And what conclusion was there to be drawn from her time in Somnhaven? What lesson learned?
Aloud: “Not this again. Why are you so set on there being one?”
Surely it couldn’t’ve all been for nothing.
Supine, under the covers, fully awake in her pitch black room: “I mean—why not? Why can’t it all be for nothing?”
Because if she hadn’t learned anything, then she was right back at Square One. As if the Eighth Iteration had never happened.
“Makes sense to me, seeing as how it didn’t happen. You know, exactly like all the Septembers that came before it. Pretty fitting, to be perfectly honest. ‘Square One’ is my default now.”
But wasn’t it then all the more imperative, all the more necessary—especially when it came to the matter of her as-yet-unfractured-but-increasingly-at-risk-of-becoming-not-so psyche, the units of time to whose structural collapse seemed to only be ticking away, faster and more agressively, the longer she failed to extricate herself from the progression-less vacuum she’d come to be mired in: the black hole of continuation the possibility of escape from which remained, despite everything she hadn’t tried, unknowable—that she should’ve gained some knowledge, acquired some kind of wisdom out of the whole ordeal?
In fact, if she really thought about it—some might even choose to hazard the protasis: if she stopped denying it—wasn’t it more conceivable than not that she had?
To which line of thinking the girl in her bed sighed, exhausted, and said, resignedly: “I, uh … I don’t know what protasis means.”
Fine. If that’s the way she saw it, then that’s the way it was. She learned nothing, she gained nothing. The total sum of her experiences up to now had been pointless. Less than pointless.
So with that established, how did she visualize things proceeding from here on out? What was her plan going forward?
“No plan.”
No plan?
“Nope. Screw plans, I’m done with them. I’m, uh—I’mma just go with the flow from now on.”
Good sense demanded she further explicate.
“I mean I’m done. I refuse to be an active participant in this … in whatever this is, any longer. From now on, I just am. I won’t do anything. Whatever comes along will come along, whatever happens will happen, but it certainly won’t be because I had any hand in it.” Then, chuckling: “After all,” she added, “I’m a human be-ing,” unduly proud, “not a human do-ing,” at what was in all likelihood, “… get it? …” rather than the end conflagration of any creative spark, “… because ‘do-ing’,” an unconscious retrieval. “It’s over. I refuse. It’s over. I’m done. I’m done.”
Cryptomnesia aside, she couldn’t’ve possibly been okay with that.
“Oh, but I am. I’m so okay with that, you have no idea how okay with that I am. I’m done—I’m so done playing this game. It sucks! This game sucks! And hey, what do you do when a game sucks? You put the controller down and you just stop playing it,” said Melody, who had not long ago been so determined to keep playing a game she hated that she ended up with a burst blood vessel. “It’s that simple.”
And she was sure?
“I’m sure.”
Alright, then.
And to her credit, she was able to maintain her conviction in what a less delusional person might’ve called self-comfort (until, of course, that happened) for most of the rest of the day, which began when, motivated in equal parts by two organs she couldn’t ignore any longer, one much louder than the other, she finally left her bed for the first time this iteration, not knowing what time it was due to her phone having run down its battery but guessing from the darkness outside her window that it was still pretty early in the morning, the immediate ramifications of her dead phone, a discrepancy too significant to be hand-waved away by pinballs, completely lost on her, which oversight could, while being very in-character for Melody, perhaps be excused by all the things that were going on through her head at the—
“No. No! That’s another thing: Nothing is ‘going on’ through my mind. I resent that. No, let’s get one thing straight—the other part of my new philosophy. There’s no more thinking, okay? No more ruminating. No more utilizing the brain-brains. No more analyzing the past for hours on end, no more what-ifs, no more if-I’d-onlys. The only thing on my mind is what’s in front of me.”
Referring, of course, to the pre-sunrise breakfast laid out in front of her, Rick’s signature dish that many ordered for the sake of novelty but couldn’t finish: steak and eggs, hash browns, a side of bacon strips, a circular, four-quadrant waffle with a blueberry placed neatly crown-up in each recess and topped with whipped cream, a stack of buttered pancakes smothered in syrup, and a bottomless mug of Rick’s house blend: the mere sight of which feast brought involuntarily to mind a conversation she’d had with the sibling she’d since resolved to never see again.
“Oh, yeah. Rick’s. It’s a chain. There’s a few down here as well. American style is their gimmick. It’s a pretty common trend now in The Continuate, American-style diners, but I think Rick’s was the first one to open.”
“I love their waffles. So good. And free coffee refills! Do they really have those in America?”
“I dunno. Probably. I don’t know if any of it is authentic. They probably just modeled it after those old retro diners you see in Hollywood movies all the time. Booths with red vinyl seats, the tile walls …. It’s probably as close to a real American diner as Sxxxbucks is to a real coffeehouse. They’re just selling you the imitation of one.”
“Sure, whatever. Anyway, they have this Big Banger Special, if you order it and finish it within an hour then it’s on the house.”
“You know, it’s not really that big, just big for a Circadi—uh, a regular person. It’s a fairly small amount of food for an average-sized American though, I’d say? I imagine they could finish it within that amount of time. They might not want to eat a double helping of waffles and pancakes in that timeframe, but they could easily.”
“Can you?”
“Hell no!”
She, laughing: “The centerpiece: Steak and Eggs. Breakfast of champions.”
“More like, breakfast of the currently-going-through-some-harrowingly-dark-times.”
Did she count herself among them? Was she going through some harrowingly dark times?
“No, not particularly.”
Just generally, then.
“Alright, I’m going to break you in fucking two, you keep this shit up.”
The lone graveyard shift waitress, nearing retirement age, frozen in place, carafe in hand, caught off-guard by a threat that by every indication seemed to have been directed at her: “Sorry dear, were you—are you okay? I-Is the food not to your liking? Do—Do you need me to call somebody?”
“No, no. Sorry, I wasn’t talking to you. The food, uh—looks great! Mmm! Yummy yum!” said Melody, before taking her first bite of food, a forkful of scrambled eggs, the shock of which to a system that had physically gone without food for at least twenty-four hours—she unable genuinely to remember when or what it was she last ate during the final day of August in that original, irretrievable timeline—caused her to experience a good three full seconds of sudden vertigo, the room around her spinning out of control, the wooziness and light-headedness gone almost as soon as it hit her, and after the cessation of which Melody began to work on scarfing down the rest of her meal.
When she stepped out of Rick’s, her bill paid in full (the steak and eggs were easy; the waffle was where she began to struggle; and by the time she got to the fruit bowl—well, the less said about that the better), the waitress having accepted Melody’s money (one trembling hand gripping the POS terminal, the other with an arthritis-locked finger primed to dial the last digit of the three-digit emergency number on her phone), the sun was just on the cusp of rising upon a deserted campus.
She walked. She toured the setting-places of memories she held no particular feelings toward. She made a game of trying to pair each memory with its iteration’s index, but stopped when she realized she had no way of verifying whether or not she was right. She developed a cramp that went away on its own. She stopped to watch some pigeons. She walked some more. The sun completed its rising.
By the time she found herself re-walking her earlier steps, the reality of her surroundings, which were nowhere near stimulating enough to reverse what they had already kicked into freefall, was already in the process of being supplanted, fixture-by-fixture, by the admittedly much more engaging (and stimulating!) mental transplants she carried over from that fake September she claimed to have hated so much: look, over there, an automated cleaning bot, picking up litter! a-and farther down the path, soliciting strangers, a younger adherent of an older faith, definitely not a scam or anything like that … ooh, and there, a food truck selling fajitas and tacos; the one next to it fried rice and chow mein … and among them all also the non-Elysian, the other twin, both arms intact, decked out in an official campus security uniform, their smallest size still too large for him (nothing to worry about, he still had much growing left to do … that’s what Laura stays up every night for, don’t ya know … don’t worry, just leave everything to Prima, she’ll find a way …), approaching her, hand outstretched to catch her attention, drawing nearer, the angle at which his neck craned up to meet her gaze increasing the closer he got … no, wait, not him, not him at all (how could she possibly have known what he looked like?)—
“Now h-hold up right there, lady,” he said, his high, squeaky voice barely audible, eyes unable to maintain contact for more than a second at a time. “I got reports of s-somebody walking around … a-around campus. I-I’m afraid I n-need to ask you, um … My su-superiors want to know what business you have here.”
Trying her hardest to downplay just how aggressively her more nurturing instincts were being activated: “Oh, I’m a—no, it’s totally fine. I’m a student here.”
Squirmingly diffident, face flushed, tears welling up in his eyes: “B-but … Th-that’s … School doesn’t start until next week.”
Pledging now that she would keep him safe forever, no matter how many sacrifices she’d have to make, because being a single mom is tough, she knew, but it would be all worth it, working two (three) jobs to keep him fed, and clothed, and healthy, so he could grow up with all the opportunities she never got: “Yeah, I know. I moved into the dorms a bit early.”
Face turned groundward, both hands tugging shyly down on the front bottom end of his teddy-bear-embroidered button-down security uniform shirt, which he was going to stretch out if he kept at it, his body bashfully rocking back and forth: “O-Okay … Then, i-if you don’t mind … Can I ask you … th-that is, if you’re really a student … what you’re studying?”
Proud of him for graduating elementary school (oh, the school play was so cute with all the pretty costumes, oh, but his especially, so adorable), then middle school (developing a rebellious attitude now, along with an interest in the girls in his class; constantly embarrassed by her, but behind that cold facade of his she knew there was love), and finally high school (getting his license, saving up for his first car, a second-hand Recon-era Katarina; dressed up for prom, so handsome in his tuxedo; acceptance into college, so far away, oh her sweet baby boy, she would miss him so much, and even though he was a grown adult headed off to begin a life of his own now he would forever remain her treasure): “I have no idea.”
Nervously picking at the ends of his fringe just above the eyes where they terminated, the border between hair and not-hair level-set by the edge of the bowl which had templated it his properly-groomed professional haircut befitting a working adult: “That’s n-not very convincing … I-I have to make sure you’re a student, o-or my mommy and daddy my manager will be mad at me …”
Already disapproving of the girl he would choose to bring home for Christmas break, they met in the dorms, you see, she was on my floor and we just clicked, but the girl wasn’t good for him, no, his mother knew what was best for him, only his mother, and this girl, nah, she wasn’t it: “Wait, my phone—I’ve got all my digital documents”—reaching for her phone, whipping out her phone, finding nothing—“on there … but I—shit, yeah, I don’t have it.”
Voice cracking, lower lips trembling, eyebrows nevertheless V’d to convey the level of severity he hoped to impart in equal proportions to both his character and the discussion at hand: “Okay, well, I’m gonna have to ask you to come back to the office with me. And if you don’t come willingly … Sorry, I mean … i-it would b-be best if you”—taking out one of the many Chinese finger toy traps plastic zip ties he had on his belt—“came along willingly … please … if you would …”
Ever there to soothe the many broken hearts that that girl from his dorm and others like her (hint: they were all like her) would inevitably leave him with, any relationship outside their maternal bond not only destined to be ephemeral but completely unnecessary from the get-go, because nobody could ever love him the way she did, her love for him was unconditional, and it always would be, no matter what, even if he ended up dropping out of school and moving back in (loneliness being the great killer of motivation that it was), even if he never found a job (society was scary, wasn’t it?), even if he stopped leaving his room altogether (“Don’t worry sweetie, nothing will hurt you there, let mommy take care of everything …”), even if he ended up spending his twentieth, twenty-fifth, thirtieth, fortieth birthday inside the same bedroom he’d slept in all through his childhood, the bags of garbage and jars of fluid piling up around the computer desk over which he sat hunched during each of his waking hours, the passage of years evident in his untamed hair and untrimmed nails and unwashed body and tattered shirt, his only human interaction consisting of the moments in the day when she knocked gently at his door to let him know she had set his meal at the foot of his door: “Wait! I know! My student number. It’s—”
To her surprise she was able to rattle off by heart those nine digits, each of which he entered in sequence into his—once he’d picked it off the ground, having fumbled and dropped it during his initial retrieval of it (pleading tearily as it slipped from his hands: “Aw, shoot, not again, please no …”)—handheld portable Ludo-Boi 6000 that featured brilliant 8-bit color graphics on a five-inch liquid-crystal display personal assistant device that was strictly intended for business purposes.
On verifying that her information was correct, that she was properly enrolled at the school, and that she was in fact not the escaped asylum patient that everybody back at the security monitoring room had suspected she was: “Oh, o-okay then. You’re free to … to continue along, Prima Quick. I-I mean … Ms Quick. Uh, ma’am. Um, also, just … if you could also p-please … remember to … keep off the grass as well … th-thanks …” Then, needlessly: “You’re … fr-free … to go … now. You’re free … free.”
Oh, how right he was.
Oh-ho-ho, how right he was.
So much so that they could only rankle her, the degrees to which he was right—about not just her freedom, o-or about staying off the grass, not even about how he, being a victim of circumstance, didn’t owe the rest of modern Circadian society, which had deceived him, withheld from him all he’d been promised his entire life, a single goddamn thing; if anything it owed him; and it did, or at least it did his bank account, on a fixed schedule, every month, the second Tuesday, if you must know, but about the sheer (some would say preposterous) impunity with which she was free to, say, run over to him right now and squat down and reach for his belt and snatch that blue-plastic orange-tipped cap gun real, functional, not-for-pretend standard-issue stun gun out of its holster and then, once she’d closed the circuit that would take him to the kind of dreamland he’d much rather not be taken to, march on over to the main stretch of what Uptown considered downtown and go door-to-door holding up the banks and convenience stores (and maybe that one frozen yogurt-slash-doughnut shop too, along the way) open for business there at electrode-point, undeterred by punishments whose metings-out she would love nothing more at this point than to receive and consequences the ephemerality of which was more than akin to that of the current month among the rest of them: of a lone September dwarfed by an immeasurable superset: a flash of an instant before the unbroken entirety of all time that followed—rankle, yes, into a rare kind of awful frenzy, a vicious recirculation of what seemed the prime distillate of what she’d once tasted, just once, briefly, back in high school, the time she downed five cans of M__st_r Energy within the span of a single hour, on a school night no less, for perfectly valid reasons she could no longer recall: the blurred vision, the sweaty palms, the numbness radiating up the side of her left arm, the muted ringing in one ear, the waves of nervous energy that not only swelled to new heights with every fruitless attempt or failed effort to suppress the no longer (if it’d ever been) containable build-up of pure mania they precipitated or keep in check the accompanying thrashing of her heart against the confines of its bone cage, respectively, but threatened, with the imminent overflow of their accumulations, to kick her down below into that gaping pit on the edge of which she so precariously teetered, that endless abyss into which she was one false tense-up or sudden jump-scare (boo!) away from being irretrievably, eternally, heart-stoppingly cast; all that she’d felt then rendered, despite having been able to at the time convince her, quite compellingly, that she was living her last few precious moments on earth, retroactively baby-level by what was surging through her body at this very juncture: a refinement of that preliminary trial run into its purest possible variant, wherein that same energy (or at least some flavour thereof) she’d flirted with so many years ago was now free—and eager—to feed back into itself, endlessly, on loop, primed not merely to prolong or to extend but to full-on dimensionalize, augmentedly, the massive channel gradients necessary to sustain the ongoing protraction in her where, say, a tachometer would be, if she had one, or knew what one was, the constant almost-spiking of a (being not quite what it should be, but rather the verge of one) continuous throttle-blip that never quite ended, or even began, forever caught in its own initial-ness as the isolate of the impulse step plucked out from its larger natural sequence (that subroutine normally reserved for events such as when her mom notified her that they were ordering pizza for dinner; or when her brain suddenly called into doubt, hours after stepping out, the locked status of her door, dorm or otherwise; or, on several occasions, when she clicked the wrong pixel on one of those sites where she could watch the newest season of her favourite foreign serial for free and the wallpaper changed itself to something unrecognizable and her default browser swapped to something she’d never installed and one of those windows with the black background and white scrolling text popped up for a split second …) and stretched so far beyond any conceivable limit of a bound in either trajectory as to be extricated from the notion altogether until it was no longer a step but a state, a static persistence that simply was, the build-up of glee and dread—each side alternately losing and gaining the lead with every second heartbeat in its struggle to ensure its own side’s complete … cellular … saturation—the sensation yielded nearing concentrations under which load a lesser Melody would’ve long since buckled, and under which this present Melody would actually crumple, unless she dissipated it, or at least attempted to do so, which she did do now, to un-varying degrees of non-success, the only way she, her brain debuffed to the level it was, could still manage, which was to submit to her hardware’s more, uh, shall we say, hands-off matrices—those lower-level autonomous pathways that tended towards, at any given branching point, the most heavily-weighted, locality-wise (… or maybe it really was just gravity-wise …), physical compulsions, such as the ones responsible for those self-inflicted red welts across her cheeks and those patches of torn-out hair scattered across her scalp that carried her over several campus-lengths, at first in a giddy, anxious skip; then, in a frantic jumble of not dances exactly but rather her ideas of them: graceless half-approximations of pirouettes and … uh, other moves she couldn’t begin to name (but had seen on some screen somewhere, probably); and finally, in a full-on sprint, her arms fully outstretched behind her, the upper half of her body bent forward at the perfect aerodynamic angle, jaw locked, teeth gritted, a strange droning sound coming from … where, exactly? (oh, how odd, from somewhere deep within her, she realized, to her horror), and her heart racing, oh boy, was it ever racing—none of these acted-upon actualizations particularly useful in dissipating what she’d needed dissipated but successful at any rate in wearing her body out, enough that she couldn’t go any futher, couldn’t complete another Uptown circuit, couldn’t even stop her legs and arms from wobbling as she stumbled through the dormitory hallway just to end up right back … where …
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
… it all began. In that same bed once more. Square One. Ain’t that right, Melody?
“Oh, great. You’re back.”
Quite the attitude for someone so desperate for company.
“First off, you’re not—you’re not company. Okay? A-and even if you were, I’d just tell you to fuck off all the same. So please, go away. Just—just let me be alone. I want to be alone.”
Ah, she had entered the woe-is-me phase. She had failed her Somnhaven quest, so the next sensible move was to wallow in self-pity and despair. A perfectly reasonable and healthy response, given that she couldn’t simply try again. No, it definitely wasn’t in her power to make another attempt, especially not with the ability to start fresh with a clean slate each time. That’d be ridiculous.
“Yeah, okay. I’m the one with the attitude problem. Right.”
I gave it my all, added Melody. There was nothing I could’ve done differently. Every conceivable action had been exhausted, every possibility explored.
“I didn’t say that. Don’t put words in my mouth.”
But she thought it.
“I … did try. I did.”
Had she, though? Had she really?
On the defense, now: “Okay, well, what if I don’t want to?”
Oh? And what did Melody think she wanted?
“The thing is, maybe I’ve been going about this all wrong.”
(Could it be? … Was she gearing up for yet another world-famous, signature patented MQ-style epiphany? The last one she had was so successful that she ended up, uh, let’s see here—ah, yes, shattering many illusions that probably should’ve stayed unshattered.)
“Think about it like this,” explained Melody, the parts of her brain responsible for self-delusion lighting up: “Why is my first instinct to be scared of it? To treat the loop like it’s something to be solved, or overcome? The loop hasn’t really hurt me. I’d say it’s been, at worst, neutral. And at best it’s offering me unlimited freedom. What if I—… What if I embraced that instead?”
So, freedom. That was what Melody Quick really wanted?
“Isn’t that what everyone wants?”
Her brother might have his own ideas about that.
“Yeah, some weird shit nobody can understand, no doubt. Just like back on the rooftop: Poke fun at him a bit and, wow, look at that, he’s suddenly six paragraphs deep into a tirade about—about, I don’t even know, fucking fish … a-and poison swamps … or some shit.
“Anyway, whatever. It doesn’t matter what he thinks. About anything. Ever again. Noel no longer has a role in this story. Because this is my life we’re talking about now. And this freedom that I’m being given?—that’s being gifted to me?—”
(Same meaning.)
“—it’s the best thing that could’ve happened to me. I don’t have to think. I don’t have to do anything. Don’t have to make decisions, don’t need to worry about money. I can go anywhere I want. Anytime I want. I can say what I want, to who I want, I can even—”
—go around smashing random cars with a stolen softball bat? All the while yelling obscenities like some mad—
“Aaaaaaaiiiieeeeeee! No! No! Bad thoughts! Bad thoughts! That’s so embarrassing! I don’t want to remember!” cried the rememberer, her face buried in her pillow, her cheeks burning, her legs flailing, she having thrown herself onto her bed at the first glimpses of a mental image of a past that had yet to happen, endlessly grateful that her dormitory floor was still empty, as it was during the entire first week of September …
“… Not that it really matters. Not that it”—surfacing from out of her pillow, her decibel limiters turned off for the two remaining words—“FUCKING MATTERS!” Then, chuckling bitterly: “That brings up a good point, though. Why the f—why the fuck did I come here so early? Was I that excited to start school in this … lame-ass college town in the middle of nowhere? Just because it was in the same Division as my brother? Come on, Melody. That’s so dumb. You’re so dumb.” Face back in the pillow: “Fucking Uptown.”
Oh? Was somebody starting to miss Somnhaven already? One trip to the big city and she was insatiable now, for the bright lights, the busy crowds, the smell of sewage everywhere she went, the mock blown-up Nixies …
“I don’t miss Somnhaven. (Although, I admit it wouldn’t hurt to have some cleaning robots and food trucks here …)”
Okay, fine, Melody was right; it was a baseless accusation. And for that apologies were in order. Because of course there was no way she missed Somnhaven. How could she, given all that she’d left behind there … all that she now knew would continue to repeat there each loop …?
“Uh … That’s not my problem.”
Classic Melody, running away when faced with the oh-so-terrifying notion that there were problems only she could solve.
“I know what you’re trying to do, guilt-tripping me like that. But I don’t care. Because they couldn’t help me anyway. So why should I bother helping them? (And, yeah, by the way, it is terrifying. You saying it sarcastically doesn’t make it suddenly not terrifying.)”
Did Melody even give them the chance for them to help her?
“Yes. I told you. I tried.”
Saying so didn’t mean that Melody actually tried. Because from an outsider’s perspective, all it looked like she accomplished was to make Laura write her off as a raving lunatic.
(Whiningly, pleadingly): “Stah-ah-ahp …”
And even with that impression of Melody in mind, Laura had still been plenty nice to her. Both Laura and Noel had been. In fact, they even tried to protect Melody from what was, for all they knew, the literal End of the Universe.
“Okay, now you’re really starting to piss me off. I can take you out, you know.”
Ahh, referring to the Temptation. Taking the place of the door, huh … (Now where was that boxcutter?)
“Fuck you. (I would never …)”
But why not? Wasn’t this the perfect opportunity? The very gee-eye-eff-tee she mentioned. Why not test out the limits of this freedom she was so proud of?
Melody, wagging her finger, her other hand on her hip, smugly: “Ah-ha-ha-ha, that’s where you have me figured all wrong! That’s not the type of freedom I’m interested in. No, no—”
(… a bit curious, considering how she was just talking about going anywhere she wanted, talking to whomever she wanted, doing anything she—…)
“—No, shut up. Shut up now. I’ve already decided. First thing I’m gonna do, I’m gonna go down to the vending machine. No—no wait, first thing I’m gonna do, is load up my laptop with every piece of visual media made by Circadia in the last three decades. Which includes all the good ol’ Recon stuff they don’t make anymore. You know, the cheesy buddy-cop action comedies, and the dumb feel-good romantic comedies, and all those horror movies which weren’t nearly as scary as their terrifying box covers were—the kind of art that made me cover my eyes when I passed them in the video store … which only made Noel grab them off the shelf and wave them in front of my face … back when they still had video stores … that one our parents would drive Noel and me to on Friday nights … sometimes we would pick out a game as well … Noel would play it and give me the controller that wasn’t even plugged in and I thought I was actually playing too, because I didn’t know any better … er, ahem.
“And then while that’s downloading, that’s when I’m going to go down to the vending machine and just buy out the whole damn stock. And then I’m going to black out the curtains so I have no idea what time of day it is, and then I’m gonna lock the door and then never come out.
“And I’m just gonna consume. Yeah. Because I can’t influence the outside world, you see? Nothing I do is permanent. Except for what’s in my head. I can carry over memories, and that’s it. So why wouldn’t I just spend all my time stuffing my head full of shit?
“A-and if I somehow manage … to stumble into a solution along the way, then great.” (Note that what she really meant was: if a solution suddenly fell into her lap along the way …) “If not, well, then—there’s plenty of entertainment. I don’t think I can ever run out of it. And if I exhaust the entire library of Circadian entertainment, then—well, then I’ll learn other languages! Don’t give me that look, I can do it! (They got apps for that now, don’tcha know …) Yes, foreign languages, other countries. Consume their entertainment! Movies, TV shows, serials, animation, v-video games, a-and even”—choking down rising vomit—“buh … books. (If I have to.)”
So that was it, huh? Melody Quick’s final decision: to abandon those lingering questlines it was in her power (and her power alone) to try and solve. No qualms whatsoever about leaving the affected parties in their own eternal Septembers, to relive the same misfortunes every month, to persist without end in that static atemporality, to unknowingly keep pushing the same boulders up the same hills over and over again: Elysia with her broken arm, Noel under the shadow of all that he thought should’ve been (… plus whatever the hell SocSan wanted to do with it …), Laura against the stagnation of all progress towards the very reason she was working as hard as she did …
At which charge the familiar battle cry, “Not! My! Problem!” sounded once more, and kept on sounding, until a rhythm emerged, the syllables falling into place around the steady beat of Melody’s claps, each measure comprising, in common time, two quarter notes and a pair of beamed semiquavers, the latter two notes denoting what exactly of hers it wasn’t, along with the appropriate rests to round out the remaining capacity, this foundational structure forming the basis of the song it would become, which went a little something like this:
> Title: Not My Problem
>
> (To the tune of Not My Problem, composed by M. Quick, in the year of 20 Rectified—follow the clapping emojis)
>
> 👏 👏 👏 👏
>
> Not - my - pro-blem (Hey!)
>
> 👏 👏 👏 👏
>
> Not - my - pro-blem (Yo!)
>
> 👏 👏 👏 👏
>
> Oh, it’s not - my - pro-blem (Hey!)
>
> 👏 👏 👏 👏
>
> Not! My! Problem! (Yo!)
>
> (Repeat ad infinitum …)
The refrain (read: entirety) of which served as the exclusive soundtrack to the rest of her evening, which she spent signing up for countless free trials of varying lengths, handing over the digits of the credit card her parents had given her (“For emergencies only, Melody.”) when requested, not only by the legitimate sites to which the trials belonged, but as well the blatantly illegitimate ones promising a, hmm, how to put it, wider library; and carrying out the plan she’d monologued to herself, one that mostly involved blacking out the curtains with an entire roll of duct tape (not far from the boxcutter, as it turned out), and clearing out the complete stock of non-perishable foodstuffs (including the bottles of sports drinks—she was going to need those if she was really going to stay inside all month like she intended) on display from the first floor vending machine (to which she fed, at first, coins; then, when she’d exhausted the loose change she had on hand, a nearby chair), both tasks instrumental in preparing her living space for the ideal Ninth Iteration she had in mind; and deciding to, when she finally realized just how famished she was, especially after all that running around she did, which had all but burnt up the total intake of calories from her early-morning breakfast at Rick’s, the only thing she’d eaten all day, order a pizza (she was in a pepperoni and mushrooms kind of mood tonight; and plus, she preferred not to dip into her newly-acquired snack stash yet—she had to make those chips and beef jerky and cheese puffs last an entire month, after all …), a task made impossible due to the fact that Uptown’s one (only one!) pizza joint had yet to implement a web portal, and Melody’s phone was still sitting there without a charge (having died … when, exactly? Before she left for Rick’s, she knew that, so … the night before? B-but that couldn’t be right, could it? Surely her phone, as it was on the first of September, had enough charge to last at least a day? Right? So what the fuck?)—okay, so maybe not made impossible, but delayed slightly: about three minutes, give or take, for the battery to build up enough of a charge for the phone to be able to boot: more than enough time for Melody to sit and convince herself that mentally and physically (and spiritually) checking out entirely to consume the world’s pabulum was the correct decision.
Melody sighed, “I don’t know what pa-bu-lum means,” and plugged in the charger. An anthropomorphic battery appeared on-screen, waved to Melody, and began to drink lightning bolts from a firehose in an animated loop, the size of its gradually expanding stomach reflecting the current level of charge.
After waiting nowhere near long enough, and knowing damn well she hadn’t, Melody held down the power button anyway, only for the battery to shake its head and shrug, the phone still unable to launch into its boot sequence.
“You know, I can’t remember the last time I left my phone untouched for more than an entire day. Which is kinda crazy, if you think about it.” Outside, beyond those blacked out curtains, a sun she couldn’t see was setting. ”There’s no way the battery should be this dead, though. What is this shit? It’s a—it’s another pinball effect, isn’t it? Well, actually, hold on … Can batteries—can batteries do that? Just drop randomly?” She paced around her room. Somewhere in the distance a bird was chirping. She wondered if the dorm hadn’t always been this quiet. “What? No more snark? Got nothing more to say?”
But then … what was there left to say? By Melody or any other?
“I don’t”—pinching her forehead, sighing, again, more heavily this time—“… I don’t know how batteries work,” said Melody Quick, trying the power button once again, to no avail; and then again, a minute or so later, to a successful boot screen at last, the typical sequence that followed it (the max-brightness manufacturer logo, the slightly-dimmer OS startup animation; and then a bare wallpaper, atop which loaded, in the expected order, a digital clock displaying the time, the date, weather, a prompt asking her to swipe to unlock) itself followed by another post-sequence sequence, this latter one not quite as typical, and which would become, oddly—or maybe not so oddly, considering its role as the precursor to the demarcation of the exact border separating what would ultimately come to be seen as the two (yes, just two) major eras of her life: pre-September 2 of the Ninth Iteration of the Endless September; and post-September 2 of the Ninth Iteration of the Endless September: the two eras being so constitutionally disparate on every level conceivable or otherwise that their delineation superseded all other delineations that might’ve defined what could reasonably be considered discrete periods in her life up to now—inextricably, a part of not merely her consciousness but her very being itself, so much so that even when, in some far-off convolution of distant futures to come, all her precious memories had faded to the dimmest of embers, and she could no longer be certain of even the most intrinsic of facts about herself, such as her own name, or where she came from, or the circumstances that had caused her to fail all those who’d counted on her, people whose names and faces were as lost to her as the wind-scattered ashes of an irreparable past—even then she would still be able to, though it no longer held any proper meaning by that point, recall if not the unlocking of the phone itself then at least the sheer palpability of having internalized what its ramifications entailed; the delta between her and her modified self before and after that critical shift brought about by her realization and, once her brain had gotten over the initial shock, subsequent processing of what she was seeing on the screen before her: the deluge of notifications flooding in, all at once, the rapid-fire glitching together of their pings into a seemingly constant, drawn-out stutter a real-time tallying of all the missed calls and text messages and voicemails and unread emails that had been, up until now, undeliverable, the phone they were trying to reach cut down in its prime, battery life-wise, by that first wave of non-stop, urgent calls that must have swarmed it sometime while she was (confirmably, remember?) asleep on the day (… or had it been night?) of the 1st—the many voices belonging to those behind the exclusive authoring of which data Melody was still in the process of digesting converging (the spatially digester-bound originals; their temporally deferred reproductions) on that not merely multi- but ultra-dimensionally tetra-confluential crosspoint where, and when, she stood listening, reading and scrolling (and almost certainly squeezing her phone a bit too tightly), her knees trembling, hands shaking, wanting to cry, or laugh perhaps, but too stunned to do either, oblivious to All That Was Headed For Her: now—tonight—in the eternity that followed—in what she would look back on (fondly? not-so-fondly?) as the rest of her life—ever oblivious, yes, even as the bearers of the voices she was listening to vocalized their intentions to actuate the The Start of the First of ATWHFR through that tinny mono loudspeaker (“… Ah, alright. Alright, screw it. You’re never going to pick up, are you? Okay, listen … we’re headed over to you, whether you like it or not. Laura, start the car!” “Don’t tell me what to do.” “… Melody Quick, we coming for YOU, [sister]!”), even as the fire door at the end of the hallway slammed open and two pairs of hurried footfalls came into hearing range (both equally familiar to her, somehow, despite Melody having known one for most of her life, the other for less than a month), the voices they accompanied growing as they drew nearer to overlap, and eventually overpower, their staler, crunchier counterparts, until they—they: those who couldn’t possibly be here (Uptown! in her dormitory building! soon to be right outside her door!), but were—were no more than a foot away from Melody, the only thing keeping her apart from them the door she’d locked earlier for the express purpose of shutting out a world that was now begging to be let in (“Mel! MEL! Open up! Open the f— …”); that very same door onto whose surface she’d carved so many numbers that would no longer matter, and beyond which lay the realization of all she’d secretly wished for, all this time.
And all she had to do was open the door to meet it.