[ WP ] You have the most obsessive fan base on this planet . On a whim , you decide to anonymously write a negative review of your own work just to see how your fans would react . You did n't know your fans would take it so far ...

It began innocently enough: a comment on a backwater website elaborating a critique of my greatest work. It was a lukewarm review, and this is what puzzles me so much. At worst it accused my work of being cliche ( and this, as the author of my works, I do believe is true considering how similar my work is to so many others ), at best it was a matter of personal taste. What harm would come in generating discussion? What harm would come in shedding some light on some of my contemporaries to whom chance was not as kind as she was to 
 
 The call me the prophet of the void, the herald of the end of times. My work it appears resonated with a particularly apocalyptic frequency. I thought it was a mere curiosity that the preppers and doomsayers interjected quotes from my work in their discourses, their warnings, their letters of concern and demand to the government. 
 
 `` The end is nigh, the end is nigh, the end is night,'' that is what Benson says as the sun sets and he sits on a cliff overlooking the ocean and he is convinced he will not wake up in the morning. The toxic atmosphere will kill him, shrivel his lungs until he is only capable of pathetic gasps for air. Benson is a fiction of course, a figment of my wayward imagination that was weened on the paranoid works of my predecessors. 
 
 I have always considered my works exploratory, a sign of a consciousness that flits from opinion to opinion, unable to convince itself of any. I explored the many paths of truth, the many steps that one might take in life, the many steps the world might take in return, but I myself let a quiet, contemplative life. I refused interviews, refused television appearances, once in my early career I agreed to do a reading in a library, but that was before *The Lost Future*, *The End of Ends*, and *Bunker in the Rockies. * The only definitive proof of my authorship is that photo, grainy and pixelated in the innards of a local newspaper which name escapes me. 
 
 There is also my agent. I would imagine that she would be able to corroborate my claims, but they have cut the phone lines and from my cellphone there is only static. 
 
 I wonder what they look like, these men outside the door. It is an assumption that they are men, of course, but their voices seem deep and gruff. They bang on the door, but the door is a reinforced slab of metal. What can I say? I am paranoid, they are paranoid, I am certain that in another life we would have gotten along well together. A life in which I did not right a review that did not speak to the `` undeniable pulse Mr. Akensazi has on the American population.'' 
 
 My last name is actually Johansen. I suppose that is the name that showed up when they analyzed my IP address and traced it back to my house, my home. I suppose, actually, it was my neighborhood. The exact details of how they found out it was me elude me still. This is what I have thought about for the last few days of my lock down. 
 
 I have supplies of food and water to last months, even years if I ration. There are certain medicines that I have been unable to get in large quantities, my therapist seemed to think that it would `` indulge'' my fantasies to stockpile them. He was a curious man, Dr. Quereshi, always referred to the end of the world as my `` fantasy'' rather than my fear. `` I am preparing,'' I told him, `` just in case.'' He always chose his words carefully, always danced about the issue. He was a good man, Dr. Quershi. I wonder if I shall see him again. 
 
 The men knock on my door more and more insistently. They say they are the police, they say they are my friends, they say they are my agent, my publisher, a concerned citizen, but I hear them plot among themselves, and I keep the door sealed. 
 
 There is food and water for months if I ration. I have run out of pills, but it is no matter. I am safe so long as I do not go outside. 
 
 How long has it been now? Days, weeks, perhaps even months. The days bleed into each other, but I am rationing and I will outlast the men on the outside, the irrational men who could not bear to see my work criticized. Good men, I suppose, who agreed so strongly with me that they could n't stomach my feigned disagreement. 
 
 Most days all I here is silence, but sometimes when I listen closely, put my face against the cold metal sheaths that seal the windows, I hear them shuffling outside in a makeshift camp they've set up. A strategy of silence, you see, of attrition. I, however, am rationing. I in here may last months, years, decades if I stretch it thin enough. 
 
 Last night I dreamed of the sun setting into the ocean and the ocean evaporating into a cloud of cyanide. I did not know why it was cyanide, but it was, I was certain. I saw the cloud approaching and I had nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, so I had to face it, allow it to envelope me, and suffocate me dry. 
 
 I awoke. I ate. I rationed. 
 
 I dreamed again. Or perhaps I merely thought it, these days there seems little difference between the two. I dreamed of a world in which I did not write, in which I merely led an average life and was not prepared for the end of days ( just in case ). This scenario ends in dying. 
 
 I dream again and again again. Most days I dream, most nights I dream, it is like that in this metal shell, this second skin that protects me from those aside. 
 
 One time I stood by the switch that would open the door and open the windows and I thought about flipping it. 
 
 But the men are outside, and I quickly walked away, terrified by the momentary lapse in judgement.
