Maybe it is putting you at risk to tell you about that time our friend Stephen disappeared. We had a quite pleasant lunch with him, all seven of our jolly tribe, on the deck of a seafood restaurant called “The Fish Show.” It was a sunny Friday afternoon in July. Stephen vanished that same weekend. His parents, his fiancee, and everyone else began making urgent calls back and forth. He was just gone. The police were contacted and by that Monday he was officially a “missing person.” Stephen’s goofy, loveable face was all over the television news that week. His MISSING posters were up in the front windows of businesses and on telephone poles all over the city. Two weeks passed in this agony. When he started texting his friends and family again, we all felt our tightened muscles and clenched jaws let go. We let out whoops of sheer joy. But he acted as if nothing had ever happened. Stephen insisted he had never been missing. Thirty-three is too old to play a prank like that on everyone. So we were all sure he had suffered some sort of break with reality, possibly had experienced a head trauma, or that this signaled the sudden emergence of mental illness. He showed us his phone, which was filled with texts from all of us during the period he had been missing. The strangest thing is we had indeed been sending him texts voicing our great concern and worries about him. But these were different, chatty texts by “us” “to him. None of them were asking, “Where the hell are you?!?” They were talking about casual events about which we had no recollection. They seemed to cross-reference with each other well. These versions of us were clearly having perfectly normal lives with no missing Stephen. Plans were being made, anecdotes were being shared, jokes and emojis had been flying fast the entire time we had been worried sick that Stephen would be found floating in the river or moldering deep in some woods. The weird thing is that the messages sounded exactly like each one of us had written each text. But we hadn’t. We became convinced it simply had to be a hoax Stephen was perpetrating and a very unfunny one. We thought maybe a new prank television show or internet series was behind this. If so, they had wasted the resources of several agencies, pissed off the police and made us all cry pointless tears. That’s what we said to him. “Stop it, Stephen! Just stop playing!” He was stunned by all the evidence we showed him of the fifteen days he had been missing, his apartment empty, his pets unfed. He showed us a video he had made of himself playing with his black cat, Urania, which was dated right in the middle of the time had had been missing. It certainly looked like his cat, but how could we be sure? And metadata can surely be faked, we told each other. Then certain agencies in the government became very interested in Stephen. And he disappeared again. This time we were told he was just being “assessed.” Nobody was allowed to contact him, not even his parents. The story disappeared from the news. It was reported (falsely) in the news media that Stephen had been found after having a “medical episode” and that he was ‘safe” and “reunited with his loved ones.” Now, several weeks since Stephen’s second disappearance, we have begun to notice that we are all being surveilled, followed wherever we go. We have been trying to meet in private to discuss what to do. Rowan said he is leaving the country, but somehow I doubt he will make it. I don’t think any of us will make it.