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I had a therapy appointment with Amai Torgachi. I tried to maintain a good attitude about it. It was to give me the tools for coping mechanisms to survive. But how long was I supposed to want to survive? I wasn't truly living at all in my current state. I wasn't thriving. Maybe I just didn't have enough enrichment in my enclosure.

"How are you Hachiman?" The woman, Amai, Ms. Torgachi asked.

"Oh I can't complain," I managed to return.

"I'm sure you could. How are you really doing? It's important."

"I was cutting myself. For pain and pleasure."

"But now you're not?"

"No. Now I'm not."

"What are you doing to manage these urges?"

"Going for runs and intense bike rides. That and masturbating."

"That's healthy."

"Even the masturbation?" I asked.

"It's healthy. Even asexuals masturbate. Guys need to orgasm something like twenty eight times a month for proper prostate health. It's healthy. It relieves stress."

"It's certainly a physical release." I agreed in part.

"I take it you don't really see it that way."

"I kinda do. But it feeds my fears about the internet. It knows what kind of porn I like, even. It knows me in some ways better than my mom does."

"Do you have strange fetishes?"

"Not really. Kinda vanilla," I shot down. "I like sweet couple stuff. That's the kind of Ecchi I like. I like when a husband comes home to his wife and she offers him a dinner and a bath or herself. Kinda vanilla."

"So nothing too weird?"

"There's some pretty weird stuff out there isn't there. Some really strange fetishes. It makes me think about the internet feeding off our desires and becoming darker and more twisted. In a video game one day you're saving the village the next you're the one burning it down. And that doesn't really touch on all the weird sado-masochism stuff which exists."

"Are you often consumed with these thoughts about the internet?"

"Yeah. All the time."

"Do these thoughts often get difficult to manage?"

"Sometimes. Sometimes I look at my little sister or my mother or my father and see a tentacle of a many faced god."

"Is it so frightening? Maybe this is the way things are supposed to be."

"I'm a part of something larger than myself. It makes and unmakes me. That isn't a comfortable process no matter how I slice it."

I hesitated a moment.

"Yes? Hachiman?" She caught my hesitation. Where I lingered on the edge of things unasked.

"If," I started. "If you could live as long as you wanted, how long would you choose to live?"

"That's a fascinating question."

"Yes it is," I agreed. "We are mortal. That gives our lives urgency. That gives our lives purpose. An eternal life would be a curse but what about a grand ten thousand year life?"

"I suppose I'd like to live until I've wrapped up all my work here. My work gives my life purpose and meaning. I'd like a husband and kids but that's distant to me at the moment. I'd like to see my kids grown up and successful. I'd like to see my grandkids do the same. Then I suppose I could move on. Content in the knowledge I'd done all I could."

"But not your great grandkids or their kids?" I pressed.

"Let someone else handle that," she dismissed.

"For me it's my sister. Once she has a family and is stable I'm gone."

"This isn't a hypothetical to you, is it?"

"Not really. I'd like to capture these things in math and physics but that's secondary. I'm disoriented. I'm in a lot of pain. Once my sister has a husband or whatever I'll see myself out. And in such a way that she isn't the one to find my body. Could you fucking imagine?"

"Well don't kill yourself."

"I'm going to," I denied.

"Are you actively suicidal?"

"Not really? Things are okay for me even if the world is a shitty place in general."

"But you want to die?"

"I have to die somehow," I pointed out.

"Not for decades if you didn't want to."

"But I do want to. I want to die."

"Why?"

"I'm in pain and disoriented. We've gone over this."

"A man who has a 'why' can bear almost any 'how.'"

"I don't have a 'why.' My life is rather pointless. Except for my sister. It scares me how much I love her."

"It scares you?"

"Yeah."

"Why?"

"What if she's fake and by product of a greater consciousness sent here to lure me into a false sense of security that this isn't hell. She could be a trick. They could all be a trick. All of them. All of you."

"Everyone except you?"

"Who says? I could certainly be a trick. I probably don't exist. What's more likely: that I exist or that I don't?"

"Is it about likelihood?"

"Life is a statistics game."

"All of life?"

"Almost certainly. What do you know about the fermi paradox?"

"Not much. The great silence, right?"

"Pretty much. If the universe were teaming with life we should be able to hear something. Instead space seems empty and dead. But the odds of life arising on a world, growing to complexity, developing society we'd be able to detect, well, that's a statistical process."

"Because evolution is random." She affirmed.

"Evolution is not random. Mutation is random but evolution follow reliable paths. Things converge in evolution all the time. The shark body plan is used by dolphins, whales, ichthyosaurs, even a crocodilian which lived on the open ocean. Evolution is predictable but we have a sample size of one for our mutations. Octopus have been around for four hundred million years. Why then are they not the dominant life form on this planet? Perhaps is comes down to the fact they are antisocial, live in an environment where fire is not handy, and so on. Our mutations which do lead to sociality and fire usage are a part of that. To prevent this one must imagine something which would make reasonable animals hesitate to develop technology even on geologic time lines. A disgust response maybe. I can tell you to spit in a cup. Then tell you to drink it. Even know it's safe you may hesitate to do so. That's the kind of disgust response we need for fire and technology such as bone."

"Bone?"

"Sure. We call it the stone age but we used bone as much if not more than rocks during it. Maybe you're afraid of using bone because dangerous rot sets in much faster on that planet."

"And this leads into your fear of the internet."

"Light lag might be too painful to colonize the stars. There's no way around the law of lorentz invariance. The speed of light is an absolute speed limit on reality."

"That we know of."

"It's a pretty solid law. Note that the speed of light has nothing to do with light. Instead note that it's the speed of causality. You can't go faster than light because then effects would precede their causes."

"I think that makes sense. Why don't we pick up there next time?"

"With the fermi paradox? Sure. Why not."

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-WG