“That comment… and this one…
they look as though they were written by the same person.”
The styles were entirely different. Yet the man had that intuition.
It did not feel like detecting a habit.
It was simply a vague sense.
There was no evidence.
Yet there was certainty.
The certainty itself was strange.
The man had spent years working with words.
Reading what others wrote.
Offering suggestions.
Helping shape ideas into form.
Sometimes he sensed sincerity.
Sometimes he sensed something else.
“Why can you tell?”
He had been asked that before.
But he could never explain it.
“Just a feeling.”
One day he decided to examine that strangeness.
Letters appeared on a screen.
When enlarged, they dissolved into pixels.
There should be no meaning there.
The sequence ABC does not contain the sound ABC.
Yet the sound appears clearly in the mind.
Then why, from such patterns, does one sometimes sense another person’s truth or deception?
The other person is not inside these letters.
So where are they?
In my mind?
If that is the case—
perhaps the other does not exist at all.
Perhaps I construct the illusion of another person, assign truth and deception to it, and experience the result.
The more the man considered it, the more confused he became.
Yet there was also a faint sense that he was approaching something.
Perhaps—
everything
is my own performance.