trades people, blog correspondents and strangers. Don’t forget the strangers. Although vastly in the majority, I suppose they were the easiest to create because I didn’t have to relate to them. And, by the same token, they just appear randomly to wander about in the background, and then disappear again. They're not people as such, just wallpaper.

Of course, the most intriguing corollary of all this is that, if it’s right, I should be able to create a person or persons to fill whatever position I need filling at the moment. That really is interesting because it throws a whole new light on the potential inherent in those holograms currently at the periphery of my orbit. I go armed into tomorrow with this glorious possibility.

I hear the cry go up: ‘You’re psychotic. Get help.’ No doubt the barrack room psychologists, and even those who’ve learned the job from a book, would say as much. The latter would probably hand me a piece of paper with the name of the condition written on it, along with a large number of pills to be taken four times a day.

But life is never that simple, is it? Labels are debatable at best and pointless at worst. No, I’m not psychotic; I see too much of the overview and the alternatives. Such as, for example, that the real reason for my world emptying might simply be that I’ve become too boring or objectionable to bother with. And I don’t really believe that I’m at the centre of the universe and everybody is a hologram in orbit around me. Not yet, anyway.