At the age of twenty-seven I am, or was, the youngest professor at Tuft’s University. A rising star due to my work on post-human sodalities. The only man in the world, at least for a time, who knew that the internet and video games and comic books and Star Wars movies were causing the decline of the nation state. Sound pretty far fetched? Everyone else thought so too.

At first I couldn’t get anything published. I worked as an assistant professor in Weise’s Literature and the Queer Event class. Weise was a minor star in the Queer Studies department. He didn’t want to use me at first, but despite no one being interested they had to admit my post-doc work was original, and Wiese thought he could turn me into a dray for his students, doing most of the marking, and teaching on the days he didn’t come in—which were a lot of them (I heard he was a functional alcoholic with a catty husband in the windy city theatre scene who didn’t treat him very well.)

Even then I was looking for a way to combine the duller aspects of Weise’s class with my own work. And then I found The God Complex. A comic book and string of graphic novels about a digital future ruled by mythological Gods. I had found my first post-human sodality. I altered Weise’s syllabus and introduced The God Complex into his class without permission. When he came back he was pissed, and said all kinds of bitchy, queer professor things. That I was too young and pretty for post-doc. That my vocabulary was riddled with slang and curses suitable to my age but not to my academic station. He tried to convince the department head to fire me, but it was too late. I had written and published The God Complex paper, and then another, and I was suddenly hired as a full professor into the anthropology department in post-human studies, which besides me consisted of a philosophy post-doc running theoretical generative AI ethical dilemmas and publishing his results in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence. The philosophy post-doc taught one class on generative AI, and I taught one about post-humanism in contemporary literature, and The God Complex was now on my syllabus instead of Weise’s.

And now I’m sitting at my desk in my apartment wearing nothing but jockey shorts and dripping sweat in my second story oven of an apartment. Writing a dumb diary entry like any Junior High School girl because I’m afraid to talk to anyone or go outside or even answer my cell phone, unless the head calls and I give him another shabby excuse.

I do my best not the listen to these voices in my head. So much of what they say makes no sense, and I feel—I have from the beginning—that they’re not speaking to me but at me. Sometimes it feels as if these voices come straight out of an issue of The God Complex. One of them is a cop. I figured that much sweating it out in my bed on top of the sheeted mattress two nights ago. I felt the cop thinking, knowing I was there, speaking to others but like the rest of them making me aware of his presence, or essence, or whatever these voices are at their semi-mythical base. And then I thought if he was a cop he was lucky; he’d have a gun. If I had a gun I’d put a bullet in my head. All at once the voices stopped—even the cop’s. The silent impression they were disturbed by my suicidal thought. And then came another voice, one I’d never heard before, speaking from the dead-centre of my mind, breaking the heavy weighted silence of the others.

“Don’t do that,” this voice said. It was the first time that any of the voices had spoken directly to me, and I couldn’t doubt suddenly that this was all real. That’s when I decided to start this diary. None of the voices have said anything about that directly. But somehow I feel waves of their silent approval floating through me, like ripples on a lake, every-time I sit down to write, the way that I felt their solemn disapproval when I thought about killing myself. I listen for that main voice, the one that speaks from the centre and not from the sides like the others, but I can’t hear him now.