“But it prompted me to remember something, a conversation I’d overheard between Officers Bloomington and Mishin about the persecution complex that afflicts most humans, and made me wonder: Why do you feel persecuted by us? From the mild feeling of being teased without your consent all the way to the other extreme of the terror of recognition, that we might expose you for what you truly are. What use is a sense of self if all it does is make you feel that self to be constantly under siege?”