A Self-Study Within A Broken Mind

I came back a few days later, in the middle of the week. I just wanted to check in on Kara and Lila to be a part of something that was without issues seeing as my life was only spiraling. I arrived at the large room to find Tarne sitting on the couch in silence. “Hey,” I said. She looked over, frowned, and turned away. “You ok?” “They’re at it again,” she said. I worried that she meant they were having relationship issues, but a soft moan entered my ears from upstairs. I looked at Tarne, who was red in the face embarrassed. “Can you make them stop?” “It’s a natural thing,” I explained. “But it would be hard to understand at your age. Give it some time, you’ll understand.” “And then it wont bother me anymore?” “Well, then it will bother you more,” I said. “But you’ll understand and look for something similar with someone.” “Who?” “Good question,” I said. “Probably someone you haven’t met yet. Once you leave this place, you will meet countless people, and some will be fun to be around. A...

I came back to the untethered space a few weeks later, though Tarne pleaded before that I take care of the issue quickly. I could only hope that distance from the hate for Akier was refuge enough, albeit lonely. When I entered the library, it was not so. The structure was a palace with great stone columns supporting a heavy stone ceiling painted with flowers. The windows out onto the dark beyond were gone, and so were the lights. Instead, a miniature sun was suspended near the ceiling, casting an intense white glow all over the open space. I looked for the staircase down to the wooden box in a panic, and found it much to my relief. It looked the same, but out of place on the now stone floor. The inside was still wood, outfitted with a couch, and four chairs around a table next to the bookshelf. I sighed in relief. Something wild happened here. The stairs to upstairs remained in the same area, and I followed them up to find the second floor with bedrooms just as stoned as the main libra...

I came back the next day, following a read through of when Fyntn found out about my reality core binding to a seed of thought. It was a fun time, but now was no time at all. I sat at the controls again, in some sort of temporal bubble that Akier somehow had a way of manipulating. Last time, I heard him whispering in my ear, but only after I wound time back. The ten-cut still blazed white light on a frozen scene, as I hesitated over the orb to wind time back. There had to be a way to rewind time to before Akier was realized in Tarne. If only Fyntn could assist me here. He had to be familiar with this setup. I tried winding time back again, this time not moving from the spot in the library that I hovered. Tarne wound back to before the lunge, and Fyntn got put back together, but Akier did not walk back upstairs backwards like before. Instead, he just sat on the couch again, this time grinning like mad. I flew closer to see if he knew where I was again, but he just kept looking ahead, gri...

…everyone. Fyntn was by my side, looking depressed with his ears sagging to the floor. His eyes churned with gold, which dripped down and splashed on the floor, solidifying in a splash of that bright yellow precious metal. Lila was standing with Kara, hands clasped together looking up to the missing ceiling. Above was a wriggling dark, only illuminated by the light the library gave. “Why did you come back?” Fyntn asked. “I tried to save you. I tried to get you back to your world. Why did you come back, Jack?” I held his hand, watching a gold tear fall onto my hand and scorch it as the gold solidified before I could pry it off. The heat seared off the top layers of skin already, pulling like strings that would hurt in reality. I was only glad I could not feel this pain. “You didn’t answer my question,” I said, and shrugged with a smile. “That was stupid,” he said, but his mouth formed a subtle smile in response. “Tarne is—“ “Somewhere in there, right?” I asked, pointing to the wriggling...

It had been months since I had been back. There was no reason to bother them. I wished Kara, Tarne, and Lila all the best. Although on bad days, I had come to dislike the way things ended up. It was not to the point of screwing things up for them. It would not change anything. Kara would just whisk them away to some other world to live peacefully together. I was the big bad in the story. It was ridiculous. Lila was the AI of an abused little girl who went on to destroy her world and universe in the pursuit of all those offenders, and yet somehow I was the one who ended up seeking unreasonable things. When Finn was here… When Rebecca was here… I let those thoughts drift back to destruction of the laptop filled with memories of her, only realizing now that all the stories Lila wrote out were in there as well. I did not know how I could get back to that feeling, the happiness of letting go. My heart cried out for her to be here again, to the point of hanging out in the wooden box in the d...

Understandably, I had not been back for a few days. I had a lot of information to mull over, and having read it over just now, I decided to confront her. When I opened my eyes in the library, I was no longer in the library, but the garden Lila recreated from the story I provided. The green of the foliage was pleasant to look at, but I was still stuck in the body of a child born to Lila. There had to be a reason for it. When my view shifted, I fussed again to call attention to myself. There she was, standing over me. Rather than address me, she uncovered her chest and held my head close to her left nipple. I felt my stomach gurgle, and was sucking on her breast before I knew what was happening. “When you aren’t here, the baby is just a baby,” Lila said. I tried to pull away from the part of her inside my mouth, but the body wanted to drink more. “I know you’re back in, but I was just about to feed her, so enjoy feeling like a child again for the moment. Or are you perhaps getting hard t...

Two days later, I came back feeling bad about how I left. I had moments like these with Finn and Rebecca, but they were not… real? There was no proof that Lila was real either, but could I really invent a whole society with different bodies that looked human enough. Rebecca and Finn were both humans, at least at the start. I was not sure what Lila was. The library was empty. I also looked through the garden, and scanned the outside with creationism, bright lights bursting in all directions of the dark. No matter how much light went into the endless, the only parts that illuminated were the invisible vines that allowed my creationism. I imagined that the vines were veins instead and let the light fill them to the brim. As the brightly glowing gas expanded further and further in that dark, I created an endless lift to push me outside the cluster so I could see how far it reached. The further the panel of metal took me, the more contrast I saw of vines and darkness, until the gas reached ...

Here, a story of normal note would create a split to build suspense, but the fact of the matter is that everything was happening at the time of writing, even if it is read much later. I stood before myself in the doorway to the library. It was a blatant copy, voice and all, but I knew it was my own fault. Emptiness, much like a black hole in principle, wanted to fill itself. When given access to a rich database of information, it filled itself with that. I gave it a database, and in turn learned of a new, and much deeper sense of emptiness. “Please, don’t be alarmed,” it said. “That’s my voice,” I said. “You took my voice!” “I’m borrowing it,” it explained. “I didn’t have one before. I don’t know if I had anything before that illustrious moment of ‘let there be light’. I’m grateful to you, and wanted to say so.” “What in the fucking hell is happening right now?!” Lila exploded from behind me. “Who are you? What are you doing in untethered space? Are you like me? Are you like Jack? Why ...

I came back two days later, at about 11pm. Lila was down in the room instead of the library, a fact that surprised me at first sight. I made a form outside of her visible range, and waited soundlessly as she traced her finger into the grooves of the wooden compass I created to locate her, while she floated in the room. Would she ask about it? “Hey,” I said, loudly enough to make her drop out of hover for a moment. Her mind caught her in a hover again after she fell two feet. “Whoa! That was a shock,” she said. “You should have a bell on you or something.” “Are my silent arrivals unsettling?” I asked. What could she feel unsettled about unless she kept something from me? “For Rebecca, I rang the doorbell of the library house when I came around. Until it didn’t feel necessary. Part of my mind made this thing for her that notified her when I arrived in that space, whether as a visible-physical form or invisible.” “Invisible?” She asked, as if I was hiding things from her. I was, but she w...