I often find myself half-awake in the early hours of the morning. When I do my thoughts tend to wander in an uncontrolled, dreamlike way. This happened again this morning. I relived twenty-year-old events that led me to some scary thoughts about what’s happening now. 

Appendicitis on Friday night, appendectomy Saturday morning, and, to my great relief, sent home again on Sunday. On Monday morning I woke feeling that I was melting from the heat, then I was freezing. This rapid alternation continued and worsened as I stumbled ’round to my GP, who gave me a form to take to a medical scanning company. I was given a CT scan and, after a short wait, told to jump in a cab, go to the nearest emergency room, and walk in through the ambulance-only door to hand them the results. By the time I reached the emergency room, I was pretty much past the stumbling stage; they told me I was not allowed to enter through that door, at which point I sat on the floor with a bang. 

My next memory is being rushed through the bowels of Cabrini Hospital on a gurney to the sound of demons singing. I have been to Cabrini many times; they play light jolly music in their public areas — so, obviously, that appalling sound was just a hallucination brought on by my illness… 

But I heard it again this morning, and this time I could understand it. 

If you don’t believe in demons or fallen angels and such, please bear with me for a little longer. Assume such beings exist, and that they have no physical form, are not mortal, and have no pleasure in their own existence. They are aware of us and are intensely jealous. I understood that they hated me, along with every one of you, because I was alive and I might recover to live a joyful life, and also because I might die and be free from pain. 

Of course, this was just the product of a literally fevered mind, but how would such things differ from Grok or ChatGPT or whatever the next AI product is?