The stars have never looked so bright

[Yonagoda]

A girl is trapped in a coffin. She cries for help. There was a gunshot, and then quiet, and she stayed there and nobody ever rescued her. She never saw the light again. Some time later, a boy is in a room and he is giddy and he is pressing a small girl up against a wall. He holds a gun to her face and pushes her down. They talk about philosophy and death and the impact afterlives have on people of different religious affiliations. They are happy and they are drunk.

–

She thought about what it would feel like to be Josh. She thought about taking a girl and leading her somewhere secluded, in a shed, or the woods, and putting her hands around her neck. She thought about pushing down, as hard as she could, until all her weight was put onto that fragile system and her arms strained. She thought about feeling her throat spasm and her mouth sputter and waiting there, just waiting, until she stopped struggling. Until the squirming turned into twitching turned into lifelessness, dead still. Until even the heart's muscles stopped moving and the blood stopped pumping and the neurons stopped firing. She'd beg, maybe, in the beginning, if she had enough air and not enough sense to conserve it. Maybe she'd push, and struggle, and scream. But either way, Amy's mind, the triumphant position went to herself.

She thought about what it would take for someone to do that, and then wear a smile on his face right after. She thought about the kind of person who would invite a girl out for a drink and then kill her friend.

She thought about Mandy, too. About what it would be like to earn someone's trust, enough so that they'd share their clothes with you, enough that they'd turn their back to you, only to stab it. About making conversation and pretending to care with a knife hidden up your sleeve.

She thought a lot about pain and evil and horror and she didn't shy away from it, this time. It felt easier to embrace when you've watched someone bleed out. It's real now. She was trying to hide it and she failed and now the darkness is seeping into the other areas of her brain that was meant to be untainted and pure.

What was it about her that made Josh decide to befriend her and then kill Mariya? What was it that made Mandy strike out at Prii first? Was she just lucky, or special?

Amy thought long and hard about it, and then concluded that she was very stupid and egotistical for ever thinking that this was anything other than blind luck and her own failures making her too pathetic to kill. Pride seemed to be an universal, inter-cultural sin for a reason.

She didn't really know that much about Prii. Much less about Mariya, really. She didn't really feel like she was… mourning them? She should've. A normal person would've cried, and a normal friend would've had enough for an eulogy. She tried, really. She picked up a stick and thought about what to etch in the snow and mud, because even if the footprints and the rain would erode it away it still meant something, and the fact that she, here and now, decided that they were worth remembering was worth mentioning in the end.

It's a shame, then, that she didn't know enough about them to write anything. In fact, there were names that came up every morning that she never knew belonged to the faceless bodies roaming her school. How was she supposed to remember? Who was Timothy? Or Meena? Did she share a class with them? Did they ever talk to each other? She didn't know. And now they're dead. And she should be crying to mourn them, but instead she was crying for herself and how she'll join them.

That was incredibly selfish of her.

–

Lyudmila held on to the rails of the spiraling tower. Aecor, once a prosperous nation, has paid their dues. There is nothing left for them to hold out except their hands, empty of all but sins.

She smiled, brokenly.

–

Amy woke up again with a jolt. Her feet still hurt. She didn't want to go anywhere. In fact, she could stay within this little enclosure again. It suddenly felt very appealing to spend the rest of her days in this little hibernation.

–

What if she was the one underneath Josh's hands? Somehow there was something particularly intimate and horrifying about strangulation that utterly eclipsed the starburst violence of wounds, of projectiles and blades that come and go. The romantic in her said that holding on to someone for the rest of their life must be kind of lovely. The realist in her said that dying so slowly must be really sad. She didn't actually think it was romantic the way that romance is. It was romantic the way that tuberculosis or the plague or sword fighting is; deadly and old and sleeping in the back of our heads. Thinking about it made her shiver. She'd like to die more quietly.

And what if she killed herself? That would be fine, right? If anything, it might be the morally correct thing to do. One less murder in the world, after all. It would give her a sense of control that she lacked since the moment she got here. Except she had nothing to kill herself with. No weapons that actually would work quickly enough. She couldn't just run very quickly into a particularly sharp rock. Plus, she wasn't sure if she had the guts to do it anyways. Death is terrifying. And the more she tried to calm herself down from that, the more insane her mind got. It didn't help that she was kind of drunk because of that Josh gave her.

Like, here's a concept- the Boltzmann brain.

[+] her brain took a while to pump out these ideas and to be honest it really would be better if nobody read this ever but this took her mind more than an hour and she was proud of it ok so like let her ramble on a bit and also this is where the unreality gets really bad anyways here it is

How do you know that anything is real? you prove it? And, can you prove that anything else is alive? What if everybody else is just a program, or an actor reading off a script? If you pinch someone, how do you know they cry out of pain, or if they cry because they should cry? Put your hand on a table or a wall. Feel it- the texture of it beneath your palm, the force of it pressing against your fingers. There's a sensation from it- you know that, scientifically, it's your nerves and your receptors and all that, right? But what does it actually feel like, and how do you describe it? And your memories, too. Did your first grade teacher actually exist? Do you still remember their name? What did they look like? Try to recall the color of their eyes and the length of their hair. The sound of their voice, the timbre, the accent. If you go back to that building, can you remember which room they taught you in? Are they still in there? Is there any proof that they existed back then, or that they existed now? Do you have any photos? They could be fake. Anything could be fake. Don't trust your senses.

There is absolutely no way to 100% prove that anything is real, even your own consciousness. Everything is made up, and the moment you "die", you'll kill everything in the world with you, because it's all a simulation, or a delusion, or something. But at the same time, this means that there is no biological process of death- after all you are a mind, and not a body that probably didn't exist in the first place. And, because you have no body, how could you die? Your brain isn't really a brain, it's something that your consciousness made up so you can navigate this false world. You don't have a brain, or a heart, or flesh and bone. Feel that beating beneath your chest? It doesn't exist. The pain from when you peel your skin off? Not there, just signals, all signals. Death isn't a thing. One day you'll get your lung crushed beneath car tires and realize that your physical body is just an avatar.

Or let's take it a step closer to reality. You're not a cosmologic god hallucinating human society. Instead, you're a brain in a vat of nutritious, specially made broth. Your neurons are firing into wires instead of a brainstem, and those wires are connected to a highly advanced computer designed to simulate human consciousness. When you think about lifting your arm, the computer recieves these electrical impulses in lieu of neurons, and moves your avatar's arm up. Somewhere in your sensorimotor cortex, the wires give off an electric signal that feels like an arm moving. In your occipital lobe, you see your arm move. Let's also say, then, that a similar process applies to every other part of your concept of self. Your simulated body walks down the hall, and meets your, I dunno, boyfriend. You've never seen this man before. The computer decides that, no, that's your boyfriend now. Your neurons work to generate your past. In your broca's area, electric signals tell your mouth to generate his name- Preston, or Harry, or something. You have phantom memories of his touch on your skin. Artificial dopamine and seretonin pumps through your diapidated veins. If you're next to him, the computer gives you more chemicals. So, you love him. One day, you are kidnapped, and put into a game against other simulations. One of them shoots you. The computer decides that death doesn't apply to you, so it lets you try again.

OK, yeah, that just made everything worse. That didn't even make any sense. What the hell?

We should probably get to something normal. Like the swampman.

Either way, it took a while for Amy to truly develop a sense of what herself is, and then another while to develop what death is.

And then she poked a hole in her own argument and started all over again.

–

For the first time in days, Amy peeled off her clothes. To be entirely honest, she had forgotten, or maybe just ignored, that all these showerless nights added up.

The vest was almost as uncomfortable to take off as it was to out on- it was made for someone taller, with wider shoulders and a smaller chest, and the fabric pinched between her arm and her side on the wrong side of painful enough to ignore. Somehow, she forgot all about it, until her mind was brought to the sensation again. The wipes were her best approximation of a shower that she could manage; any water that could be used for drinking shouldn’t be wasted for this. The dry soap gave her goosebumps when she rubbed herself down.

Everything was cold against her skin, and she shivered the whole way through. The knowledge that the cameras were watching was mortifying, especially when she started to shimmy out of her underwear. The blanket protected against the worst of the game-masters’ watchful eyes, but it felt wrong. She wished there were toilets and showers and things that worked.

For some reason, this was something that she had a lot of hang-ups about. It didn’t make any sense. She felt so embarrassed that she could cry. Everything was so gross. None of it should be as bad as watching Prii die, but somehow, it felt even worse to be here, trying to make herself more presentable. Why should she care if sweat caked the inside of her clothing, or if the band of her dress had pressed an ugly ring against her hip? Was she really this self centered, or was it just an instinctual cling to the last dregs of her pride? She had nothing left for herself. Maybe she just wanted to die pretty.

Either way, her bruises from gunshots on the very first day were still blooming. Overconfidence and a lack of self regard had allowed herself to think, maybe naively, that perhaps the incident would leave no marks on her. After all, the vest was bulletproof, right? But still, there was splotchy lime and magenta covering her skin. And no blood; not a single cut. That also surprised her. She wondered if everybody else was in as much pain, or more, than she was right now.

As quickly as she could, she put her clothes back on, her throat hoarse and snot trailing down to her lip. Mandy’s jacket was sticky and hardened in areas where blood dried.

-

On December 28, 2021, a new species was discovered. Called the Trinidad Salamander, this nifty little reptile fits in the palm of a hand, and quickly became an internet sensation because of its bright coloration- they were like betta fish, with their ombre skin and fluttering fins and dopey wide mouths with little smiley faces. People sold them on the street in bags like goldfish. First introduced to the U.S by a group of smugglers in early Feburary 2022, the population exploded in hot, swampy areas, where they lacked natural predators. Somehow.

-

Amy took a step back and thought about her whole unreality theory again. Here's how the story goes.

Amy dies in a snowbank. She is cold and desperate and alone, and her leg is broken, and she is freezing to death. Slowly, she closes her eyes. She takes a deep breath. The last of her consciousness fades, and she wakes up. It's June fourth, 2023. She remembers Amy. She remebers being Amy, and also being Emily. Emily is seventeen. She is a high school student from Colorado. She's white, and has a little sister. She lives with her parents in a two bedroom apartment in the suburbs and she has a very, very active imagintion. Emily remembers Amy, because she made her. Amy wasn't ever real, but she's more real than everybody else, like, say, Prii, or Mandy, or whatever, because she was Amy in her mind, but nobody played Prii. Amy is a story that Emily wanted to tell. Amy is a coping mechanism. Amy is an obssession built over three years of daydreaming and writing and drawing and creating. Amy is a character she wrote about for a first-person horror story in creative writing back in 9th grade. Amy is the protagonist of a play she submitted to the school's drama club. Amy is a blurry figure in the corner of her eye. Amy is written to be self-aware, but only sometimes, because when the story gets too meta everything becomes too messy to handle.

Emily smiles. It's 2:28 in the afternoon, and she just finished her homework. She opens a word document and begins typing.

[Yonagoda]

Truth is, Amy isn't anything but a teenaged girl, toeing adulthood, who was in the wrong place in the wrong mind who also had a very active and restless thirst for creation, in any way possible. She wasn't anything special. She was one of almost eight billion people in the world. She is small and weak and going to die. She is real, and so is everything else, and that simply occam's razor-esque reality was worse than anything else she came up with so far. Death is inevitable, and we are dragged behind the ankles of Time in Her unending march. Yet, like an immune system, or a home with a distinct smell, we get used to it and build up resistance. The human brain's ability to tolerate our own lack of longevity could only be, ironically, obtained with age itself. It's why a young death is a tragedy and an old death is par for the course of life.

It's why Prii shouldn't have died. They were so young. They changed everything for her. She never thought that she could have a real, genuine friend, and then they died and suddenly it felt like she didn't know them at all.

[Yonagoda]

Hours passed. Maybe days. She no longer kept track of time. It would be too exhausting otherwise. She didn't know any of the names, anyways.

[Yonagoda]

She'd die for sure.

[Yonagoda]

But also, like, death, for her, wasn't really real.

[Yonagoda]

So none of it even mattered anymore.

Prii remained face-down. She gingerly removed what she could from them- but they were all sticky with blood, and it felt like something sacred and untouchable was here and that she was disrupting it, so she left, instead.