My neurons fire signals down my nervous system. They reach my leg, where they plug into my muscles like an outlet. They pulse electricity into them, causing my legs to move forwards rapidly. All the feedback they receive, down to the subtle slip of wet asphalt under my shoes, gets returned to my brain. The neurons unpack the new information and use it to update into the next step of the cycle. This loop repeats at lightning speed, giving the sensation of smooth movement; graceful and calculated over decades of learning it to perfection. This is how I run. It’s the same way I’ve always done it, and yet it feels like I’m learning about it for the first time.

It felt like my brain cells had been fried, and maybe they really had been. There was only one thing on my mind: find Martin Moore. By the time I awoke from whatever weird dream that was, I was already sprinting back to the place I dropped Bunny off. I made it there in record time. Unlabeled concrete buildings surrounded me at every turn, twisting and churning into dead ends and loops. I was calling her name, but I doubt she’d ever be able to hear me over the downpour. It was raining so hard it felt like I was underwater, running a labyrinth of Atlantis. It felt like I was blindly dashing around for so long, but realistically it had only been less than ten minutes before I stumbled onto something. There, slumped up in a corner of an alleyway, was a body. I felt a sensation inside me that made it undisputable that this was Martin Moore. He had longish brown hair and wore a puffy black jacket that was entirely soaked through. If it wasn’t for the giant bash on the side of his head, I would have assumed he had drowned in the rain. As much as I wouldn’t want to admit it; I knew what that gash was. It was exactly the shape of a baseball bat.

I checked his pulse and breathing, there were none. I awkwardly glanced around, afraid someone would get the wrong idea if they saw me. I didn’t know what to do next. I found the body, now what?

It wasn’t long before Rose and Biologist caught up with me. I didn’t know they were following behind, but I’m not surprised. I didn’t need to say anything, they understood the situation as soon as they saw it for themselves. Rose took immediate action searching the body, something I was a little too afraid to do.

“A wallet, a phone, a pair of ruined earbuds, and a book.”

She had collected all the salvageable items from his body and presented them to us. I took the phone and tried getting into it to see if he had any clues inside. I got locked out pretty much immediately. Biologist took the book and had much better luck.

“I’ve read this book,” she said, “I was at the library, looking for information on how to kill you. Uh, sorry. Anyways, someone there asked me what I was looking for. I told him that I’m a Biologist, looking for general information on life. He recommended this book: Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. It was all information that was second-nature to me, but it was interesting seeing it proven from a human’s point of view.”

“What’s it about? Is it a novel?”

“No, it’s a text about how life might emerge. It postulates that the patterns of life can be found within things that most people apparently wouldn’t expect: like mechanical, physical, or digital systems.”

She began flipping through the pages. It sounds a little interesting, but that’s a hell of a thick book. It might look cool on my shelf, though. I know some Gödel so I could probably get away with it. I heard her stop flipping when something fell out of the book. It was a key-card for a warehouse nearby. Damn, the poor guy must have been coming home from work when Bunny jumped him…

Biologist opened the book up to me and Rose. The page the keycard fell from had a passage that was furiously circled, underlined, and highlighted.

“As I see it, the only way of overcoming this magical view of what "I" and consciousness are is to keep on reminding oneself, unpleasant though it may seem, that the 'teetering bulb of dread and dream" that nestles safely inside one's own cranium is a purely physical object made up of completely sterile and inanimate components, all of which obey exactly the same laws as those that govern all the rest of the universe, such as pieces of text, or CD-ROM's, or computers. Only if one keeps on bashing up against this disturbing fact can one slowly begin to develop a feel for the way out of the mystery of consciousness: that the key is not the stuff out of which brains are made, but the patterns that can come to exist inside the stuff of a brain.

This is a liberating shift, because it allows one to move to a different level of considering what brains are: as media that support complex patterns that mirror, albeit far from perfectly, the world, of which, needless to say, those brains are themselves denizens — and it is in the inevitable self mirroring that arises, however impartial or imperfect it may be, that the strange loops of consciousness start to swirl.”

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Those words echoed quietly through my skull as we continued our search for Bunny, but they never really found a home. I couldn’t quite get what it was trying to say. Biologist seemed like she wanted to give me a hint.

“What the author says throughout the book is that ‘loops’ are the seeds from which consciousness and self-identity come from. Everything that’s alive is self-referential. You have to be able to think about yourself in order to exist as a human, right? But a brain is a physical object. You’re a chunk of the earth that thinks about itself, then writes those thoughts down inside of itself. Those thoughts, being part of your brain, are also physical clumps of matter referencing themselves—so it loops again. You’re recursive. That’s what makes you alive.”

Sounds good enough to me. She’s an angel of Biology of all things, so I assume she knows what she’s talking about when it comes to life. Winding through the confusing alleys of Magnolia Park, we passed back by where Martin’s lifeless body lay. His brain stopped working a while ago. It can’t make his muscles get up and move anymore. The material in his brain has stopped relating to itself; so now it’s just a meaningless clump of material. I guess Bunny did enough blunt trauma to his head for him to exit his loop.

Is that what happens when you die? You turn from a recursive engine of existence into a pile of meaningless mush of biological chemicals? I thought I was meaningless before, but that’s a bit different than what I’m experiencing. Maybe there’s different “kinds” of meaningless. Even if there’s no ultimate purpose to my life, I want my friends to keep looping. I don’t want Bunny to end up like Martin. I’m worried about her, she should have been here. I don’t know if I started to cry, or if it was just the rain getting harder. God, I wish she would answer her phone.

Lightning strikes near us twice in quick succession, each with their own deafening crash. The thunder storm was getting worse, so we took temporary refuge in the warehouse that we now have a keycard to. Sorry for trespassing, Martin.

The first floor was one giant concrete room, home to uncountably many boxes full of metal parts. It smells like concrete and pennies. We three huddle up in a corner of the floor, listening to the lightning strikes grow closer and more frequent.

Biologist pulled a lighter out of her purse. She grabbed a bit of scrunched up newspaper lining the inside one of the boxes. The storm was raging so intensely that even things in here were sopping wet. She was trying to make a make-shift campfire to keep us warm, but no matter how many times she tried to start it, the paper was just too damp to light up. It made me a little happy seeing her put some small effort into keeping me alive. I mean, I doubt I’m in any serious danger of dying right now, but it’s the thought that counts. However happy it made me that she was trying, it made me even more sad to watch her keep failing at it. I thought I’d try to take some pressure off her by starting a conversation.

“Hey, Rose. Why did you send Bunny after Martin, anyways?”

“I received a tip from a demon. I’m not possessed like you guys, I just do simple invocations from time to time. I was warned by a demon a while ago that bad things would be in store for my friend Mina. I thought they just meant simple misfortune, you know? But as it got more detailed I realized that there was something special about you. You know, the cosmic meaninglessness and everything. The demons didn’t care whether you lived or died, but the angels did. You weren’t a part of the universe’s rigid order, so you were being targeted for elimination in order to restore it. A couple times a week I would ask the spirits if someone, or something, will end up being a threat to you. I still do it, actually. If the spirits sense a problem bubbling, I send Bunny out to fix it as soon as it’s identified. Most of the time they were just petty criminals going to mug you or something, but the severity escalated. Then, before we knew it, we were fighting against beasts commissioned from God himself. That’s how we ended up here. I know, I’m probably on the wrong side of divinity. What kind of fucked-up person would ally with the denizens of the underworld over the messengers of God himself? And it’s not like I can even do much for you, I make Bunny do everything for me.”

She curled her knees up and rested her chin in between them. I didn’t interrupt, I just let her finish what she wanted to say.

“I… I just didn’t want anything bad to happen to you. Even to the point where I would shun angels. But in the end, I guess I only made things worse for you two, didn’t I?”

The lightning storm outside wasn’t letting up in the slightest. Just as we were about to continue our search for Bunny despite it, the search was already over. In the far back corner of the warehouse, a door swung open with a deafening sound. It was Bunny. She was running towards us. I was frozen in shock, waiting for my brain to catch up with what was happening. Before my bearings were set straight, she had thrown her body into me. She was gasping for her breath.

“Bunny? What the hell were you doing here?”

She didn’t respond, just continued to press her head against my chest. I was starting to get worried.

“Hey, are you alright?”

I gently pulled her away from me. Her usually pale face was covered in bright-red burns and swollen welts. In her cheek was a small conical hole, almost like a pen had been lodged inside. She was hysterical, sobbing and gasping for air, all without making a single sound. While looking into her eyes, I saw a fear in her I had never seen before. Not just in her, but in anyone. I wanted to wipe the tears off her eyes, but I didn’t want to touch her burns. What the hell happened? What could have caused her to act this way? Did it happen because she was trying to protect me?

I couldn’t say anything. I could only watch the cloudy water seep from her eyes and the gashes on her face, looking for the right words. Even just one would have been alright. Instead we stayed silent, as I watched the sadness and fear flare in her eyes. I wonder if she could see the skulls flaring in mine?