"I haven't seen Emily for a while," Tom thought to himself, "I wonder what she's up to."
It had been a while since Tom had reached out to anybody. A black cloud of depression had been following him ever since his road accident six months ago. Unable to remember it himself, he relied on witness accounts of the event. He was apparently listening to music on his way to work when he had forgotten to look before crossing the road at a sharp bend, causing him to walk right in front of a car, hitting his head on the windscreen.
The resulting memory loss had caused him quite a lot of frustration, which over time began to drain his energy, leading to the depression. To top it all off, his friends and family hadn't even bothered to see how he was, apart from a couple of phone calls and one hospital visit from his brother. That didn't help his mental state of course, and Tom was far too stubborn to be the one to reach out to them.
However, loneliness is an awful thing, and Tom was growing sick of it. Emily was his closest friend from work, which due to his condition he had to leave. He decided he was going to call her.
"Hi! This is Emily, leave a message!"
Tom, suddenly aware that he didn't really have much to say anyway, hung up.
A couple of dull weeks had gone by when Tom began to recall a memory from the day of the accident. After work he was going to meet his old school friend James for a drink. His phone had been smashed by the car, meaning he wouldn't have been able to read through the arrangements, but it still seemed odd to Tom that he wouldn't have attempted to contact him afterwards, as he kept him old number for his new phone.
Tom decided this time he would search him on Facebook rather than call. It had been a while since he checked it anyway, seeing everybody getting on happily with their lives just made him feel worse.
He typed "James Phillips" into the search bar. He didn't know anybody in the results. "Oh, maybe it was one 'l'," he thought to himself," but "James Philips" didn't turn up the James he was looking for either.
Confused, Tom had the curiosity to check for Emily too. "Emily Turner" came up with the wrong Emilys also, and he knew there was no chance of a spelling error this time. "Bill Robertson", "Grant Bruce", "Ellen Marshall" were among the friends and family he begun searching for, all of which weren't coming up in the search results.
Suddenly panicked, Tom took to google, searching his friends' names was difficult as quite a few of them seemed to share the name of someone more established, until he found one on a missing persons list. He searched this list and realised that all of his close friends and family was on it. He wondered why he wasn't aware of this, why nobody reached out to him. Scrambling for his phone, he called the police.
"Hello, what is your emergency?" "Hi... I, um, everyone is miss- all my family- friends- missing?!" There was no response. "Hello?!" There was a knock on the door. A second knock. Tom could hear muffled voices and crept closer to make them out.
"I told you, people need human contact, and at some point, even with serious depression, they will try and reach out," "Well, if you hadn't deleted their goddam facebook accounts then maybe we'd have had more time to deal with this,"
Another knock.
"Who is it?" Tom shakily whispered. "Just let us in, Tom," one man sternly instructed. Confused and desperate to find out what was going on, Tom opened the door. Two men, dressed exactly the same, one a little fatter than the other, stepped inside. Clean shaven, dark brown hair with short back and sides, eerily non-descriptive faces.
The slightly fatter man looked towards the corner of the ceiling. "See that? There's a camera hidden there, and you are the subject of a little experiment we like to call "people watching"," he breathed out a little more air than usual, for what one could only assume was in amusement.
"We have you in this state called "the depression delusion", cleverly induced so that you think the cause of it is perfectly explainable. After all, who doesn't get upset when they struggle to remember happy memories, or no longer have friends who care?" A little side smirk creeped up his cheek. "I guess you never remembered that you actually left your phone at home the day of the accident," the smirk had turned into a symmetrical smile.
"We would go into further detail, but what's the point? You won't remember anyway," the skinnier man stuck a tiny little dart into the side of Tom's neck, who had sat there in complete silence, desperately trying to make sense of what was being said, but these thoughts turned to a warm nothingness as he slumped further into his chair.