Doctor Hector Bronson is a large man with a larger smile. He welcomes me to his house-cum-office with great delight, expressing his joy at the fact that someone has decided to write about the bleak chain of events after all. Cards, dried roses, chocolates and books litter the chamber he directs me to. Gifts from patients both former and recent. A cat glares disapprovingly at me from a rug in the corner. Doctor Bronson comes in whistling a merry tune and settles his bulk in an armchair, fixing me with mischievous eyes. He does not look like a man who dealt with some of the worst and ultra violent cases of the pandemic.

I had just landed at Heathrow when the cellphone beeped shrilly. I didn't pick it up, anticipating another lecture on revolutionary new medicine for Schizoid Personality Disorder. Believe you me, between the terminal and gates my phone died and came alive fifteen times. Fifteen! I finally picked it out of my coat ready to shower the caller with abuse. It was Healey. A smart man, you would have like him. Could make the rocks laugh with his ribald jokes.

Healey sounded impatient. Scared even. He said a new patient had just come in from Broadmoor and he suffered from an illness that was not on any book or historical record. The Americans had been contacted and they were clueless. He asked me, nay pleaded me, to come as fast as I could. Apparently the patient had knocked himself senseless screaming something along the lines of "ara ara".

I recall thinking to myself, bloody hell this might be shot at winning the Nobel at last. Just kidding. New, unique illnesses intrigued me like nothing else. The world is ever changing and the mind struggles beneath the weight of changed realities all the time, which in turn provides for some rather interesting cases. I hailed a cab and clambered into it with my suitcase and duffel bag. Told him to take me straight to Bedlam.

The hospital was in uproar when I arrived. Orderlies rushed about waving straitjackets or accompanied other patients who had been let out for a bit of strolling back to their rooms. Healey stood at the very entrance. He relieved me of my luggage and ushered me in inside, straight to the Psych Unit and down to the subterranean level where the most unstable patients are kept in secure isolation. There, I stood before a screen of polycarbonate and watched an extraordinary young man go through the stages of a disease not known to man.

He was twenty one, blonde, of an athletic build and a fresher at some software engineering startup. An achiever by all means. His name was Luke Forester. For twenty five minutes he bared his teeth and widened his eyes at me like a ghoul while repeating again and again that he needed to go back to his waifu and kill the goblins who had attacked his village. Then he suddenly went stiff for five minutes, then started again about how immigrants from Middle Eastern countries were fertile ground for lone wolf terrorism and should be ousted with immediate effect. Another five minutes later he was regaling us with jokes that would never pass muster in civilized society. Then he went still and blank, like a TV turning off, and went back to bed.

Healey and Sabitha Roy, another specialist who assisted me from time to time, informed me that he had been going on like this for the past three days. His coworkers initially thought he had overdosed on LSD or some cocktail of drugs and was having a bad, extended trip but that was not the case. That morning he got into a fight with his boss and nearly stabbed the man in the eye with a fountain pen. Cops were called and he was taken to the nearest hospital, where it was determined that he did not have any hallucinogen or other recreational drug in his system. The resident psychiatrist, baffled out of her mind, referred Luke to Bedlam.

At first I thought it was a severe psychotic break. You must understand, my brain still worked to assign a "normal" category to the phenomenon. We dosed him with clonazepam for the first week. It had no use. He slept longer hours but started his inane blabbering as soon as he had eaten breakfast. Then I scheduled some counseling sessions personally where Luke told me he was actually the Messiah of Memes come to earth to expel the homosexuals, Muslims, anime-haters and sodding poofs. I am not even joking. Such sights became commonplace later but in the blissful days before the storm, it was still bizarre to say the least.

Risperidone had the same effect. He simply grew more violent and began banging on the doors and windows at odd hours. Refused to eat or drink. Did not sleep for two full days. His blood pressure spiked and crashed at regular intervals until I decided to stop medication altogether. A CT scan was ordered on urgent basis.

That shed a lot of light on Luke's condition. What was immediately noticeable was that he had an abnormally enlarged amygdala. There were several inflammations on his hypothalamus and the cerebrum had shrunk considerably. It confused the hell out of me. What manner of a disease was this? Not epilepsy, which would have explained the amygdala. Cerebral atrophy? No. This was something else. Something big.

I put all my work on hold on work and started dealing with the Luke Forester case bit by bit, trying to make sense of his banter and brain. But as you might know if you have read the interview I gave to BBC, all of a sudden a flurry of cases started cropping all over the bloody United Kingdom. Birmingham, London, Leicestershire, Hereford. Dublin. Cardiff. Mate, they all displayed the same symptoms of coherent but inexplicable speech, aggression, behavior resembling extreme drug withdrawal. As if mass hysteria had suddenly gripped the nation.

It was in the middle of September that it occurred to me in a flash. It was a Facebook post written by a sociologist I think. Here I was, sipping tea and fiddling with my laptop by a crackling fire and my eyes fall upon this beautifully written column which predicted a time of great intellectual retardation caused by overexposure to social media and normalization of things that should not be normalized. It got me thinking. Perhaps Luke Forester had fallen prey to this retardation and his mind had snapped. The same goes for all the other patients filling the psychiatric wards elsewhere. It was the germ of a possibility and would require more study, more research.

But we ran out of time before that. Less than a month after Luke came to us, Bedlam was visited by a team of very official looking men and women. They just rolled into the premises one day in pitch black sedans with tinted windows, all dressed in crisp suits and dark sunglasses. Bluetooth earpieces stuck in their ears like slugs. Two of them had HK45 Tacticals strapped to their chests. My cousin is in the army so I know a bit about guns, and those meant serious business.

The leader of the little group shoved an official looking letter in my face. Said a lot of tosh about national security and delicate experiments. Basically, they were taking Luke off our hands and there was nothing I or anyone else could do to stop them. They bundled him into a car and drove away in a manoeuvre so smooth I knew they had had a lot of practice. Luke was still yelling about how Area 51 contains the remains of gray aliens when the door slammed on his face.

Doctor Bronson rubs his face and looks out of the window, lost in another age and time. The azaleas are in full bloom, the robins are singing and a pair of mounted police trot down the lane. It is the perfect suburban life. I finish scribbling and shake his hand, thanking him for his time. There are no parting words, no wistful regret. The MI5 confiscated his research and forbade him from speaking to another soul not soon after he discovered the first connections between social media and the disease now called Bronson-Jakoby Syndrome, or simply digital insanity. Now he helps heal the minds of those affected in the war for virtually no fees.

The cat hisses at me from its corner as I take the good doctor's leave.