A Self-Study Within A Broken Mind

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...

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...