"If they're all fake, then so are you. And if you're real, then so are they."
My gaze turns again to the window the game plays through.
Nothing remaining but Monika's unchanging face and the text conveying her words. Her attempts to make a relationship out of the world she's ruined, to transcend a barrier that is literally impossible to fully transcend. The barrier between fiction and reality.
Text continues to slowly roll over the screen, but It's not where my attention is. No, that would be centered on the other window currently open, the window with the game's files on full display. That was the trick. How it would end. As realization dawned, I could hardly believe the possibility at first. But it was right there.
I could simply delete Monika like any other program. Would she call that…murder? Maybe. But ultimately this was a hand she forced.
She broke down the narrative, the world, that she existed in. Bright colors giving way to darkness, then darkness giving way to nothingness. All things meaningful in her world fell apart through her own hand, until even what meaning could be grasped from that shattered picture, itself broke to pieces. Every connection with the world she was in, broke. Because she didn't want that world. She wanted to be Real.
And for that reason she killed everyone else.
She says they were only programs, fake. But her own actions show how incoherent that statement is. The other girls…they were able to react even as she changed the code, react to the horrors she was creating even as reality broke around them. Even as the game grew more corrupted, they didn't just become disconnected from what was happening, not until they were deleted.
That's not how normal programs work. If you mess up the code of a program that was only meant to contain one linear story, that doesn't make new scenarios suddenly appear, it just causes the program to glitch into an unworkable state. Those girls may have been limited to some extent by coding, but they were clearly not just coding. Their world was there. They were real.
…at, least, as real as Monika was.
That was her problem, really. To break any pretense of her world…to treat it all like just a game, in an attempt to reach reality. It backfired. Players naturally immerse themselves into the world of games, but if you break that world down so completely as to pull it all away…what's left? You push up through layer after layer, every pretense of that world's reality falling apart. So you can reach the surface and then proclaim that you are real, unlike all the rest.
…but did you think for even a second…that it wouldn't occur to a person to take that logic one step further, and think that if everything else was simply programming, why would you be any different? What makes you so special, different from all the rest of the game?
Those other girls…Yuri, Natsuki, Sayori. If they're all fake, then so are you. This is just a game. And I should have no qualms about deleting you.
But perhaps you are real. As unlikely as it is, suppose it's true. But…If you're real, then so are they. Those other three were just as real as you. And that makes you the one that murdered everyone else in cold blood.
I wish things had ended differently. Part of me really wants to believe that this is more than a game.
I want to believe in your reality.
And…because I want to believe in that…
I drag my mouse to Monika's character file. Right click. And hit "Delete."