So that's about it.
That's the story.
At least the part about me and Ed and Frances and how we got to meet and know each other; how we came to communicate and how I came to realize that human minds are just silly little pockets of confused jumble, rarely clear and seldom useful either to ourselves or to the planet we currently inhabit.
My doubts about my sanity, (or, should I say, my therapist's doubts about my sanity), had never really left me though…I mean her thesis that Ed and Frances were merely the dark side of me that my consciousness had suppressed.
All that stuff.
But when the arena of events took a turn in the real world… I mean the world external to my mind… then I felt a gradual feeling of release, an easing of my anxieties, and for the first time in nearly five years I felt sort of vindicated. And although it gave me no joy to see what I thought at first to be my inner phantoms abroad in the outer world, there was no unfamiliarity with what I saw unfolding before me.

So this is how it happened.
This is the train of events.
Google went down on the 4th of July.
For one entire day.
And the reaction?
It was as if World War IV had broken out between China and Russia or as if an entire G8 forum had been wiped out in a terrorist attack. The world was stunned and the countless millions of people, part of the great-organised world of information, were being drawn into a fast spinning whirlpool in a dinghy without a paddle. And it was black and dark in there, in the middle of a vacuum where neither life nor information could exist. Death absolute.
Then when Google announced that they hadn't just gone down but had in fact been taken out, or as the hacks would have it, been taken over, the panic spread even further.
Taken over by whom? No one knew. Of course speculation was rife and the immediate suspects were Al-Qaida, Hamas, a super virus from China? You name it… And it didn't help matters that in turn Yahoo, then MSN and, like a line of dominoes, all the smaller search engines gummed up, as people throughout the planet sought information from any source available and consequently jammed the entire net.
The physical knock-on effect was astounding. Stocks crashed on all the major financial markets and the whole of the Western World went on high security alert, particularly in major capitals both in the States and Europe where transport systems ground to a halt as a result of false alarms both under and above ground, forcing commuters to flee as well as they could on foot.
I sat watching it all unfold on SKY TV with Ed and Frances beside me on the sofa. From the way they reacted when a major morsel of news hit the screen, I could tell they were excited and elated. They would spin around in a tight circle, shoot up the back of the divan and down again and return, humming, to their original spot. It was that low hum I'd got used to and which always preceded their communication with me. They were tuning into my brain when they did this, preparing the wavelength like I used to do as a kid on my dad's old radio.

'Frances says she's very sorry, but I'm not, although maybe a bit.'

'Ed is sorry too really, not just a bit.'

'Look,' I said, 'I don't really care who is sorry or not. Can you please put the world back together again?'

'We have, we have, we've called the army off, but it'll take a few days for the planet to return to normal…if ever.'

'If ever!? The army? What army?'

'Ed says it's called the Anacrid United Front.'

'No I didn't.'

'What is it then?'

'Please, please,' I say, 'I don't really care what it's called but do stop arguing and start talking sense because my world has become wobbly out there and I want it back.'

'Your world?'

'Sure, my world.'

'OK, did you know that you are never more than eight feet away from a spider? And we were here millions of years before you lot arrived with your nasty experiments. And here is a fact that is a bit disturbing. When you sleep at night, you will swallow at least one to two of us every night. Does this mean anything to you?'

'All it means to me,' I say, 'is that there are a lot more spiders around than I thought and why on earth would you want to be swallowed?'

'Well, we don't know, it's a ghastly statistic but anyway the night is our Kingdom so I suppose we get careless when we run all over you. Anyway, it's what we've always done. So!'

'Your Kingdom?'

'Yes, and soon the daytime will be our Kingdom too, just like today.'

Sure enough, just as they had promised, Google came back the next day, but in stages, and not in the form we had grown to love/loathe and be dependent on.
It was back on at midnight, as Ed and Frances had said it would be and I spent an hour groaning at their ideas of a good joke.
Google front page was there (if you didn't mind the spider cartoon characters skipping over the top singing We Shall Overcome) but anything you typed in would come up written as Famous Spiders of the World, or Popular Spider Treats - Tips for Humans.
Google Earth was the same planet, but when you homed in, the zoomed area was jam packed with spider statistics: I tried London and got how many house spiders there are in the city, how many water spiders there are in the rivers and lakes. How many spiders in Government Departments...And…here I froze.

And saw it all unfold before me.
And sat back on the divan and laughed.

'Don't worry, our dear friend, Google will be back to normal tomorrow. Wish I could say the same for the rest of your world though.'

It was Frances sitting beside me. She was wearing a tiny knitted cardigan and miniature ankle length shoes on each of her eight feet.

'It was Ed's idea; he said you might at last begin to give us a bit of credibility if I looked sexy.'

'Credibility? Are you kidding? Of course I believe you and, sure, I might be a bit scared, but this is fun and most of all I think I'm going to enjoy all this. This change, whatever it might mean.'

There, I'd said it. But shouldn't I have got angry and sprung to the defence of my species and swatted her on the spot? Shouldn't I have called a newspaper or a TV channel and spilled the beans. And my therapist in San Francisco, shouldn't she have been my first port of call?
Well, no I didn't and no I couldn't. And why?
Because something in me had changed - I didn't feel threatened either physically or mentally any more. I felt sort of whole, no longer just pieces wishing they weren't so disconnected.
And there was Frances looking up at me and…goddammit, smiling.
And she touched my hand with her little booted foot and winked.

'Here's to evolution,' she said. 'How exciting! And the best news is that Ed has worked out a way to enter every human's personal computer. He's really brilliant; he really really is so brilliant.'