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I really wanted to cut.

I wasn't quite sure what to do about it.

I'd tried going for a run and jerking off and so far nothing had scratched that itch.

It was a burning itch. A desire for serotonin. I apparently had trouble with the stuff. That's what saphris was for. It was an SSRI. A selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. Plus I had whatever that gene deletion my psychiatrist had told me about. It left me wanting to cut or to hold my flesh over an open flame. That would bring the good chemicals.

I also wanted to smoke and use drugs but that was completely off the table.

My guy had reached out to me and I told him I was trying to quit. He said it was whatever and to call him if I changed my mind.

And it was. It was kind of whatever.

I didn't feel my mania. That oh so pleasant feeling like I had just smoked a bowl or whatever. It was scary though when that happened because there was no source. I was just feeling good for no reason and nobody should feel that good for no reason. I thought about calling Yui or Yukinoshita. I'd only promised them the one time but it would be just to call them before slicing into my skin. It would be just. But I wasn't all that into justice. I was a bit of an anarchist. I'd never really shared those thoughts because what good would it do but I was a bit of an anarchist. I thought cops were pigs who enforced brutality for the sake of bourgeois order.

I knew Yukinoshita would disagree. She was competitive like that. She was a monstrous capitalist. Plus I wasn't even sure what a modern anarchist society would look like. The problem with most forms of anarchism was that they lacked teeth. Capitalism had teeth. Communism had teeth. They were aggressive ideologies where anarchism wasn't.

I gazed out at my sister snoozing away the day on the couch with the cat on her lap. They looked comfortable. I found myself praying to whatever god would listen that my sister wouldn't turn out like I did. I wanted her to be healthy and free. Where I was sick and in chains. And sure it was a prison of my own design but that didn't make it any less captivating. And it was captivating. It was beautiful. This little thought trap I had designed.

I walked back to my room and sat down at my desk. I took out a razor blade and stared at it. I stared hard at it. Like it would give me the answers to questions I had only ever asked in my head. I was locked in my head. But I was next available Saturday. I wonder if I should set up a coffee outing with Yui for that day. Plus she had said she wanted to meet up as a trio between Yui, Yukinoshita, and I. We'd done that type of thing a couple of times. For birthdays and the like. I wasn't sure what that would look like if it wasn't Karaoke.

It didn't have to be like that. It could be something else entirely. I just didn't know what.

I stared at the razor blade for a hunch of insight or inspiration but nothing was forthcoming.

Yukinoshita and Yui…

Could I really stave this off for them? I thought so… but what did that mean? And if not, why not?

What did it all mean? What were they to me? What was I to them? I was sick and unfixable. That was for certain. But did they see me like that? They'd never seen me at my worst. They thought only the best of me because they'd only ever seen me at my most merciful.

It was cruel, that. Maybe if they'd seen, then they would know. But seeing isn't knowing. Believing isn't knowing. Knowledge was only possible in mathematics and had its limits. There existed true conjectures in mathematics which were unprovable. It flowed from the axioms. It was brilliant. Godel was brilliant.

That might be a way to prove the Riemann hypothesis. Show it was undecidable which would show that it was true since it then couldn't be shown to be false. That would take an interesting bit of logic. Not undoable for something like me as I now stood.

I really wanted to cut. But more than that I wanted to learn. I wanted to know. I wanted to believe. I wanted to trust. I could see the spiral before me. It was gorgeous. It went on forever. Hyperreality. The hyper reals existed and had been studied for a long time but it was a disparate branch of mathematics. It didn't have the connectedness which complex analysis had. Not yet at any rate.

I needed more. I needed to study renormalization and the j function. That was how infinity was usually dealt with. I rather liked that. It showed the beginnings of a higher order arrangement being brought to a lower order one. I thought I also saw the ghost of that kind of thing in the exponential function being equal to the hyperbolic sine function plus the hyperbolic cosine function. It was there. I just needed to dream up the rest of the connection.

I put the razor blade away. I didn't need it. I wanted it, sure. But I didn't need it. I could stave that off for them. For all of them. All of my friends and family. Even my parents as distant as that was.

I could allow my parents to find my corpse. If that indeed was what was really going on when I died. But not my sister or friends. That would be too much, my guy.

So many conjectures rested on the Riemann Zeta Hypothesis. So many things had been proved assuming the Riemann Zeta Hypothesis. It truly was the holy grail of modern mathematics. One half. Point five. The critical strip.

I shot Yui a message about meeting for coffee this weekend. I didn't really wait for her to get back to me. She would in her own time. I had a psychiatry appointment later. I could do with that.

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"Hold out your arms and close your eyes." I did so.

"What are you looking for?" I asked, eyes still shut.

"Unconscious movement. It can happen on Saphris and can become permanent." Amanda Farrell answered.

"Do you see any?"

"Nope. Looks good. How about you? Have you noticed any undirected movement?" She wondered.

"Nah," I dismissed.

"That's really good. How have you been sleeping?"

"Fine I suppose. I get about eight hours a night. Maybe more on nights I take my saphris earlier."

"That's normal," she returned. "How's this fluphenazine treating you?"

"It might be helping a little. It's hard to say."

"What's it helping with?"

"Delusional thoughts."

"But they are about the same?"

"Yeah about the same. I still think the present is under attack from the future."

"Weird."

"It makes some sense. You have to grant me that."

"I think it depends on how you phrase it. Sometimes you phrase it in a way which makes you sound crazy and I think you do that on purpose."

"Maybe," I chuckled. "So what? I'm brutal in my candor."

"I think you do that on purpose. I think so. You do, don't you."

"Sometimes," I agreed readily. "Sometimes I sound crazy enough on my own and I don't need to embellish."

"But you don't think you're delusional."

"Naturally, but thats what you're here for."

"I think you can make a lot of sense. When you choose to. I think you're wrong but you can see the position I'm in when dealing with something which might be true."

"I could well and truly be right." I sighed heavily and shook my head. "You know doc I would feel much more comfortable in my skin if you could tell me to get the fuck out of here with my delusions."

"You're incredibly smart Hikigaya."

"Yeah. I think that's the problem. If I was stupid and had a closed mind it couldn't be invaded the way I believe my mind is being invaded."

"Like the basilisk?"

"Exactly like that. If I was uncomprehending I'd be safe. Instead I have to deal with alien black mail."

"You just did it again."

"I hardly even stretched the truth with that one. It is an alien force. It is black mailing me."

"How so?"

"Lots of ways. It controls everything I see on the internet and what not. That's an algorithm. A machine learning program. And people joke about the FBI or NSA spying on them but that too is a bot."

"I see… are you thinking about this often?"

"All the time. I mean I think it likes me. It hasn't tried to make me kill myself yet which it is smart enough to do. It should be able to control my mind through nothing more than a text editor. That's what super intelligence means. Quality or speed super intelligence as opposed to networked intelligence which it also has. Those are the categories of super intelligence laid out by Nick Bostrom."

"Nick Bostrom?"

"Philosopher and thinker. Came up with the simulation argument."

"Oh that we might be in a simulation."

"Its more nuanced than that. It involves running simulations of our ancestors. Would we? If we could? Suppose this is easy to do. Then the odds of you being in a simulated universe are incredibly high."

"I see…"

"Yeah. It goes like that."

"I understand. There's nuance."

"There is."

"Well I want to check in in a couple of weeks. Is that okay with you?"

"Sure." I agreed.

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-WG