After Hiero, the thoughts kept coming. I just stopped considering them mine. As it turned out, nobody was better off for it: someone else’s thoughts inside my head were thinking the same things as my own—only now I knew they belonged to someone else, and that changed nothing.
The point wasn’t that they had stopped—on the contrary, they sped up. It’s just that I now greeted each one with suspicion: like a customs agent at the border who already knows the passenger has something undeclared. “Whose is this? Yours? You sure? Papers, please.” A thought would pop up, and instead of thinking it through, I’d start interrogating it. Where did you come from? Who sent you? Are you mine, or are you some program somebody installed a long time ago?