PROLOGUE 

It's often said that real fear comes from the things we don't understand, the fear of the unknown. Thinking that the gods were angry with us when a thunderstorm raged overhead made perfect sense before commercial flights, weather balloons, and satellites. From the sixties through the nineties, television shows like the X-Files kept the fear of being abducted by an alien alive. But with advances in space-observation and -travel, we moved the freight line to the outer reaches of the universe. A muscled up man in the sky, dressed in a robe, throwing lightning at sinners, flying saucers, the man in the moon, or life on Mars will scare us as much as the boogeyman under the bed. We checked and there ain't nothing there.

The thing I played with in this story, to tickle the inherent fear of what we can't understand or control, is much closer to home and, with average dimensions of 14cm x 17cm, not nearly as vast as the cosmos. Jet, the human brain, with its 100 trillion synapses, has 100 times more connections than there are stars in the observable universe. It's mind-boggling to think about the potential it holds. But not only that; have you ever heard someone talking to themselves on the street and your first reaction was: what a weirdo? Me too. But these people have only lost the self-control to keep the voice inside. We all have a running commentary in our heads, and not just one voice. Those voices can be the cheerleaders that build us up, the bullies that tear us down, the little whispers that move us subconsciously, or the screams that make us lose our temper. The voices we hear, the stories they tell, will inherently become our lives, for better or worse. 

Maybe a hundred years from now people will look back on this story and laugh like we laugh about angry gods in the sky. But until we understand those voices and put them in their place, the thing that scares the living shit out of me is to go off the deep end, to lose one's marbles, you get the gist: to lose my mind.