Hey, this is Kate Parker. You know, the disillusioned teen from the early 2040s? Anyway, this is one of the weirder stories of my life.

For context, I grew up in a fairly reasonable and loving family with two parents of differing genders and no siblings. My father, Kevin, was an awkward mess made even more awkward by the blossoming Internet, and I'm not quite sure how he even had the courage to talk to girls, but I guess the mere fact that I exist must count for something. Meanwhile, my mother, Monica, did look out of place as an Asian girl with a Western name and a white daughter, but that wasn't even the most important issue, since I knew she wasn't my biological mother early on. As for my biological mother? I did figure out from old holopictures that her name starts with an A, but not much more.

Of course, even that knowledge couldn't prepare me for the discovery that I made the other day.

It all started out with some party held in VR that I attended. In the current political and societal system, it's pretty rare for people to leave their homes (as countries are much more fractured than they were before, at least in the case of the United City of America), but if you think there is some sort of VR utopia like the OASIS from Ready Player One, you're mistaken too. (You're also mistaken on the idea that, in the 2040s, a revival of 1980s culture would have happened.) Rather, VR is limited to "local" gatherings of hundreds or thousands of people in preset "rooms", but even then, people hang out in these all the time.

Except for me. There weren't really events that caught my eye and made me want to check them out, except for someone's 10,000 day Duolingo streak celebration on September 2040.

It was crazy. She had gotten this huge group of people that only made me reminisce "the better times", despite not having lived through those times. Yeah, "le wrong generation" sentiment would be ridiculed back then and is ridiculed now, but as someone who clearly doesn't like the way things are going now, you can't blame me for wishfully thinking back to the past.

However, at the heart of the event was a couple by the names of Loreta and Monika Diamond.

Yeah, I know, people with identical first names pop up all the time, and even then, "Monica" isn't exactly "Monika". But trust me, we're getting there. Also, just because a letter that doesn't even change the pronunciation is changed doesn't mean that it's not the same name etymologically; believe me, I've run into my fair share of Cates too.

And, of course, this wasn't the sole reason why I decided to check that party out. But nevertheless, I did, and I proceeded to enjoy both dancing together with the big streak celebrity and her style of "piano" music which sort of mashed every era possible into one.

But then, of course, when my turn to dance finished, my partner turned to her wife, and said wife looked almost identical to my mother. There were some similarities that could have only happened if Monica Parker and Monika Diamond were the same person, such as the exact style of ponytail bound in a white bow.

And of course, what Monika Diamond said also played a role in the discovery that I made, mainly in telling me a phrase I could search up on Google IntuiFind. I don't remember everything, much less the cutesy names that the couple used to refer to each other, but I do remember her saying: "I haven't loved you this much since I was a part of Monika After Story."

So, "monica after story" was, indeed, what I searched for. With a C; that was the spelling I was used to. Nevertheless, IntuiFind corrected me, as well as leading me to what the thing was: a mod for a decades-old game which was essentially superseded when the game's fans figured out how to make the game's characters real, in an advance apparently known as "synthetic humans" which wasn't exactly AI, but was essentially a way to recreate your favorite fictional characters.

So, I proceeded to look at the game's page. Unlike the mod's page, messy with updates from lots of different dates (but mostly 2029, which I presume was the year when the game's characters became real), the game's page hadn't updated at all, and I could see Monika, whose original name spelling seems to have been with a K, alongside three other girls, who I also recognized as people from my life.

This time, they were Sarah, Natalie and Julia, who were in the same class as me and who we always teased, calling them triplets even if they were simply girls who liked to hang out and all originated from the same adolescence facility. (Basically, what would have been called an orphanage, but much more "caring" and "humane" for the children staying there.) But here, they were known as "Sayori", "Natsuki" and "Yuri", and were Monika's age (which was slightly older than mine, in the last year of Japanese high school), as the romance plot between them and the game's protagonist indicated.

Nevertheless, I had something to approach my stepmom (and eventually, the triplets) with. I shut off the Internet browser in my VR headset, then logged out of the streak celebration party, put the VR headset itself to the side and went up to Monica's room.

"Hey, Katie-pie. How's life?" she asked, in a voice that was downright identical to that of Monika Diamond that I had heard not too long ago. Indeed, my suspicion that my mother was an artificial human was confirmed by this point, and there was only one more thing to learn from her, however detailed the answer may be.

"Hello, Monica. Say, do you happen to know anything about a literature club?"

As I predicted, Monica remained completely silent, staring past me and into the distance before uttering: "That takes me ages and ages back."

Needless to say, I was in for a ride.

Author's idiotisms: yes this is the same Kate Parker from Bright yet Dark/The Council of Claires