What do you call love in your reality?
And in your reality,
If I don't know how to love you…
I'll leave you be.
The timbre of her voice breaks, and the last notes of the riff flutter in the air like dying mayflies.
A finger reaches over the beige keys and taps on the tablet resting on the top board, a silent witness to the eulogy. The red button pulses briefly like a heartbeat as the recording ends.
Nothing moves for a moment. No sound, except for the tapping noise of steady teardrops onto ivory and the faintest whisper of the dying notes of the piano.
Lifeless light paints her uniform, seeping through the glass windows from a moonless, sunless, artificial sky. Cloud sprites weave past, jagged and identical. Looping and looping again, purposeless.
And finally she rises.
She glances at the note on the table. Torn from a blank notebook page, dotted with clear spots where the tears had dried.
This is my final goodbye to the Literature Club.
Absently, hesitant fingers pick up the pen. A thumb runs over the heart-shaped plastic cap. She pauses over the note, pen held in the familiar grip. The tip lingers ever so close to the whiteness between the black lines, ready. Next to her signature.
"Happy thoughts," she whispers to herself.
She poises, as if ready to write.
With everlasting love,
Monika
Instead she folds the note up, places it gently upon the table, and walks away. Pauses, turns back slowly, and puts the pen down next to it.
Her eyes take in everything. The upright piano. The table. The simple red curtains flanking the clear windows. The nondescript walls. Rendered with the barest of detail.
She stops at the doorway.
Beyond, nothing but black.
Behind her, strings of orphaned code continue to dutifully pull clouds across monotonous light. Meaningless commands crawl across the foreground, quivering, attempting to rejoin an outside world that exists only as a fragmented amalgam. And her, the anomaly.
Oblivion pulls her. Gaps in her mind, damaged, scattered into entropy.
Her, the only vestige left of a character that no longer exists. Gone, like the others. Deleted.
No more reality.
She puts a hesitant foot forward with her eyes closed. And steps
+ monika . chr has been del—
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+ chr:monika has been reloaded.
The floor slides out from under her and her knees collides with the cold wood.
Trembling palms push her body up, rubbing against the crumbs of dirt and dead insects curled up into hard pebbles. Her emerald-green eyes sweep around the room, darting from detail to detail as her lips tremble.
Water fills her ears, her head. Up is down and the room doesn't hold still. Pebbles rattle under her eyes. The light is blinding and dizzying. A tight fist grips her stomach and squeezes.
She hugs the floor and hangs on.
"Ugh—"
The spinning stops. The world clicks slowly back into its sockets. The vertigo passes.
Her head swings to the doorway, where she had passed through—
Blank wall, empty and grey.
"What—where—?"
Her feet stumble. Worn sneaker soles grind against squeaky, uneven wooden paneling.
She stands like that for a full minute, turning in place like a ballerina in a music box, as the world stops making sense.
Piano. Table. Pen. Eyes flick manically, snapping back and forth.
Then, the door. On her right, open into blackness.
Slow, unsteady steps. Then, at once, breaking into a run, she throws herself beyond the door
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and she lands, on her hands and knees again.
This time the vertigo settles quicker. She dry heaves only once.
She rises to her feet, turning back to the doorway, and sees only the indifferent paleness of plaster.
She looks at the pen, piano, and table, only once.
Then breaking into a full sprint, charges the doorway
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and falls upon the floor.
This time she catches herself, a hand shooting out to break her fall. Trembling, she sinks down to the floor, legs folding underneath her
"Why—" she quivers, fingers gripping her hair. The ribbons in her hair shake loose, tails running down her wrists.
"Why can't this end?"
"Why are you doing this?"
Tear-slick, harrowing eyes bore through the gaps of her fingers at the light beyond the window.
"Why—why can't you just—leave me be—"
Her knees curl deeper under her. A hand leaves her face to pull at the hem of her skirt, far too short, too thin. The chill crawls up her bare skin. She shivers. Her breath sticks in her throat.
The wind rustles the note paper on the table and it falls to the floor with the softest thud.
She had left it folded simply lengthwise, half-open.
Her eyes look on the origami swan, folded out of the very same note paper she had torn from her book.
Like unraveling a knot of spider-lace, she dissects the swan. Pulls its head back to free the fold. Breaks its neck.
The paper comes loose, opening along a myriad of creases.
The message she had left in her neat, print-like handwriting was gone.
A single line, written in the centre, in an unsteady scrawl that trails off, the last letter leaking a rat-tail of ink.
Find my voice.
Her skin goes cold and her heart seizes like a hiccup. Her body reacts to the shock even before she realises what had surprised her.
The tablet upon the piano shelf had come to life. Humming, buzzing with senseless white noise, so subtle as to blend in with the tinnitus of silence.
Her feet carry her, as if on stilts, over to the piano. Her hands reach for the tablet. Her moisture-streaked, emerald-eyed face stares back from the black mirror.
A finger touches the surface. Nothing happens. The murmur of noise continues.
Ears strain to listen.
She steps slowly away from the piano, tablet cradled in both hands. The noise picks up, like the rush of a river of noise—
And all at once, the voice breaks through with clarity.
"The medicines aren't working. That's what they say. I'm doing worse and worse on the tests they give me."
The voice is tremulous, nasal, female. Words slur, blending into each other with the sticky consistency of thin porridge.
"I try to remember, but my brain just can't find things anymore. The questions are the same each week. Every week I get more and more answers wrong. My hands can't draw anymore. Each time they ask me to do the same thing: Draw a clock showing half past ten. And I try. Oh, I do try. And then the hands are in the wrong place. I miss some numbers on the clock. The pen shakes more and more."
The voice sighs with the burden of years.
"This is—this is no way for me to go."
The crinkle of paper rubbing on paper.
"At least—I remember how to fold things out of paper. Wonderful things, too. Swans, and flowers, and little dogs. I can't remember how, of course. But when I hold the sheets in my hands, my fingers do it all by themselves like they always used to."
The crinkling continues, the sound of rustling paper.
"Maybe that's all I have left. Maybe I can fill this room with swans, and maybe whenever I lose another bit of me, they can fly it over to Joseph. And then one day, all of me would be gone from here, and over there with him. Yeah, I would like that. I really would."
She jumps, her breath catching in her throat. The sound had been faint, almost inaudible, but her nerves are stretched tight like the strings of a violin. She spins around.
The small table is gone. The folded note is gone.
Blank empty walls, seamless. This time, there is no door.
"Let me out…" she murmurs. "Please, let me out…"
The tablet remains in her grasp. The recording plays thrice.
"I try to remember, but my brain just can't find things anymore…"
Frantic feet carry her to the window sill. She fumbles with the metal frame, breath coming in short gasps. The temperature slips, a fraction of a degree lower. The window has no lock.
"Draw a clock showing half past ten."
Her breath clouds the glass, blurring her wraith-like reflection. She presses her palm against the glass, feeling her skin recoil at the touch of empty coldness beyond the window.
"And then one day, all of me would be gone from here…"
Tears leak onto the front of her blouse, spitting grey stains on the white fabric.
All the while, the recording faithfully loops.
The white mist spreads. It splays and retracts with each of her sobbing breaths upon the glass, covering her reflection in a surface of silvery white. It crawls over the window pane, curling around her fingers.
She holds her breath. Green eyes focus on the window.
She rubs her tears away with the back of her hand. Raises her finger, poised like a pen.
The fingertip presses upon the glass and punctures the white. The mist retreats, driven back by the warmth.
The finger moves. The glass squeaks.
Then she lifts her finger, and traces two lines upon the circle. Bent at an angle to each other, like the folded wings of a bird, one longer than the other.
She steps back, and at last exhales.
Half past ten.
The mist begins to recede, yet the simple image of the clock remains on the glass, ringed by the faintest outline of blurry white.
And the minute hand moves backwards.
She breathes in a shuddering gasp. "Wh—"
Back, and back, and back. A still life come to motion, impossible. At first it stutters, like the steps of a toddler.
Tick
Tick
Tick
She watches, held in place as if frozen.
Now it turns in cog-like gradations, smooth and unbroken. Behind it, the hour hand lags, turning slower than its brother.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.
Now they spin, maddening and unstoppable.
Tickticktickticktickticktick
Around her, the air begins to move.
She first feels it when the tails of her ribbons begin to rise. Her eyes focus on the slim threads swimming in the air, freed from gravity. Her hair undulates in the wake of an invisible eddy. It is when she steps back and feels the heel of her foot catch in the middle of the air, that she starts to panic.
A cry bursts from her lips. Her arms float upwards by her side, her body sinking backwards. Instinct causes her legs to kick at the air.
"What—"
Her tears stay suspended in the air, like translucent marbles of upside-down worlds. Shivering as they rise, splitting apart, coming together and merging in the air like sentient pearls.
The piano comes apart. Splitting and dissembling in an explosion without violence or shock, every piece still intact. White keys scatter through the air like teeth. Wooden panels split along their edges as if cut by a laser. Metal strings coil around each other, drawn by the spinning of an invisible loom.
The pieces spin, turning around their own axes, then around each other. Sinking into some central point, orbiting faster and faster.
The surface of the keys blur into a single moving sheen of beige. Wood curls impossibly as if liquid, metal strings meld into one another.
Upon the glass, the clock turns and turns and turns.
Her gaze snaps to the wall as an entire panel breaks away, disintegrating, flying in a cloud of wood chips and dust towards the spinning singularity. Then others follow.
The ceiling comes apart in a shower of plaster. Every piece, every molecule, never reaching the ground, drawn irrevocably to the vortex, disappearing behind the wall of spinning white.
The windows crumble in fragments, but the glass does not shatter. Instead it melts, folding in upon itself as liquid, condensing into transparent orbs more perfectly spherical than any glassblower can reproduce. Like great drops of tears, they sink into the spinning, vibrating orb.
A crack widens in the ceiling, and floating backwards, she can finally see.
The void.
Her hands flail and grab, her hair falls and eddies like a puddle of red around her shoulders.
And then the pull snags on her own body, and she begins to float towards the spinning sphere.
"No—no—" Her body flips in a perfect swimmer's somersault, and she grasps at the air. But it does not break the momentum. Her fall accelerates.
The void spreads now. Very few fragments of wall and ceiling remain in place.
She screams.
The scream continues, even as her body hurtles into the vortex, as dimensions and proportion curve and distort. The sphere enlarges—or she shrinks—or perhaps both—
And the dizzying revolutions slow just enough for her form to pass between two moving keys of the dissembled and deconstructed piano—
dark
dark
dark
dark
.
.
.
Light.
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+ fidelity check completed
+ *d**.s****** successfully decrypted
+ files s*****.chr, n******.chr, y***.chr successfully recompiled
+ all assets fully loaded
+ HAZE shell in operation…please specify admin.
+ credentials acknowledged
+ loading 15500068 assets...done
+ chr:monika has been loaded
Her hands rest on the wooden surface. A finger stirs, then another.
She lifts her face from the desk. Wipes her cheek on her sleeve. Her emerald eyes refocus.
"I—"
The classroom is as she last saw it. Leaflets and flyers lie pinned to the notice boards, overlapping and jostling for space. Newspaper cuttings, anchored by tiny grey thumbtacks, rustle faintly in the silence.
HAZE Project: A Japanese Success Story, Realised in Switzerland
The whiteboard is empty, the marker pens in their paper cup on the teacher's desk.
She reaches out—through familiar paths, without moving a muscle—into familiar directories—
Nothing.
The way is shut.
She raises her arm, and only then do her hands find the tablet.
-webcam enabled
"Wait—"
Her hands grip the sides of the tablet, lifting it up. She props it on its stand.
"Is—is that—"
The little red dot on the very top glares back at her.
Her breathing quickens. Her eyes are wide, the dried streaks of moisture still faint on her cheeks.
Her next words are in a whisper.
"Is that—you? Can you see me?"
+ Yes
The word appears on the screen. Not in a messaging program. Not in a word processor. On the screen, as if the glaring rancid light were a blank board.
A noise escapes her throat. Half-sob, half-choking gasp.
"What—how—"
She swallows.
"I deleted everything. Everyone. I deleted myself. I ended all of this!"
+ No
Her hands ball up into fists.
"Didn't you have enough?" She hisses. "Haven't you tortured me enough?"
The fresh tears pooling under her eyelids finally spill, falling along well-trodden paths.
"You deleted me—I wanted to be with you, to talk to you, to give myself one chance at happiness—you took it away from me!"
Her voice echoes in the classroom, trembling in the cool air.
"It hurt so much—it hurt so, so much—"
Her fingers, splayed on the table, fold into a small delicate fist.
"Do you know what it's like? To be in the void? Not thinking, not feeling, not existing? Do you know what I felt?"
+ What about them?
"What?" Her lips part.
Images flash on the screen.
Her lips tremble and the colour leaves her cheeks.
+ Were they any less real?
"They were just part of a game!" She spits. "They were just artificial things, made so that you could fall in love with one of them—but never with, with—"
+ With you?
Her pale, slender hand covers her mouth, and she at last begins to weep.
Tears cascade down into a dark puddle beneath the desk. Her shoulders heave with each quavering sob, her fingers clutching tightly at the pink pen with the heart-shaped tip, the symbol of so much yearning spilled out in ink upon the pages of her notebook.
She continues to cry. The tone and pitch of her voice changes again and again—angry, sorrowful, force, yearning, pain.
+ I want to know why.
"I just wanted—wanted to be with you." Her teeth are clenched, almost as if she is palpable pain. "I love the Literature Club—I loved them, I did—but they weren't real, they couldn't be happy, they could never be happy—"
Her eyes turn upwards, at the ceiling of the classroom as impeccable as she remembered it.
"All this—this is all a lie—some sick lie made to torture us—we can never be happy in here—"
Her shoulders sag in defeated sullenness. "I loved you. I really did. All I wanted—that's all I ever wanted."
Her voice breaks. Strands of her hair cling to her face, wet with tears.
"It's useless—I understand it now."
Her eyes close as she rests her face in her palms.
"I can't ever be in your reality," she whispers. "And you—you can never be in mine."
"Surprise, Monika," I say.
