First Person

[code_breaker]

Fear is the most primal response that humankind has. Before pride and love and loyalty, before lust, even before anything so esoteric as anger, we know fear.

Fear is the driving instinct that has driven humanity through its evolution. Our brains have evolved, are complex and massively disproportionate compared to the rest of the animals we share this planet with, with lobes dedicated to reasoning and logic and lateral problem solving and abstract, intricate thoughts that ponder the nature of being and how we have come to be.

But even the most sophisticated of us is as much victim to fear as any domestic pet, as any rodent or predator.

We can rationalise fear. We can dissect it, pluck it apart in out highly developed brains until we understand what is not worthy of our fear, until we know with every logical circuit what is and is not a danger...

And still, we will scream when faced with a predator. Our hearts will speed, our body will release chemicals and we will act in ways we otherwise can never achieve as our brains are completely disregarded in the face of fear.

Some of our fears we understand are irrational and we cannot stop it. Arachnaphobia. Agoraphobia. Simple misfirings of the brain that tells us to fear beyond reason, to short circuit the brain and simply act.

Some of our fears are born of childhood and even as adults we can never shake them. We tell our children monsters don't live in the dark, that the night is not an enemy, that nothing will come for them without warning and reason. They they are safe.

And then we must learn all over again that the night is not safe. That there are monsters and they wear human faces and they will come for us and will never understand why us, why now, what we did to deserve our fate.

We learn the boogeyman is real, in a thousand faces that lurk in alleys, that peek through windows, as not a a man, but as an eternal concept as the base of all our fear.

And that can never die.