5:37 PM | Deshur Wastes | June 5th | 1608 COVENANT

The house was not my property. Like all homes on the megastructure, it was loaned to me by the Deshur Settlement Council, who were withholding all the actual land until the end of a 50 year introductory period. The idea was that this was a sort of 'trial' for society on the colony, after which the state of the populace's health, the social fabric, and the biosphere's stability would be subject to assessment before immigrants would be invited en masse. At the moment, you could only get in via lottery or through an application process that might as well have been for a job. I'd managed via my academic credentials.

Almost all the decor in the place had come with the building. Like the exterior, it was relatively minimalist, much of it colored flat white or in understated, earthy tones. There weren't many rooms, but they were all much larger than you'd get living in a crowded city like Oreskios. On the first floor there was a living area with a few sofas and shelves, a kitchen with all the utilities one would expect, and a dining room with a view of where the garden could be if I'd bothered to plant one. The Settlement Council had a nebulous policy of wanting everyone to participate in fostering the planet's ecology, so there were some water tanks and fertilization equipment out there - including raised arrays for crops - which I'd completely ignored, resulting in them now being half-buried by red dirt. The second floor, meanwhile, contained the master bedroom, a bathroom, and a study. There was also an inlet containing the bronze gas tank (nowadays one refill could last you nearly six months) halfway up the stairs, which I'd been using as a washing and laundry room.

I'd left most of these rooms largely untouched from their state when I'd moved in, save for the living area which was half-filled with boxes I'd never bothered to unpack, and the kitchen which was a little messy as a matter of necessity. I had a golem to clean things up for me (an awkward, sandstone-colored thing that more resembled a stack of oblong shapes than a person) but it was limited in its functionality since I didn't like them too sophisticated; one had destroyed a photo album that was important to me 80 years ago and I'd never completely got over it. I could do it with the Power if push came to shove anyway, but was just afraid of somehow breaking the delicate system of pumps and valves that kept the appliances working. The last thing I wanted to do was to have to call a repair man.

The only room that showed clear signs of consistent human occupation was the study. That was where the logic engine was, so I'd built my nest there in lieu of the actual bedroom, which felt too big and empty. The whole place felt too big and empty, but it was the smallest type of house they'd offered when I'd decided to move out here. It was presumably assumed by the authorities that the only reason you'd want to live this far away from the city was because you valued your personal space, and not because you were a freak who just wanted to shun civilization.

I could count on just my hands the amount of guests I'd had period since I'd moved nigh-on 20 years ago, but I'd never let a single person into the study, since I'd assumed it would lead to certain assumptions about my mental state. About the only thing normal about it was the area around the bed, which I'd dragged in from the other room and kept relatively tidy so as to not leave me feeling too boxed-in or gross when I was trying to sleep. The rest was...

Well, there was no nice way to put it. It was a mess. Stacks of papers, books and magazines covered half the floor, and another third was occupied by dirty clothes and sacks of trash I hadn't bothered to take downstairs yet. Cleaner clothes and more books (mostly novels) were stacked on top of the dresser without particular rhyme or reason, and the desk, overlooking the window, was engulfed in so much crap that one could barely see the surface outside of the shrinking zone I'd fenced off for actual writing. There were old letters, tissues, dirty cups I'd never had the energy to take down to the kitchen, and of course medication bottles. Even the closet in the back of the room was messily stuffed full of echo mazes, logic engine parts, and boxes I'd meant to unpack but never had.

Finally, on the end-table next to the chair I'd sit in while using the logic bridge, I'd kept my most dear possessions. My favorite stuffed animals from my old collection. Photos from the high points of my life; with the team at the end of the Redesign Project, with my old girlfriends, and - so old the color was almost gone - with Ran and others we'd known back then.

And, oldest of all, my old logic engine. The metal so worn away the inscription could barely be made out.

A shadow of a shadow.

Once I'd arrived, made a quick visit to the lavatory, and grabbed a bag of preserved and spiced flatbreads that could serve as an impromptu dinner, I headed straight up there, dumping off my suitcase in the laundry room without even bothering to unpack. Having spent the last couple of weeks in primarily normal, clean spaces, I felt almost an instinctive pulse of disgust at the sight, then a sense of deeply-abiding shame. I found myself wrinkling my nose instinctively - I hadn't been negligent to the point that it literally stunk, but it definitely stunk spiritually, on an existential level.

I can't believe you live like this, my self-judgement said.

Even though you're fucking practically middle aged.

I despised the state of this room. It depressed me even to look at it. But the one time I'd made an effort to clean it up properly, I'd been left with a feeling of emptiness and anxiety when it was all over. It's often said that the first step towards making oneself feel better is improving one's environment, but I've come to conclude that this is only true if it's part of a broader effort at self-improvement. If you make your home pristinely tidy but are still personally stuck at a dead end from which you can see no escape, all it will accomplish is to make you feel disappointed, like spending a week preparing for a race you're not even eligible to enter.

The truth was that this place, this embarrassing shithole, made me feel more comfortable with myself than anywhere else I'd lived in the last century. It was like a scab, insulating me from a world that felt filled with misleading information and imagery, making me fixate on what could have been had my life been different, or worse, renewed false hope that it could be different. It was a room that reminded me that I was not of the same kin as other people, and did not have to hold myself to their standards.

It was a room that accepted the world as I experienced it rather than fighting against it; disorienting, exhaustingly contradictory, lonely. It was the home I needed and, more than that, the home I deserved.

I'm presenting this all like it was some intentional philosophy I'd adopted, but don't get the wrong idea. I didn't really know why I was living like this. I hadn't made any sort of actually-conscious choice about the matter, and I was always fluctuating between resignation and telling myself that it was temporary, and that eventually something would happen which would lead me to get my shit together. I'd sometimes even have weeks where I'd decide to do so, filling out job applications and getting out more, only to run out of energy and slide back into my groove.

But I think it was what I really felt, in the deepest place of my heart.

Yes, I thought, feeling relaxed. It's good to be back.

I plomped myself down in the comfy chair and attuned myself to the logic engine; it was thin and sleek compared to the ones from the old days, more resembling a pillar full of thick, faintly-glowing liquid than the intricate mechanical designs it had succeeded, though there was still some of that at the base around the sleek surface of the logic bridge itself. I caught up on a drama I'd been following before my trip about a series of mysterious killings at a race track in a small Rhunbardic town. I played an echo game I'd been addicted to about building and staffing a fortress for about four hours. I ate again. I tried another drama that had come out in the last week that was an adaption of a fantasy book. I curled up in bed and slept.

I woke up. I attuned myself to the logic engine. I finished catching up with the drama, feeling disappointed there were no more episodes. I went on the logic sea to look for recommendations of similar stuff, but ended up getting distracted watching political recordings. I felt angry and hopeless about the state of the world. I ate again I drew in my sketchbook for a couple hours. I talked to a friend (more acquaintance; I only really talked to him about media, having met in a discussion group a few years ago) over the logic sea, and they recommended me a different drama, which I tried and thought was okay. I ate another meal and then went back to sleep.

I woke up. I attuned myself to the logic engine. I went back to the echo game from the previous day, until I got stuck on it after about another two hours. I went back to the drama I'd been recommended, which I kinda got into. I talked to my friend about it a little, ratting off some of my complaints. I ate. I got a message from an old friend in academia asking how I'd been, and spent an hour thinking about how to reply, before ultimately giving up. I mindlessly watched the local news for an hour. I tried the echo game for a little longer, and managed to make a little progress, reaching the next story event. My mother sent out a summons because I'd never bothered to call her to tell her I'd made it back okay, and we talked for a while. I ate, and went back to sleep.

I woke up. I got out a book I'd been meaning to read, the biography of a novelist I liked named Mahirat of At'Ymara. Her life story was really sad, her father having left her mother at a young age and her mother becoming abusive, leading to her also developing a solitary personality. However, later in the book, she found love and got married, which annoyed me and made me feel empty. I ate. I finished the first season of the drama and talked to my friend a little more about it. I played the echo game for way too long, almost the entire day. I ate again. I went back to sleep, my sleeping pattern getting more and more unmoored from the actual progression of night and day.

I woke up. I read the rest of the book, which culminated on a message about how she was inspired by the art she consumed to become a person she didn't expect, and that she hoped to induce that transformative feeling through her own work. It was so generic and survivorship bias-y that it pissed me off. I decided I wouldn't buy any more of her books, even though they were good. I saw Yu was available - rare, nowadays, since her job kept her so busy - and we met over the logic sea in this library-like simulated environment we always used. I was having fun catching up with her, but then she was suddenly called away by something to do with one of her kids. I felt sad and sat around in bed doing nothing all day. I ate. I played a little more of the echo game, and fell asleep doing it.

I was woken up prematurely by another call from the stupid university, the bell ringing obnoxiously from my portable logic engine. I reached over and smashed my hand into it.

"Hello?" It was the same woman from the other day. "Is this Grandmaster Fusai?"

"Mmhm," I said, glad that logic bridges didn't convey your literal appearance unless you wanted them to. Why does this lady only call people at the crack of dawn? Psychopathic.

"I'm sorry to bother you, but I was hoping to discuss rescheduling the date of your lecture, now that we've passed the original planned time. The department head was very sad that you weren't able to make it."

I could tell from her tone - despite her attempt to make it come across as friendly - that she was annoyed at me, which in turn made me annoyed at her. They'd been the ones to try and mess me around by changing the time we'd agreed upon. Why would that be my fault?

"Okay," I said. "I apologize for not getting back to you sooner... I was traveling, and things got away from me." Why am I apologizing? I hate my personality.

"Completely understandable," she said, pleasantly.

"Did you have a date in mind?" I asked her.

"The time I've been given by the department is the 17th, again at our morning slot of 9:30 AM," she explained.

Oh, fuck off. Fuck this.

"Would that work for you?"

"Uh, well... no, I'm afraid not..." I cleared my throat. "I'm sorry, but I'm usually busy in the mornings. That's why I opted for the time we'd arranged before to begin with." I frowned. "Do you have anything available in the afternoon?"

She paused for a moment. "Not within the month, I'm afraid. We have a regular speaker taking up half of our guest positions for our Thanatomancy course, and the rest are already booked or taken up by exams and other forms of supplemental study. We've had to take on an unusual number of new students this year as part of an academic push by the Settlement Council, so I'm afraid that's caused considerable disruption in this area, since we only host casting exams in the afternoon. They require use of our gymnasium, you see, and it's occupied by our athletics programs during the early periods."

"I see," I replied mutedly.

"So I'm afraid morning slots are all we have available for this term, which is really when we'd want you, since it coincides with our module on Entropic Thanatomancy. Perhaps I could give a list of all our available morning slots? Surely we could find one that works for you."

I twitched. I was possessed by a powerful urge to dash my logic engine against the wall with great force. I felt cornered-- I couldn't just tell her, whilst pretending to be a serious adult academic, that I didn't want any morning appointment because I didn't want to get out of bed. But at the same time, wasn't that completely obvious? It wasn't as though I was being a particularly good liar. Couldn't she take a fucking hint?

She's just acting on instructions from the people actually running the university, my common sense reminded me. She can't make any actual decisions or assumptions about you.

I was silent for a moment. I thought about just cutting the transmission and literally ghosting the university. I didn't want to deal with this. I didn't want to mess up my sleep pattern to drag myself out to the train station at some stupid hour of the morning, then try to give a lecture while still half-asleep. It was hard enough to pretend to be functional when I had time to get myself together.

But I'd already flaked out on another guest lecture this year, and like my brother had said, it'd been years since I'd had any sort of even tangential employment. At what point would the Settlement Council take issue with me being a leech, and send me back to the Mimikos?

Maybe my brother was right after all. Maybe the solitude I had out here wasn't worth the price, and I'd be better off just going back to Oreskios. I only had to pretend to be a little functional for my family, and maybe if I got blackout curtains for all the windows, I could forget the state of the world around me.

"Grandmaster?" the woman asked, with a hint of impatience.

"P-Pardon me," I stuttered. "That should be possible, but I'd have to see about moving some of my engagements around. Would it be alright if I got back to you later?"

"...very well," she said. "There are some other scheduling concerns we're also dealing with, though, so the department head was hoping to get this sorted out by the end of the week. Shall I tell him to expect a reply in the next day or two?"

I bit my lip. "Sure. Okay."

"Very good. Thank you for your time, then, Grandmaster Fusai."

"Yeah, you too."

She cut the feed as I felt a twinge of embarrassment for the final moments of the conversation. I scowled, tossing the logic bridge unceremoniously onto the desk. I flopped back into bed, slamming my face into my pillow. The fabric was oily on account of me having put off doing the washing.

Shit, I cursed to myself. Why did I say it 'should be possible'? Now it'll just be even more awkward if I end up saying I can't.

Why didn't I just make a decision? Why was my first thought to kick the can down the road, like a child trying to get out of their fucking homework?

Gods, I'm pathetic.

I inhaled and exhaled sharply. The pillow smelled like a mix between dry spit and the floral odor of my hair ointment. A reactionary impulse of defensive pride welled back up against the shame I was feeling.

You're not pathetic, it said. You're probably one of the most accomplished Thanatomancers in the entire colony. They should be grateful you're even giving them the time of day! Who the hell do they think they are, trying to guilt trip you?!

They can all go to hell.

I laid in bed for another hour or two, trying in vain to get back to sleep. I felt queasy, and kept rolling back and forth on my mattress. My skin felt sticky and gross. I couldn't stop thinking about things that frustrated me.

Eventually I gave up. I got up, took a shower, and ate. I watched a different drama - this one about a group of people who obtained superpowers after traveling through a portal to a different world populated primarily by lizard people - that I'd forgotten had started a new season. I finished the echo game, which had a disappointing ending. I stood up to open the chamber in the logic engine and replace it with another I'd been meaning to get to.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

As I waited for the machine to spit the cube out, my gaze - without me really meaning it to - wandered to the end-table. I looked at a photograph of Rekhetre and I that had been taken back when we'd still both been living in Tem-Aphat. She was a tomboyish-looking woman, with hair cut only a few inches short, her eyes and expression always having a certain calm that made her look effortlessly cool. She was dressed in a stylish black chiton, and was holding me around my waist. I was smiling and my face was flushed, but my eyes looked somehow distant. In the background, Araket - a friend of hers the two of us knew through work - was making a silly expression, waving her arms in the air erratically.

Then my gaze drifted further back, at a photo of the whole Exemplary Acolyte's Class, taken on the day we'd all been assembled for the first time. We were standing in the middle of the atrium, in front of a tree that used to be there back then, contrasting with the white marble of the flooring. Kamrusepa was giving a picture perfect smile in the middle, alongside Ezekiel, who we didn't know was a complete asshole yet. Seth was giving a more awkward smile off to their left, next to Bardiya, who looked as dignified as ever, clutching his scepter like it was a rod of state. Ophelia was off to the right, blushing, while Lilith stood alongside her with an expression akin to a terrified animal.Ptolema was in a weird position and only partly-visible behind Ezekiel, her eyes wandering to look at something off-frame. Fang stood at the periphery, their arms crossed casually. Theodoros looked like he was about to sneeze.

And opposite them, at the other far end, were Ran and I, standing closer than the others. I looked nervous, wearing the forced smile of someone who desperately wants to look photogenic, but has no idea how they're coming across, and she looked deathly serious, staring dead at the camera like it had personally pissed in her breakfast.

It was so like her. I smiled bittersweetly.

I wondered why I kept this stuff here, knowing it hurt me to even look at it. I told myself it kept me tethered to my true self. That even though I didn't know what to do with it, my regrets were precious, because they still felt like something.Because they were proof that I'd lived, even if my nature had led me to screw it all up.

But maybe at a certain point, that sort of sentimentality was just masochism in disguise. Maybe it would be better to just let go. That was the cliche, right? Let go of the past, live in the moment?

Somehow, I didn't think the life I was living was what whoever invented that truism had in mind.

𒊹

I'd tried to live. I really had tried. For Shiko's sake. For both our sakes.

After the deaths of the Inner Circle at the Old Yru Academy of Medicine and Healing, our class became subject to a huge amount of attention, both by the press and the local authorities. There was a breathtaking (literally for Seth, who broke a rib trying to climb out a second story window in an effort to avoid the media) amount of speculation about how the impossible murder could have even occurred, especially as it had been found that the Power had not been used whatsoever except for the incantations we'd employed to open the door. No one had gone in or out, and the headmaster, the only conscious survivor upon our entry, had himself died moments later, with no explanation available as to his physical condition. And to add insult to injury, the windows were confirmed to have stayed locked the entire time.

That left two plausible explanations for the crime. The first, which was generally considered the less likely of the two, was that the headmaster's assistant had singlehandedly killed an entire group of elite arcanists and, of over the course of a single minute, decapitated their corpses and elaborately staged their bodies - in Durvasa's case literally smashing it to pieces - all without making a sound. Oh, and given herself a genuine concussion, as a medical examination had later confirmed.

The second, more realistic option was that our entire group had simply killed them together and then invented a fantastical story of how we'd discovered the crime scene to cover it up.

There was no evidence for this, of course, nor even any real reasonable grounds for suspicion; there was no motive, and to call ten students, two Order notaries, and a high-ranking member of the academy staff coming together to coordinate something this complicated far-fetched... well, it would be a pretty substantial understatement. So obviously nothing happened legally. We weren't prosecuted.

Still, the stink of scandal had fallen over our class, and the entire exemplary acolyte program ended up getting scuttled. They offered to transfer us to a regular course of our choosing, but most of us, including myself, ended up leaving the city altogether just to get away from the attention.

Of course, my unique perspective left me with some unique suspicions. The situation - the entire Inner Circle of the Order mysteriously dying in an incident, at surface level, as divine vengeance taken by the goddess of death - was an all-too-familiar one, especially when you considered the decapitation had left them without identifiable brains. It seemed all too likely that it was the scenario I'd experienced in the 'loop' playing out again, and that they'd faked their own deaths while using us as witnesses. The obvious conclusion was that they'd had that whole scene prepared in advance with substitute corpses somehow convincing enough to fool the authorities, though I still had no idea what the headmaster's role had been, much less how the hell they'd escaped.

Actually, that's understating the issue-- I had no idea about fucking anything. Why, if one could assume the conclave represented an aborted attempt to implement this same plan, had it been so important for our class specifically to be witness to their demise? Even if assuming they had the men of our class in their pocket like in the loop, I couldn't even see a means by which that could have helped with the way things played out, let alone enough to justify such an absurdly elaborate setup. I mean-- They'd been with us virtually the entire time. They couldn't have done anything meaningful. So surely there were simpler approaches.

And more pivotal than that was the question which had dominated the final moments in the loop before everything had gone to shit: What was even their motive for faking their deaths in the first place? Just what the hell was going on?

All I had was a suspicion borne of an impossible piece of evidence. It wasn't like I could go to the police, and with things as they were, pursuing my own investigation could end up getting me in serious trouble.

So, in the spirit of the direction it felt like I'd chosen for my life, I just... let it go again. I moved on. Tried not to think about it.

As for Neferuaten's envelope, it had indeed contained two messages: One from Samium, and one, presumably, from her.

The one from Samium was basically just an extended apology that reiterated a bunch of the points from our final conversation. He apologized for how he'd handled the conversation, and said he feared he'd come across as condescending or dismissive. He offered me a list of books I could read - mostly legal, but a couple that weren't - that could conceivably help me with my problem to a degree, though again stressed their limitations and the fact that nothing could ever fundamentally change, this time with an almost brutal sort of honesty. Finally, he suggested, since there was essentially no one else he was aware of in my exact position, that I outright lie about the nature of my assimilation failure and pretend to recall the old world, as he felt I could still find empathy and companionship if I sought out the underground community of Witches, since our state of being was ultimately similar.

I looked into the books, but they all seemed unhelpful, and the last bit of advice felt so thoughtless I found it outright annoying. Like, yeah. Go soothe the pain of living as a perpetual imposter by forging a bunch of relationships based on a lie! What a great idea. Asshole.

The second letter had been significantly more succinct insofar as it was not really a letter at all. Instead, it was just two lines of text.

The first line was a logic bridge address, specifically '1274-3309-4735-9509-1542'. Sending a summons to it produced no response.

The second line, which was at least clearly in her handwriting was, 'Should you come to fear death, return to the gateway to the Sanctuary. Here, you shall begin your journey, as Gilgamesh once did.'

I had no idea what to make of this, and frankly, the more time passed the less I cared. I didn't know what I felt about Neferuaten at this point, especially since we'd parted without me truly knowing if she was even alive or dead. I mean, she was probably dead at this point no matter what, but you know what I mean. I still thought she was a brilliant person, but as I'd grown older, I felt more and more strange about the relationship we'd had. I'd been driven into her arms largely due to the stress of my quest to save Shiko - being out in Mekhi, isolated even from Ran - and I'd felt like she'd given me exactly the sort of affection I'd needed at a time I was almost at my breaking point.

...but, you know, she had slept with a student who had only been an adult for a couple of years. And with the Order and everything surrounding it such an unanswered question, I couldn't shake the sense of having been somehow used. I'd thought we were close, but she hadn't even told me what her plans had been. It made me uneasy.

Anyway. After I'd returned to Oreskios, I finished with my doctorate just to have it done, then abandoned medicine altogether for a while, trying to pursue what I thought would make me happiest. I tried to follow Ran's advice, asking myself every day what Shiko would want and following that to its best conclusion. I ended up going to art school and learning how to illustrate, then after graduating, worked at a company that produced graphic novels, then later one that made animated dramas. I thought following what had been her biggest personal passion would make me feel fulfilled, and for a little while, it did.

However, as it turned out, I just wasn't very talented. I was okay, enough to serve as a rank-and-file employee producing work of decent quality, but I didn't have a good enough sense of visualization to truly stand out or pursue successful solo projects. The jobs became a grind, and all the joy drained away from the experience.

I decided, instead, to try and become as successful and famous as possible, to shine brightly in the way Shiko and I both had always wanted to in different ways. I went back to Thanatomancy, becoming a researcher. I made a number of discoveries and slowly worked my way up the ranks of scholarship, and indeed became extremely successful. Though I never reached the heights attained by the council members, at the peak of my career I was invited to be part of the Human Redesign Project, an endeavor put forward by the Old Yru Convention to significantly raise the human lifespan by performing the first set of fundamental alterations to the human body as a biological system since the collapse.

It took nearly 25 years, but in the end it went very well. We rebuilt a number of organs from the ground up, and ultimately succeeded in raising the mean lifespan by an estimated 80 years, as well as making the human body notably more durable and energetic in general - better metabolism and immune system, more efficient muscles, tougher bones. The Order and Kamrusepa would have been proud. Even if I'd only been a single member of a fairly large team, I got to stand on stage and get a medal from the First Administrator herself. (Fortunately, this was still about 10 years before they were consistently Idealists.)

By any metric, I was 'shining brightly'. I was standing at the absolute center of the world, acclaimed, if only in abstract, by all of humanity.

...yet, I just felt empty. It was completely separate from the feeling I'd imagined in my youth. I didn't feel loved or savored in any way that mattered, I didn't feel like I was cared about for the right reasons. And all the material rewards I received felt meaningless. And as the cherry on top, as the world fell more and more apart, I felt increasingly complicit in what it had become, in allowing the problem to fester further.

I'd become, in practice, the exact person I'd felt like Kamrusepa would grow into. Is that ironic? I think it's ironic.

I concluded what I'd really wanted, what I'd probably always yearned for since looking towards that horizon in my childhood, was to be seen. Not to just practice my passions, or to be superficially special. But to be loved for the things I cared about most, for the traits that came closest to the core of my selfhood.

But what was my selfhood? Who really was I, other than a shell I'd built up over a lifetime?

About halfway through my time as a careerist Thanatomancer, I'd put more effort into dating, which I'd previously avoided due to... well, I don't even know where to start. The fact that my entire identity was predicated on a dark and probably unforgivable secret I'd never told anyone about, and which confessing could subject both myself and the other person to legal and personal consequences? The fact that I had a distorted, pseudo-romantic relationship with my own body, that still left me ashamed and feeling callous when I did anything untoward with it? The fact that going through Induction had shattered my belief in humans even being capable of understanding one another?

I could go on. I didn't even know how to be emotionally and physically intimate with someone I saw as an equal. Even though I was over a century old, I still felt like just a kid.

But I tried.

While there was a veritable mountain of embarrassing false starts - 200 years is a long time, after all - I had three relationships that are really worth mentioning. The first, with a girl named Tatama who I'd met when I was still working as an illustrator and I'd hung out with off-and-on for decades, was an absolute disaster that hadn't even lasted 5 years. I didn't know how to moderate my craving for intimacy or my paranoia about her real feelings, and turned into an absolute nightmare person, becoming demanding and depressing in a way that, while not equal to my old self, still echoed that behavior to a harrowing degree. We'd had the most in common in terms of actual hobbies and interests, and she was so kind and patient with me. She always wanted to hear about my ideas for things I wanted to draw, and never made me feel foolish, even when I was acting ridiculous. But in the end, I exhausted her and pushed her away.

The second was Sapanbal, a woman who worked on the Human Redesign Project with me. We didn't have a lot in common in comparison besides our work, but got along because we both enjoyed intellectual and philosophical conversation and had both come from traumatic backgrounds. This time the relationship lasted longer, but ultimately fell apart when she realized, over time, that I was keeping things about myself from her and not truly opening up and making myself vulnerable. It ended strangely and bitterly, with her growing more and more resentful of my reservation, and myself frustrated at a situation where I couldn't give what she wanted. In the end, the relationship withered and disappeared, with me never even brave enough to demand hard confirmation that it was over at all.

Finally and most recently was Rekhetre, who I'd met once I'd more or less given up on pursuing a high-profile career and settled into a lecturing position in Tem-Aphat, and who I'd originally moved out to Deshur with. In a way, she was everything I'd thought was right for me in a partner. She was energetic, mature, and naturally upbeat, happy to asymmetrically play the role of emotional support and 'leader' of the relationship. We had a decent amount in common, too, both liking to over-analyze media and traveling in a lot of the same social and academic circles. We got along well, even if I didn't understand why. She took care of me, and seemed both to know and not mind that there was a part of me she never saw. That relationship lasted the longest.

...but in the end, it was for nothing. I still didn't feel the kind of connection I wanted. And after our relationship had settled into what felt like its terminal state, with us living together and working in low-stakes research positions at the local university, I started to feel more and more distant from her. She didn't really know me. It felt all of her kindness was being directed at a dummy I was merely standing next to.

It was then that I began to understand. Or maybe I should say that I started to accept what I'd really known for a long time.

When I'd arrived at that answer on my return to Itan all those years ago, I'd found a way to justify my own existence and live with myself. But not as a human being. My sense of self was still existentially compromised; I'd become an alien existence, only able to diffuse my never ending internal conflict by immersing myself in roles and narratives I no longer sincerely believed in, by dwelling within a fabrication of reality, a fabrication of self. All this time, I'd been just chasing memories of the goals held by Utsushikome and Kuroka, dreams forged by their real feelings.

But my present day self, deep down, had no coherent, realizable desires. I was still trapped in that moment I'd watched my grandfather die, caught in a puzzle that had no solution, only able to escape by simply not thinking about it.

So I'd crafted an increasingly elaborate shell. While the disjointed chimera that was my true 'self' had withered away.

One night, at the end, I'd got drunk enough to try confessing the truth to Rekhetre, throwing caution to the wind. Nowadays, with the government becoming openly authoritarian, the way cases of assimilation failure were treated had changed significantly. There was no acclimation therapy any more; if you confessed to having a set of foreign memories, you were liable to simply disappear. I'd got a message from Cheng Gue a few decades ago saying he was shredding all his patient records, though there was a tacit understanding the Oathguard wouldn't pursue historical cases so long as they kept their silences. Even looking for information about Witches like Ran and I had could get you in serious trouble.

But all the same, I'd more or less told her everything, rambling incoherently about it all for over an hour. Letting all my sins out in an act of final, reckless desperation, maybe as a proxy for never having had the courage to tell Ran all those years ago, even at the very end.

I don't even know if she'd taken me seriously; I strongly suspect she thought I was confessing something else through allegory. Still, she repeated many of the same things Samium had said; that I was young, that the whole situation sounded fucked-up, that whatever had happened wasn't my fault.

I felt nothing. It was empty.

I doubted even catharsis would be enough to actually unfuck things, but I understood now that I would never even get that, because what I wanted wasn't really sympathy. What I wanted was genuine understanding; someone who was trapped in the same hell, and my words would reach.

But unfortunately, the world is full of extremely specific hells. And a problem that cannot be solved eventually ceases to be a problem at all, and instead simply becomes a part of you, like a chronic illness. No matter how you might want to live, to defy your nature and push yourself again and again even if it hurts, your will eventually cracks. You adapt. You accept a more limited existence.

I gave up on the relationship not long after that. I moved out here - ostensibly to take time to 'think' - and ended up dedicating my days to doing that which felt natural and without friction. I didn't need other human beings. When I felt lonely, I told myself I had Shiko, and we were closer than anyone else could hope to be. And on the days when that notion disgusted me, I instead told myself that I knew from personal experience that all bonds between humans were fake and predicated on delusion anyway. And when that left me feeling bitter and lost, I abandoned any higher reasoning for my actions altogether, and simply told myself that I'd try again someday. Just after I'd rested a while.

I wasn't really happy. But... maybe that was okay. I felt peaceful. At ease. Perhaps that was enough.

In natural philosophy, it has long been understood that time and human will are illusions. All matter, all planes of existence man-made or otherwise (as man is himself a part of reality, and not an exception to it) originate from the Timeless Realm, the crystalline core of the universe of which all else is nothing but facets. Everything - an impossibly, unspeakably vast everything - exists, there, in a single, static moment, and what we interpret as causality is nothing but the turning of an already-written page. All perceived movement of matter is nothing but an extrapolation of its interplanar relationships.

There was never a choice. This was always the life that had awaited me.

I was what I was. I couldn't be anything else.

Or, well, so I said until about a day later.

𒊹

I played the new echo game, which was a historical strategy game based on the unification of Rhunbard following the Hollow Years, for several hours. It was too easy. I went into a discussion group on the logic sea I sometimes participated in and told a few people about it, prompting them to also complain. I sent Yu a funny observation I had about a drama we'd been discussing. I ate. Reluctantly, I spent a few hours looking at my lecture notes. I watched a few more episodes about the drama about superpowers, which got progressively more unwatchable. I went to bed.

I woke up. I browsed political feeds and got annoyed again. I watched another two episodes of the terrible drama, then remembered I had a routine medical checkup today. I ate, got dressed, and let the magnetic carriage drive me into town.

It was routine; mostly stuff I could have done myself. I checked in, sat in the lobby - a room that I could only describe as being in the uncanny valley of cozy decor, with furniture that tried to look like the inside of a hunting lodge but was all too clean-looking and precisely arranged - then got called in to the assessment run. They stuck me in a couple of machines, gave me my senolytic and immune system maintenance shots, then had me wait for the results. The doctor called me into her office for the short follow-up conversation that inevitably accompanied these visits.

But then something happened I did not expect.

"Miss Fusai," she said gravely, "I'm very sorry to have to tell you this, but I'm afraid your neurological sign has shown you to be exhibiting the precursor symptoms to complex associative collapse dementia."