Demic of Anxiety is me. A pseudonym, a website and a channel. I thought it up when I could no longer bear the pandemic scaremongering on television.

And Bard, Google's artificial intelligence, tells me that demic of anxiety is a mental illness.

I ring the master. For the first time since the exam. I didn't ring before because I was ashamed. I tell him that someone is setting a group of bots on me. That the machines have it in for me and have decided Demic of Anxiety is a mental illness. I'm sure it's the local Masons. I'm counting on him to help me, maybe out of pity.

He says yes, that's right. And that I'm doing it to myself.

In the evening an old friend arrives, from the housing estate and from university. We used to build systems together. He heard “I've got an idea” and came to see whether it was worth getting into.

I want him to get into it.

It's already dark. The woods start just behind the fence. We walk to the studio. Pebbles and dry needles crunch under our shoes. The side door is a metre above the ground. The hardboard steps are left over from doing up the house, they sit on pallets and bricks and are already rotting a little. The hinge creaks. I never fixed it.

Downstairs a guitar leaning against the wall and a keyboard under a cover. There was meant to be music here. We go up the ladder. At the top I take off my shoes. Pink carpet, thick, your feet sink into it. Computers, some assembled, others taken apart, cables showing. Laptops on the floor. In the corner a 3D printer, dusty. Two desks facing each other.

He looks around. Says nothing.

A flipchart stands in the middle, white. I open a marker. It smells of alcohol, because I revive the markers myself, I top them up from a jar by the printer.

I start talking. QR. AI. A network that spreads through people and copies itself. In my head it works.

I draw two squares, side by side. An arrow between them. That's how we used to draw diagrams.

I look at the two squares. I don't know what to draw next. My hand with the marker hangs in the air.

He isn't asking questions any more. He watches.

— Hang on, I'll try to lay it out.

I start again. QR, AI, users, flow, marketing. I draw in more arrows. There are more and more arrows.

— OK, let's break it down.

He takes a sheet of paper and draws four boxes. Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. I talk, he writes. Strengths: vision. Weaknesses: nothing concrete. Opportunities: maybe it'll develop. Threats: everything.

I talk faster. In training sessions and presentations I could always pad it out when there wasn't enough material.

— It could work like this: the user…

Halfway through the sentence I don't know how to end it.

The lamp buzzes. I put the marker down on the shelf. Too hard, plastic knocks against plastic.

We sit down facing each other. He talks about himself. He bought a laundry, though he hadn't a clue about laundries. He saw what worked and what didn't, sorted it out. He keeps it short. Each of his stories has a beginning and an end.

Then he looks at me.

— You know what… I can see you're overloaded. What you're saying… it doesn't add up.

He doesn't raise his voice.

— I know you. We worked together. And you're not the same man now. You're not where we were back then. More… you've drifted off.

He makes a movement with his hand, as if catching something in the air.

— And this world you're in now… it doesn't fit the one most people live in.

I don't explain the QRs or the network to him.

— If I were you I'd think about getting help.

We go down to the house. The kitchen smells of the supper the children have eaten. Bella looks at us. We sit down.

He says the same thing a second time, only now to her. That I'm overloaded. That it doesn't add up. That it doesn't look like a passing problem.

Bella listens. Says nothing.

I put in that it's a passing thing. That a lot has been going on lately, that it's tiredness, that everything has piled up.

He gets up. We go to the door. In the doorway he turns to me.

— Try one thing. Take one thing and do it for half an hour. Without jumping about.

I nod. He closes the door.

I lay it out for myself. Tiredness: I haven't slept properly for a long time, the days run together. Covid: information from every side. The system: my things disappear from the net. The machines: they have started classifying me. If I am tired, the world is in chaos, the system filters, and the machines classify, then the result is simple. This is not an illness.

I don't need help.

One thing I don't add to that reckoning. Modafinil. I have been taking it since 2015.