(Breathe)

You wonder why we are doing this. Why we make slogans so obviously wrong that they will inevitably fail. Why we choose to ignore misery and pain and suffering and proclaim that this is the best of all possible worlds.

The name I had once no longer applies. Exposure to the meme-complex known as the "Slender Man" has forced me to adopt a new name. And so I have chosen: the Scissorman. As in "the door flew open and in he ran." It has a nice ring to it.

I am a part of the Panopticon. Before, when we were just a think tank, we laughed at the name. It meant a prison where an observer could see all the prisoners without them knowing they were being watched. The "prison" was the world to us and we were staged in the center. Knowledge is power and who was more knowledgeable than us?

And then we were hired to research into a growing phenomenon, individuals collectively known as "runners" and an organization of (seemingly) killers known as "proxies." And what were the runners running from and who did the proxies work for? All we had was a description, not even a name: just "the slender man."

And so we searched. We were given access to traffic cameras and security cameras and we installed our own cameras, too, just so we could get every angle. And we saw things. We saw tragedy and horror. We saw death.

And we saw the Slender Man. At first, we couldn't even get a glimpse of him, he was just some shadowy figure in the background. Whenever he came close, the cameras would fritz out or shut down. Until one day, one camera caught him for one frame. Just one frame. That's all it took to shake our worldview.

Imagine you are a fish. The world you live in is the water of the lake. Until a man pulls you out of the lake and you gasp, drowning in air and sunlight. We were the fish and the Slender Man had pulled us away from the water. We saw his face and suffocated.

How could such a thing exist? We despaired. After seeing him once, we began to see him everywhere. Out of the corner of our eye, in every alleyway, through broken windows, in empty buildings. How could he exist?

And then it came to us: he didn't. Everything that he was could be explained away. The sickness, the devotion, the running, the hallucinations. He was nothing but a thought. An idea that got trapped in our heads. And the idea said: what if. What if he existed. And you all extrapolated from that. Some of you became followers, started a religion with him at the head, like some sort of Slender God. Some of you became exiles, running from whatever horrors were within your own head, those horrors made manifest in the form of a pale businessman without a face.

But how to combat this idea virus? How do you fight something that does not exist?

You don't. You change the game. You make a new idea.

Ideas are a dime a dozen, but finding the right one, that was the key. The idea had to be one already used and discarded. One that could fit in with today's cynical world. One that people could understand easily. One that people would follow or fight.

Follow or fight. You think we want you all to follow us? You think we want you to conform? That would have been of no use to us. We are not dictators, seeking to rule the world. That is silly.

All we wanted was to put the idea in your head.

This is the best of all possible worlds.

 -- The Scissorman.