A
shift occurred. Walls materialized and shifted into existence and an
infrastructure was built around. Soon the feedback and distortions
were not encompassing him anymore, but drifting off the sides of the
newly made physical space. A door opened up across from him and the
distortion moved aside in a swooning motion to reveal a small, skinny
woman wearing jeans and a Harry Potter T-shirt, along with old-timey
goggles that he could imagine Amelia Earhart wearing, walked into the
room casually. While Stanley was far from expecting reality to
behave in a certain way and even further from caring what happens
concerning reality, he was still surprised, especially by her casual
nature.

“Wow,
it stinks in here! I don't think I'm ever going to get used to
that.” She proclaimed and then looked Stanley's way. “Don't
worry. I'm not blaming you. It's just side effect of, you know,
...this.” Idley she waves her finger by her ear directioning all
around her, insinuating that the distortion around them was the
subject.

“And
what does 'this' happen to be? -And who are you, by the way?!”
Stanley questioned, starting to get uncomfortable finally. She
looked at him with an extended glance, showing no signs of her future
intentions.

She
then ended up saying, “It's distortion, don't you have eyes? Use
them.” An unzip sounded in the cube-like space and she began
shuffling through her bag. “This is your doing anyways, you should
know what's happening. You went and caused the system to glitch and
now the connections are fucked.”

“I
knew it! This whole thing must have been all a simulation. My life,
the office, my ex-wife, everything. That's why everything was so
meaningless and inconsequential. I broke it didn't I?” Stanley
said with some assertive clarity. He was positive there was
something more to the world he knew.

“Pffffftt-
Hahahahahahahahah...,” and the woman fell to the multi-colored
ground laughing hysterically, “Rich, that's rich.” She got up
cracked up one more time after re-remembering what just happened and
the composed her self like a true professional, wiped away her tears
and said, “But no, that is not the correct answer, funny though...”
and then went back to shuffling through her bag.

Feeling
a bit stupid, as one would when such a reaction is performed in front
of them like this, he conveyed an anger in his questioning asking,
“Well, then who the HELL are YOU!?”

“I'm
from IH and I'm going to fix you.” She then pulls a a compact
laptop out of her pack that had a multitude of tendrils with suction
cup-like objects at the end hang off the strange looking computer.

“IH?”
asked Stanley feeling something about it sounded familiar.

“Yeah,
IH, Information Humanities. You're in IT, right? You should know
what I'm talking about.” She said this while kick out a stand for
the laptop to rest as it does the job it was designed to do.

“I
really have no clue what you are talking about.”

“Ugh,
fine. I have to explain this to everyone though. It get's
annoying.” She stopped she was doing in her bag, obviously
frustrated, and started explaining as a chair materialized for to
casually sit on. She began to explain, “There's this theory. It's
a cybernetic theory, you may have heard of it, called the
Shannon/Weaver Model of Communication. You see with this
communication, it starts with the source of information, then goes to
the transmitter of said information where a signal is sent to a
receiver and then the destination after that.

“Us
IH peeps combine this thoery with the idea of Autopoiesis, which I
think comes from some Greek root words, all these thing ususally do
you know... “ She continued thinking aloud about this and then
jumped back on to explaining the situation saying, “Anywho, this
means self-creation, which is the way all of us perceive reality,
including you. It's all self created an-”

“Wait,
you are saying I have control of my life, because I absolutely do
no-” interjected Stan and then was in turn interrupted by the
woman.

“Hey,
Rude! And no that's not what I am saying. I'm saying that you have
control of your perception of your life, which seemed to forgo,”
she paused on this word and took a beat to look around at the chaos,
“and that's where the communication model comes in to play. In
between the transmitter and receiver, there is a certain noise that
is present and that is what you are seeing right now. You gave up
control of your perception because of your damn apathetic depressed
state. The information of the real can't reach it's destination,
you, because you chose not to perceive and and communicate with
reality! This is your fault!”

“Why
are you yelling!?” said Stanley in an extremely nervous state.

“Oh,
sorry...” She brought herself back looking embarrassed and
smiling, “I get really fired up when I talk about that, passionate,
I guess. I also probably should have lead with how you lost touch
with reality too, sorry bout that. Anyways, that's why I'm here and
I'm going to fix you. Like you do with computers and data
connections, I'm going to do to your brain.”

“Why,
what if I don't want to be fixed?” Stanley pouted. There didn't
seem to be any point in going back now. There was nothing for him in
that reality and he'd much rather just stay in this one and let the
feedback flow through and melt his brain.

“You're
going to go back. You're going to go back because I get paid lots of
money to fix people like you. By next year our treatments will
eclipse things like psychotropics or therapy because our methods work
in giving the patient back their functionality. Just like you do
with computers in your office I do with people. People need to be
functional for the whole of society to function. You've been broke
for a long time Stanley, you just finally cracked now.”