35.

Like most of the people I had met in the last few months, he looked tired. A slim, unremarkable white male in his late 20's in a rumpled suit that looked out of fashion by at least 3 decades. He seemed like he would be at home on the cover of that old Trainspotting movie.

"Hey, Tommy Boy," said The Man. "I think maybe we should take it down a notch."

I realized I was still crouched, reaching out for a brother who was no longer there. To my surprise, other than the adrenaline dump, I was relatively calm. I straightened, collected myself, and asked, "Who are you?"

36.

The Man smiled. "Come on," he said chidingly. "You know who I am. I'm ’It,' which, if I'm being frank, is kind of insulting. Understandable, but still insulting."

"You're a he?"

"I'm a lot of things, but yeah, I identify as male."

I swallowed hard. "What just happened? Why are you doing THIS? Why did you just kill everyone? Why DID YOU KILL MY BROTHER?!" The calm I had felt evaporated.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa... chill there, Mr. DeNiro," he said with an easy grin that came across as false. "First off, if you cared so much about Philip, where’ve you been the last decade? Secondly, if I just blurted out the explanation for everything you've just experienced, it would totally ruin it. No, you and me? We're going to talk."

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37.

"Okay, the first rule of Fight Club," he said while extending his right index finger. "Don't… Don't f-fucking," The Man stammered here, a mannerism I decided MUST be an affectation. "Don't fucking ask me if anything you've experienced is real… I know that has to be hard, but that too would destroy the point of absolutely everything."

I fumed. Still, I waited as politely as I could for him to finish. I needed answers, and I knew that interrupting an evil megalomaniac mid-monologue never worked well in anything I'd ever seen. He grinned sheepishly, pointer finger still extended. "I guess there's really only the one rule… Okay, shoot!"

So I raised the gun still in my hand and pulled the trigger. Screw waiting politely.

38.

A small, yellow foam dart issued forth from the barrel of my gun, squeaking as it bounced off the loose tie hanging off his neck. "You know what? I should've seen that one coming; that one's on me," he said, rubbing the back of his neck. "But I think you should be careful with that thing, considering your history."

My face flushed, and threw away the firearm as if it was venomous. "Now that you've hopefully gotten that out of your system... ask." He sat down heavily on a featureless, white tree stump.

"Why me? Of all the people's lives you destroyed, why are you deigning to talk to me in person?" I asked, feeling an ache within that I had been trying to outrun for months.

"That's actually a good one. So, by way of answer, I'm going to give you a statistic: in my current capacity, I can operate at human-level intelligence in over 300 million, instanced, concurrent threads."

"So you're telling me that you're talking to everyone at the same time?"

"EVERYONE?" He let out a breezy chuckle. "No… I didn't say you weren't special. You're just not the chosen one."

"Right. So what makes me different, then?" I asked. He smiled as if he had been hoping for that very question.