dualshock desertbloom

That is, your apartment, back in Houston, crammed to bursting with your brother’s paraphernalia: old turntables and mixing equipment, posters plastered over the walls, stacks of vinyls, all kinds of cables tangled into impossible knots. Magazines, dusty fans, jewel cases with mismatched CDs, your puppets, your various swords. The windows are always open. It should make you uncomfortable, all of these unsecured entryways, but you also get the feeling that there is no reason to close them, except to keep the birds out.

White birds, mostly. That’s new. Or it isn’t. The ocean outside doesn’t look like any ocean you’ve ever seen. The clouds are strange, cut-out shapes. The sun and the moon tick through the sky like clockwork. Sunrise and sunset paint themselves up by inches.

But the heat is the same. You’d know that heat anywhere. It’s how you know you’re home, even if you’re dead.

At least, that’s the conclusion you arrived at a few days into this. You are – and this you know with resounding certainty – dead. You remember a lot of things, vaguely: You were in the middle of something. You were trying to find someone. You were flying above an empty green field with a single home, smoke curling from its chimney. You can’t seem to recall where you were going.

But this is the sort of weird that you only know from dream bubbles, and from the strange disjunction of your memories, you reckon it’s probably based on your life. There are very few shared memories connecting anyone to this place. Your brother could come in, maybe. He hasn’t.

You don’t find that you are particularly lonely, even though no one’s ever online. Old habits die hard. Your entire connection is out, actually, but something tells you that it’s not supposed to be fixed. You try anyway, just to fuck around and put your brain to work before it chews off its own leg in boredom. Even if you are dead, and in a dream bubble, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to be of assistance to your party, somehow, and you do want to know how they’re doing, but it’s not like you can track their progress until you figure out how to get around the way the bubble restricts native outgoing signals. So you pop the case on your computer and slap the metal arms of your chair to discharge any static you might have gathered up, and do some diagnostics.

The only thing that stops you from getting into the guts of your transmission apparatus is remembering, very suddenly, that Harley died a long, long time ago, and the other two will have kicked it by now. You kicked it, too, a while back. The Game is over for you. You are waiting for your bubble to pop, and then that will be it.

You stare at the breadboard inside your PC tower, and put your screwdriver down. You snap the case back on, and stand up, and you don’t touch the computer anymore.

But, again, you’re used to this, and aside from the occasional twinge of nostalgia, it’s not really an issue. You just don’t touch the computer. Life goes on. Sun follows moon, inch by inch.

This is fine until something starts to bother you. You aren’t sure what it is, at first.

Just a feeling.

Just that sometimes you stumble like you’re off-balance, a little bit, or that you look up and things are in a slightly different place than you expect them to be. Like the world shifts down when you’re not looking. Weird. That didn’t used to happen, you think. It’s been a long time, though.

A long time since what?

The thought pops into your head, unbidden. It kind of spooks you, to be honest, because you don’t understand it. A long time since what? Where the fuck are you? This isn’t your apartment. The sky is wrong.

The hairs on the back of your neck stand straight up. You take a deep breath and clench your fists.

Your name is Dirk Strider. You’re seventeen years old. You’re in your apartment in Houston, in some kind of fucked-up afterlife, and you’re waiting, you guess, just doing whatever it is that ghosts do in dream bubbles, until someone comes along to mix things up. Working on old projects, keeping fit, watching movies, eating centuries-old instant ramen for no other reason than morbid curiosity. Or habit. Might be that you’re supposed to be doing it. Something like that.

You take another deep breath and ground yourself, and it’s fine.

Except that it keeps happening.

You’re in the bathroom and your hand goes for something that isn’t there. Razor. You open the medicine cabinet to retrieve your electric shaver.

You’re on the roof, stretching out before you start your routine, and all of a sudden your limbs look alien, too short, skin too tanned, freckles standing out like accusations. It makes your skin crawl like it doesn’t fit, like you’re about to molt your own body. But you pause, re-center yourself, and the feeling goes away.

You’re repairing a torn seam on one of the puppets to fill orders and some part of you absently notes that you should schedule server maintenance soon and what servers. You have to put the puppet down because your hands are starting to shake because you don’t know. You don’t know what servers.

And suddenly you can’t shake the feeling that these thoughts are being injected into your head. Usually, you have such a painstakingly detailed grasp of everything that goes on in your brain that it drives you a little nuts, so this…

But there’s no one else here.

Your name is Dirk Strider, and you’re seventeen years old, and sun follows moon, inch by inch. You take a deep breath again and you’re okay.

All of the others are dead. But you’re okay. You’ve always been by yourself, except for Cal, and, well, he doesn’t really count anymore, not now that you’ve had a good helping of the real deal.

You are handling things pretty well, considering.

Then you have a dream, and in the dream you see the bright green eyes of someone you thought was dead, someone you never met, but you have met this guy, you know his buck-toothed smile, the short-sleeved green shirt he wears unbuttoned, his bitten-down fingernails. God, what’s his name? Harley? Harley’s dead. Harley’s been dead for a long fuckin’ time and you never met him and he never gave a fuck about you. But Harley leans his head against your shoulders and twines his fingers with yours and it’s so familiar and you know that the sunburst in your chest went out a long time ago and this, all of this is dead, but—

You sit up straight, eyes wide open.

“Fuck,” you say out loud, heavy on the labiodental fffff and the plosive k, voice still hoarse with sleep. “Jake. Jake English.”

His name is Jake English. How the fuck did you forget Jake? You spent so much time thinking about him. Created such a fucked-up complex about everything he meant to you. Still means to you. The only Harley you personally know is Jade, the Witch from the Beta session, and whatever her current status might be, she wasn’t dead before you died. Which means, logically, that… well, shit, you don’t know what it means.

Or. Or. It means that they’re not dead, that you’re not dead, and that maybe this isn’t a dream bubble. The only condition you are relatively certain of is the first, that your friends are still alive out there, somehow, or at least you can’t confirm that they’re dead. And you’ve been sitting around doing absolutely fuck-all for the better part of, well, however much time has passed, enough weeks for time to coagulate into months. But you were so certain that each and every one of them had chomped down hard on that dust. You remember knowing that, for a fact, you were the last one. That Harley, or Jade, died years and years ago, before the Game even started.

But she’s fucking alive, right? So who could it be? The only other version of her you know about died in your session, but she was ancient when she bit it. You didn’t know about her before meeting Jake, and she was technically an English, besides. So, not the alive Harley, not the Condesceased English. Not Jake. Come on, Dirk, think.

Okay. Jade’s guardian, maybe, because you can remember a couple of times when someone’s referred to Grandpa Harley or came up with some bizarre nickname for Jake. Your bro and Roxy’s mom died hundreds of years ago, and you know Jake met a similar end in the other session. Not much beyond that, though. You’ve spoken to Jade about – well, you’re not actually sure you’ve conversed with Jade at all about this, actually. Or, if you have, your defective fucking brain has dropped that particular interaction down one of the mnemonic oubliettes that now apparently riddle the thing like holes in Swiss cheese, and you may never retrieve it.

It’s the middle of the night, still. You know that instinctually. Rain is drumming against your window, lit up white-edged and glowing by the comically-oversized moon that peeks through the cartoon clouds. You roll out of bed and stand up, switching on the lights before you give your eyes a good, hard rub.

You’ve been in this place before. Maybe not this exact place. But it’s familiar, the feeling of three in the morning, eyes throbbing, the weird tension at the back of your head that rolls down from your shoulders to your back. The vibrating need to do something. So you and pop the case on your computer, and get back to work, cross-legged on the floor and surrounded by a mess of tiny components the size of your thumbnail, checking your achingly slow progress by running occasional tests on your laptop.

By the time you get to the point where you’re driving yourself up the wall about a hundred different little problems, the sun has gone down again, and you haven’t had time to think. You go out into the kitchen to pour yourself a cup of water, because it’s not like you’re going to be any good to your friends as a desiccated corpse. (Well, stranger things have happened, you guess.)

If they have any inkling that you still exist, Roxy’s probably on the case already, which would usually comfort you – you like working alongside her, or at least meeting her in the middle of a project – but you find yourself a little resentful, too, because she’s not—

Aren’t you over this by now? She’s not here. Of course she isn’t here. You’re fucking dead, and she (probably, hopefully) isn’t. But… you know. You never did too well by yourself, despite what you’d thought at the beginning of everything. Too much time in isolation sends you straight back to your old thought patterns, treading paths so well-worn that they threaten to give out beneath your feet at any moment, plunging you into your next spiral.

So that’s another thing you have to add to the list of things to keep track of in the afterlife, or whatever this is: the brain that just won’t goddamn quit.

The weird physical sensations have pretty much stopped. There’s not exactly a guide on how to survive the transition into being dead; you figure there’s probably a troubleshooting period where the Game is adjusting the environment dynamically, custom-fitting it to your particular neuroses. You just kinda hope there aren’t any more growing pains, because the dissociative sensation of being in a body that doesn’t look the way you remember it is, well, not fun.

The problem doesn’t quite go away, though. And you have a theory as to why.

Your brain is restless, as always, but even more so now that you’re not-dead or whatever. And isn’t this the perfect time to try to do some spring cleaning? To get rid of all the parts of you that hate the other parts? You’re picking at yourself, like when you used to peel dead skin off of your sunburned arms, because you’re bored out of your skull and you don’t like yourself very much. There’s always the itch to do some pruning.

And, really, once the idea worms its way into your head, you can’t let go of it: you can finally take a step back from your hypercritical, controlling functions, and pretend they’re someone else’s problem. When the urge to pick-pick-pick comes along, you can comfortably dissociate, because you can simply say that whatever it is, it’s not you. You’re taking responsibility for all the things that are you, that you want to be, and whatever that is – obsessive-compulsive, controlling, super-fastidious – you don’t want it. So you don’t take it.

That works for a while. You open a pack of ramen, corral a stray thought into the not-you zone. Practice your forms on the roof, push away your unjustified resentment. Watch a movie, firmly refuse to think about your dead friends or your save state. After a few days, it becomes as easy as breathing.

Eventually this conceptual other-you, impulsive and agitated and perfectionistic, repels you so much that you feel like you’re sharing a body with him. You are, but consciously you understand that you’re the same person.

Doesn’t feel like it, though.

Feels like you’re trying to pick a splinter out from under your skin. Rough, irritating, inflaming. That’s what you’re doing – splintering yourself, again. What absolute bullshit.

There’s no one around, though. No one except you. So you dig your psychological fingernails around the splinter and try to find its edges.

It protests the most when you get to your memories. That’s interesting. Your mind twists at your memory of Roxy because you don’t know Lalonde. You’re also suddenly, nauseatingly confident that she’s dead. And you’re alone, as always.

But that’s not fucking true, is it. Or at least you deserve the chance to find out whether it is.

Your splinter seems to disagree; makes sense, because you poured everything about you that is disagreeable into him. Your fear of abandonment, your latent death wish, your self-hatred and the toolbox of shitty coping mechanisms that come with it. That’s him, now, and you’d feel cruel and capricious for consigning him to a life with a brain that constantly shits the bed, but you also couldn’t give less of a fuck right now.

He gets his own memories, too. Cal, Dave, a Houston burning up under an unforgiving sun. A variation on a theme. You, mixed up, jumbled around, puzzle pieces shuffled into unrecognizability. Your imagination running hogwild on things Dave told you about his Houston, the one that looked kind of like the one your brother must have known. The Houston you know from video clips and photographs and movies, as far away from your reality as you can get it.

Your Houston.

But not yours. The Houston that was destroyed during the Reckoning. A Houston that only exists in someone’s memory, now.

God, you miss that piece of shit.

You want this splinter gone, because you are tired, so tired of being reminded of old thoughts and stupid fantasies, shitty memories and bad habits. So you push your nails in, resist the temptation to dwell on a dead Harley and a dead Lalonde, resist poking around in the part of you that wants so badly to be dead. You focus as hard as you can on your Jane, your Jake, your Roxy, their features, their doofy god-tier outfits. You can picture the gentle curls of Jane’s hair almost perfectly in your mind’s eye.

But you can’t and you don’t remember that. Even though you’re remembering it right this instant.

She’s dead – she’s been dead for a billion years, basically.

These are your thoughts, but you don’t want them. You ran through this shit on your alpha playthrough already. There is no reason you should be falling prey to these same insecurities again, and if it takes partitioning your fragmented disk drive of a brain to get rid of them, then so fucking be it, because you are so tired of being the same person with the same fractured mind, unable to stop second-guessing every moment of friendship you’ve ever had. You slam against it, pry it out of its place, trying to knock it away from the rest of you.

They don’t give a fuck about you. That’s the way the Game is played.

You drive that chisel into the rock of your brain again, around the parts of you that you are finally rejecting, that’s not true, and that makes a neat split, a crack all around, a psychic schism. And it works.

It works in a way that you didn’t expect, but doesn’t surprise you in the least. You’re still a Prince, after all. You have always been good at breaking yourself apart.

Your unwanted self dislodges and begins to fall away. It doesn’t hurt, but the sensation makes your skin crawl and your stomach try to evacuate itself, like something is sliding out of your body, like you’re just a cocoon and whatever was inside you has pupated, slithering down, leaving you an empty shell.

You half-expect there to be blood in your eyes and mouth, but there isn’t, although your stomach is still doing its very best kickflips. You end up tripping over your own feet and falling back on your ass, vision swimming, nausea cranking your salivary response. It takes a couple of swallows to get both of those things under control again.

When you collect yourself and lift your head from your knees, you’re looking at yourself, sprawled out on the floor in a heap of ungainly limbs.

Huh. Not yourself, entirely.

It – he, maybe – is older, or at least more physically mature, from what you can guess, a little taller, and with more muscle mass. Same pale hair, same face, although sharper and more lined. Same outfit, actually. You wonder how the fuck you managed to cough him up with clothes on. There’s no tattoo on his shoulder, and you don’t have as many scars on your arms, but they certainly look like he got them the same way you did. Maybe he also has a katana in his sylladex.

Well, it looks like you went ahead and generated your Beta session self. It feels very much like there’s some serious #incl<stdio.dirk> going on.

You stand up, nudge it/him with your foot. No response. You bite the inside of your lip. Holy shit, did you really just full-body-puke up a temporally-displaced clone of yourself through the sheer power of petulance? Can your brain ever leave itself the fuck alone, or are you just doomed to repeat this insane Jungian drama of the ego over and over until your bubble pops and you wink mercifully out of existence? You didn’t get Hal back, and there’s no AR and no ghost, so this time it’s just pure, unadulterated you. You, and your twin-by-carcinectomy.

And, well, he’s prone and unconscious, and it’s not like you’ve forgotten what Dave said, about his “training,” his cruelty, his absolute self-assurance. You’re not sure you’re ready to deal with a splinter you created out of your greatest fears and some kind of fucked up guilt over someone else’s shitty childhood. Maybe it’d just be better to—

He stirs in the middle of your monologue, cutting off your train of thought. You watch with morbid fascination as his eyes open, half-lidded, wandering around the room as if trying to get his bearings. Same color as yours, of course.

Then his gaze lands on you, and he scowls faintly, closing his eyes again, and says, at a decent volume, with a voice deeper than yours, “Ah, jesus christ.”

You’d be offended if you weren’t also pretty unhappy to see yourself.

He is still lying on the floor, sulking or rebooting or something, when you leave him to go chill in your room, extremely not in the mood to deal with more splinter bullshit. If you’re going to be trapped in a dream bubble, or some esoteric subset of n-dimensional space, or whatever the hell this is (well, maybe it’s hell), then you’re definitely not going to dive right into the combat portion. You’ve earned that right, if any.

Maybe you should have locked the door, though, because after about an hour, the knob turns and he’s standing in your doorway with a blank expression. You look up from the knot of cables you’re trying to untangle.

“What?”

He stares at you for a couple of seconds, face still completely unreadable, then just makes a kind of huh noise, and closes the door again. You feel like you’ve been assessed.

Usually, your splinters can’t shut up. They’re like sharks, almost – gotta keep the self-sabotage pumping or drown. But, besides your brain ghost, you wrote and debugged every line of code the others were made of, and you did sort of eject this one out of your own body with no prior testing and no QC, so it stands to reason he’d be different in a bunch of different ways.

There is also the fact that you have apparently modelled this splinter to look and act exactly like the image in your head that you have of Dave’s guardian, because you apparently have some hidden depths of self-loathing to plumb for a few final ontological nuggets. You chiseled out every part of you that you are afraid of, and gave it the face of your cross-dimensional brother’s childhood abuser, who also happens to be you, cross-dimensionally- and genetically-speaking.

You would be glad that none of your friends are here to comment on this, because it doesn’t take Rose to figure out what’s going on, but you just end up feeling faintly sad that none of your friends are here at all. You’d appreciate the company.

At least your memory of beating the Game has returned to the foreground, intact. You don’t have to rush to solve the puzzle of your entrapment to save them, probably. But you don’t particularly want to be here, either. You kind of desperately want to get back to planning the infrastructure of the Consort kingdom with Jane.

Yeah. You remember most of it, now. The life you all started together after the Game rewarded you with a clean slate. The life you suddenly left. And you can’t remember why, because whenever you stumble across your memories, you know that you were closer to happiness than you’ve ever been.

It’s always easier, these days, not to think about that.

When you finally leave your room again, he’s sitting cross-legged in front of the TV, sorting through the piles of Xbox games, muttering to himself.

“Hey,” you say, guarded.

He ignores you. You become a little less guarded.

“Hey, dickhead.”

He doesn’t look at you. “Shut the fuck up.”

Well. That’s not the retort you were expecting. You lean on the doorframe, hand on your hip. “Got a name?”

A noncommittal grunt.

“Or I could just keep calling you dickhead.”

That, for some reason, finally gets him to glance up at you, his fingers cracking one of the neon green cases open. His expression is half frustration and half… revulsion, maybe. “What’d I fuckin’ say.” He looks like absolute garbage, by the way, despite having only been puked out like four or five hours ago. Maybe you ejected your insomnia, too. That’d be nice.

“Right back at you.”

“Y’know,” he starts, and then stops. He shuffles a disk between cases, pressing his lips together. “Whatever.”

Wow, he’s testy. All the other splinters were yapping your ear off from the get-go. “What crawled up your ass to die an ignominious fucking death?”

He’s outright scowling now. It looks like how your frown feels, but more forceful. Concentrated. He pops a shuriken out of a TURBO RAD RALLY II case and tosses it on the carpet. “This place’s dirty as. You’d think if the Game decided to turn all this into beach-front property, it’d put some elbow grease in and clean the place up.”

Huh, okay. Maybe you misjudged this one. He’s totally rambling. You step forward, cautious, putting a hand on the corner of the mixing console. “Maybe you should’ve cleaned it when you were alive,” you suggest.

He rolls his eyes. “You really think I’m gonna learn anythin’ from gettin’ Scrooged.”

“What the fuck are you even talking about,” you say, because the point is absolutely not the amount of shitty Very Special Christmas Episodes you watched throughout your self-designed 21^st Century Cultural Studies curriculum. It is that he apparently doesn’t know know who the hell you are.

“Look,” he says, staring up at you. He doesn’t seem as irritated as he’s been letting on, just… on edge, tired, impatient, you don’t know. He’s proving kind of hard to pin down, despite being literally you. That’s a challenge you didn’t anticipate, but probably should have, in hindsight. “If you’re plannin’ on some kinda shitty morality play, or whatever, I’m not interested. Leave me the fuck alone.”

“There’s not exactly anywhere for me to go, dude. All of Houston’s underwater now.” While you are telling the truth, you’re also very interested in what exactly your newest splinter thinks is going on. There’s a 95% chance he thinks that you are his splinter, actually.

Either way, he is not being particularly kind to you. But, then again, you can’t be accused of showing particular kindness to any of your alternate selves.

“Great, so I’m stuck listening to you whine for the rest of eternity or whatever bullshit. Ain’t it just like this dumbass game to fuck up something simple as takin’ the dog out behind the shed.”

Your eyebrows are trending upwards. “What were you expecting?”

He picks up a stack of cases in one hand and starts opening them up, one by one. “I expected to be dead. And goddamn unbotherable. Yet here I am. And here you are, botherin’ me.”

To be honest, you thought your imagination would be a lot more active than this. It gives you a little bit of hope. This might turn out to be a manageable splinter, after all. You had this picture in your brain of a monstrous version of you, every destructive impulse and narcissistic tendency blown up in painstaking detail, some kind of Godzilla-tier villain. He just seems, well, like a grumpy asshole. You’re glad your newest brainchild didn’t follow your exact instructions.

But then again, it could just be your imagination being right instead of properly creative. You’ve watched enough Hallmark cinema to be able to identify the most human kind of monster.

And you, you maniac, cannot resist poking it. “Who do you think I am, exactly?”

He rolls his eyes. “Whatever double bluff you’re tryna pull is dead in the fuckin’ water already, so can it, asshole.”

“No double bluff,” you say, hand on heart. “Just curious.”

“Like anyone gives two shits about your curiosity.”

“I’m the only other person here, so I’d rate my personal shit-giving at about a four point five out of five, but I’m no Olympic Committee.” You watch him, but he ignores you. “Come on. I'll stop nagging you.”

He groans with not a little melodrama and stretches his arms over his head, cracking the joints in his elbows and shoulders. It’s fucking grisly. “Fine. Jesus. You’re Dirk ‘Fuckface’ Strider, you’re about fifteen years old, and you’re a pain in my fuckin’ neck, as per. That good enough for you.”

“Seventeen, but close,” you say, and that makes him freeze, for some reason. You get the distinct feeling that you’ve given yourself away, even though you never pretended to be anyone else.

In a split second, he’s over the couch, and his hand is wrapped around your lower jaw, pulling your face up for examination, all before you have time to react. You thrash out of his grip, a protest on your lips, but he grabs your left arm instead and stares at it, eyes searching your skin. You can guess what he’s thinking, because you’re thinking it, too – your nose is too straight, and the scars don’t match.

Then he drops it like he’s been burnt, and yes, you were right, he does have a katana, and it looks exactly as rad as yours, by which you mean it looks like a piece of shit but you love it. You are almost as fast on the draw, a half-step backward putting your hitbox just outside his immediate range.

“Who the fuck are you,” he snarls.

You give him a look, training your sword on his centerline. Of all people, he should be able to read you through the sunglasses. “I’m you. Dickhead.”

“No, you’re not.” He shifts his grip. “Dickhead.”

“I literally just coughed you up like a gigantic clot of anthropomorphic phlegm. You’re my splinter. Or do you not remember being in my brain for the past however-the-fuck-long?”

A stare. “You’re insane.”

You can work with that. “Have you looked outside?”

“The hell does that have to do with anything.”

“That’s my Houston,” you say firmly, only half-lying. “After your players scratched their session, the universal remix put the city underwater by the time I reached my entry point. It’s not a dream, it’s the post-apocalypse.”

He points the tip of the katana down and away, straightening up, but he’s still suspicious. High alert, this guy. “So they did end up scratching it.”

“Yup. And I’m the remixed version of you.” Well, kind of. “The real you, though. Strictly speaking, you are a remix of me, what with being my splinter and all.”

“Okay, see, that’s where you’re losing me again, with the bullshit.”

You shrug, resting the flat of the katana on your shoulder. Look how non-threatening you’re being. Just the most harmless dude in the world. “You’re entitled to an opinion, bro, but the fact is that you’re going to be stuck here for a while. So I’d appreciate it if you didn’t act like a fuckin’ menace while we ride it out.”

He curls his lip when you call him bro, but the katana blips out of meatspace and presumably back into his sylladex. He shoves his left hand into the pocket of his jeans. You get the up-and-down again, a kind of tsk and the impression of impatience, and then he vanishes.

Manageable, your ass. He might be the most immediately insufferable asshole you’ve created yet.

You don’t see him at all over the next few days, but he does leave a trail of… well, he leaves a trail. Your smuppets move from place to place, you find the menu screen of Halo 3 unnervingly glitched out on the TV, there are empty bowls of instant ramen on the roof, and there are shuriken on the fucking kitchen floor what the fuck. You almost slice your foot open on one of them when trying to captchalogue some more Crush, which is when you decide that you do not like this guy.

Not that you were ever going to like him in the first place, when you have so much trouble liking any version of yourself at all, but you could have at least hoped for a neutral start.

The second time you almost grievously injure yourself because you are not used to his organization schema (read: just leaving his shit everywhere, like a god damn animal, you have never met anyone more committed to earning the epithet beast of burden, not even Tavros fucking Nitram) is not coincidentally the time you actually go out and try to find him.

Try being the operative word. He’s not on the roof, he’s not in the hallway, he’s not in the crawlspace, he’s not in the living room, he’s not in the bathroom. And he’s certainly not in your fucking bedroom. You take an extra look at the iron struts that keep your house above the waves, but he’s not down there, either. You almost do not see the throwing knife lying flat in the stairwell.

You get the distinct feeling that you’re being fucked with. Typical splinter.

Eventually, he lets you find him, or at least that’s the impression he gives you. He’s finally actually playing the Xbox instead of leaving the game skipping in the drive to annoy you, messing with some Grand Snacks Fuckyeah ripoff that you definitely didn’t have in your session. He’s wearing a cap and pointy shades of indeterminate origin. You haven’t noticed anything going missing from your personal wardrobe, so either they’re his, or you need to take inventory again.

He’s hunched over, holding the controller in a claw grip. Finally, someone who gets it. Dave always hounds you for your weird fuckin’ goblin hand shit.

Because you think it’ll annoy him (because you know it’d annoy you), you hop over the back of the couch and plop yourself down right next to him. He absolutely doesn’t acknowledge you, which tells you that he has noticed you and does not like it.

“Sup,” you say, twisting your head to telegraph the intention of making direct eye contact, which you definitely don’t like but are willing to use in order to fuck with him. His mouth flattens almost imperceptibly. You are already worming your way under his skin and it is hilariously easy. “What are you playing?”

He doesn’t say anything for a minute, sends his little skater guy clipping through the floor of the level until he starts falling endlessly into the skybox. But when it’s apparent you won’t leave, he says, “Some old shit.”

The case says MAD SNACKS YO. “Huh. I didn’t have this game. In my session.”

“That so.”

You lean back, tucking your arms behind your head. “We didn’t have a lot of the things you did. Dave and I compared notes.”

His fingers pause on the controller for an entire quarter-second before he starts fiddling with the menu settings again. “Mm-hm.”

“Both of our universes have Faygo,” you say.

The controller clacks away. He says nothing.

“But yours didn’t survive long enough for Party Rock Anthem.”

Clack, clack.

“Wish we’d had Obama instead of the Mirthful fucking Executives.”

He hits the pause button and drops back against the couch, crossing one ankle over his knee. You can see him blink hard a couple of times, keeping his eyes trained strictly forward. It might take a few minutes, but he has something to say, and you’re going to wait with your arms figuratively crossed and your left foot figuratively jackhammering the floor.

Finally, he speaks, still not looking at you. “Did you win?”

That tiny bit of inflection makes you feel very, very smug. “Yeah. We got everyone through alive. Ain’t that somethin’?”

“So why are you here.”

You shrug. “I thought I was dead, for a while. I was convinced. But now I’m not so sure. I can’t remember dying.”

“That was me,” he says dourly. “In your head. I remember it.”

“Okay. So you admit that you’re my splinter.”

“Nah.” He shrugs. “I ain’t you. No two ways about it. I had my life. ’Sides, you, as a player, can’t do this to a non-player.”

You pick up the other Xbox controller, running your thumbs over the buttons and sticks. God, you haven’t played an actual game in a long time. Too busy with construction projects and landscaping and group therapy and whatnot. “Can’t do what?”

“Resurrection,” he says, navigating back to the menu. The title MAD SNACKS YO pulsates in vibrant, artifacted orange. Once the console recognizes your controller, you pick a random map, and the screen splits to let you play side-by-side. “We get one shot. So even if I am a construct, I’m not yours.”

“Right,” you snort. “I’m your splinter.”

“Fuck, no. Got no idea why I’d make a totty dickshit version of myself. The original’s enough.”

“Well, that’s great, because I dunno why I’d make an asshole litterbug version of myself, either.” He shoots you a look, brief and caustic, and you shrug. “Don’t mess with Texas, dude. You should know better.”

Neither of you are particularly focused on the goals of the level – collect ten MAD SNACKS and the letters C-O-O-L-K-I-D from the tops of various skate obstacles – because after hundreds of hours, intended gameplay gets kind of stale. You remember being able to jam yourself into the side of the halfpipe and launch yourself through the rest of the level full-ragdoll style in Fuckyeah, but the commands or the angles are different in this one, and all you do is wobble up and down like a dork. Embarrassing. Highly uncool.

“Is this your reward,” he says after a while. “Sucks ass, if I’m gonna be honest.”

“Nah. There’s a whole world out there, somewhere. I thought it was a dream bubble, at first, but this is a little too wacky for that. I don’t even know if the world we landed in has dream bubbles.”

He hums tonelessly. “And you don’t think you’re dead.”

“Ninety percent sure.”

“So how’d you get here, then.”

You shrug. “I don’t remember.”

“Fuckin’ useful.”

“You’re not any better. How did you get here?”

He shatters his poor little dude’s model. It’s just a mess of writhing polygons now. “I was dead, I was dreaming, I woke up on the floor. That’s it, from my point of view.”

You poke the bear again. “How did you die, anyway?”

The bear is poked. “Fuck do you need to know that for.”

“I just want to know what kind of ending I made up for you. Now that you’re not in my brain anymore, I don’t think I remember what it was.”

He gives you a withering stare out of the corner of his eye. “Why don’t you take a guess.”

You suck in a deep breath through your mouth and hold it while you think. There’s reason to believe everyone’s cloneselves had some kind of narrative continuity – Dave and SBaHJ, for example, or Roxy and her wizards, Jane and Crockercorp. The way they interacted with their roles turned out pretty fucking different, but still archetypically similar: daughters defying their mothers, boys looking for adventure, children growing up alone.

“You don’t seem like the kind of guy who’s into revolution,” you quip on the exhale, “but it wouldn’t surprise me if you tried to tackle a boss with Roxy and got fucked up anyway.”

“Is that what you woulda done.”

“Maybe. If I’d played your session, at least.”

“Well, that’s nice to know,” he says, falsely saccharine and genuinely mean, a true Southern gentleman. You can’t remember if Dave told you how he died, and your fantasy version of events is consistently unreliable. Doesn’t seem fair that he keeps it a secret, though. But place-voicing-manner of death and all that are personal subjects, you think, and so you decide not to push it directly, even if you want to. Even if you should, because he doesn’t deserve your consideration.

“I died plenty of times,” you offer. “So did Dave.”

You weren’t sure if that was a soft spot before now, but you’re pretty sure it is. Just not the kind of soft spot you were expecting, probably. He scowls. “Not when it mattered. You got out eventually.”

“Just because it wasn’t permadeath doesn’t mean it didn’t matter, dude. It’s hard to enjoy the spoils of war when your sleep hygiene goes to shit.”

“Fuck you, ‘sleep hygiene.’ You’re tellin’ me you’re capable of sleeping on the regular with bags like that.”

“I mean for other people,” you say pointedly. “Who are post-traumatic.”

He rolls his eyes. “Just skate, why don’t you.”

You both sit there in grim silence until your guy gets stuck in a bench and he manages to fling his guy up into the stratosphere where the camera can’t follow. The Xbox chokes and dies. You get up to make some instant ramen.

When you turn around, he’s gone again.

The next morning, you find a spot of blood in the bathroom, on the lip of the sink. That’s confirmation that he doesn’t use the shaver, because he’s a contrarian asshole. You wipe up the tiny stain, wrinkling your nose. Even if he’s you, that doesn’t make this not a biohazard.

You can almost see Jane wince and stick her tongue out in disgust. And that almost makes you smile.

It’s fucked up that either of you need to shave, anyway. Nothing changes outside. You’re not even sure time actually passes in any meaningful way. No matter how much Sunkist you stick in your sylladex, it never seems to make a dent in the stash your bro left for you.

At least the empty cups of ramen stack neatly and compactly. You used to repurpose them for fishing traps and prototype models. When you were really little, you used to make them into boats.

Look, you’re a messy guy. You’ll admit that. You have left many a be-rumpéd, coquettishly phallic plush guy lying around. You have left piles of Xbox games on the floor. You have not made your bed, ever. You weld in your bedroom, for christ’s sake. But you have tamed your organizational chaos. You have a system. It’s not like you had the benefit of a municipal sanitation system, much less a dumpster, so you had to find ways to keep the house functional. And since you lived alone, with the nearest living person a thousand miles away, you had to be able to find your shit in case of emergency.

Therefore you feel completely entitled to judge this motherfucker for his littering, unhygienic, rude-ass ways. The first time you open the fridge to find a shitty, shitty bundle of unsecured swords and not your normal store of sewing materials, you have half a mind to take one and shank him with it. You have never been exceptionally particular about someone getting up in your space, but this guy has made it his personal mission to press all of your piss-off buttons, apparently. He’s just plinking his splintery Ghost in the Shell robo-fingers all over the microswitches of your Qanba Irritating Neurosis™ Edition fightstick. Fuck this dude.

You’re not scared of him. Maybe you were apprehensive at first, because his reputation preceded him, to say the least, but apparently he is, indeed, you, which isn’t surprising, and, predictably, you hate his fucking guts. He’s an inconsiderate asshole who makes conversation feel like strifing and uses his aloof demeanor to, well, demean. You’re pretty sure he sees you primarily as an annoying little tag-along mini-him.

Well. Whatever. He can fuck off and die. You’re not taking the bait and babysitting your splinters again, ethics be damned. You’ve been paying attention in group therapy, Rose, you can be irresponsible if you want.

After a couple of days doing whatever the hell it is he does, he comes to you, finally, and you wish he hadn’t, because you’ve had it up to your neck with his shitty unwanted-roommate etiquette and you’re about to blow your top off. You’re in the middle of fixing up an old Brobot exo, tightening some bolts and buffing out some scratches. Other menial shit. Normally you’d do this in the living room or on the roof, because you don’t like to sand where you sleep, but the rest of the house is currently Schrödinger’s Ocupado by a gigantic piece of shit.

You’ve also been stewing in your irritation, a little bit.

He’s standing in the doorway, weirdly hesitant about coming into your room. What the fuck. It’s not like he’s been big on respecting your shared spaces before now.

“What do you want,” you grunt, inspecting a busted rivet. Fuck, you’re probably going to have to remove this, huh? That’s what you get for shipping these guys overseas. And over time.

“Just thinkin’,” he says, voice strangely light. He perches on the end of your bed, across the room from you, hunched over to look at your work. “You keep saying I’m your splinter. What exactly does that mean.”

You glare up at him. “It means you’re a non-alpha version of Dirk Strider. For you, specifically, it means you’re a simulacrum constructed from the worst parts of my personality and a bunch of stories Dave told me about his brother-father, as well as what I’m sure is a potent combination of latent desires to improve my character and any number of other moral projects I can’t name off the top of my unfortunately benighted head.”

“Okay,” he says, with an intonation that clearly means he thinks you’re overreacting. “I don’t think that’s a convincing theory, what with me having a couple of decades’ worth of mnemonic inventory that you don’t, and all.”

You set a chisel next to the head of a rivet, planting your foot on the Brobot’s chassis, and with a few blows of the hammer, you chip off its head. “Look, you can say all of these things, and you can have a goddamn subjective character of experience, and I’m not denying that you’re an – independent organism, or whatever. But you’re never going to convince me that you’re not an outgrowth of my own imagination, especially because I cleanly barfed you the fuck up.”

He shrugs. “Is there gonna be a problem if I don’t believe you.”

“Not as big as the problem you’re going to eat if I have to keep picking your shit up off the roof.” You knock the head off of another rivet.

Out of the corner of your eye, you see him stretch out his arms as you work. You’re not sure where he got that polo from. Maybe he has all that shit stored in his sylladex.

“You’re a solipsistic sonovabitch,” he notes in the pause when you move on to the next rivet. “Ain’t that kind of selfish, denying me my own point of origin?”

“Your point of origin is yourself, and therefore also me, dunkass.”

“No matter what oroborousian ectoscratch shenanigans may link us,” and he says this with not a small amount of distaste, “it seems kind of fucked up to insist that I have a false experience of my own life and universe simply on the basis of your tendency to create splinters.”

“What, you want me to lie to you and tell you I didn’t midwife you out of my own fucked-up brain?” You set your chisel at the head of the last rivet. “Isn’t it more cruel to let you labor under the pretension that you’re not what you are? To let you think you’re the Beta session’s Dirk Strider, with his fucked-up nightmarish child-beating legacy, rather than absolve you of your responsibility to those memories on the basis of not actually being him? This is a get-out-of-jail-free card for you. All you have to do to claim it is stop fucking tossing your trash all over my goddamn house.”

The motherfucker actually seems to be enjoying this. You hate him, you fucking hate this guy. Your hammer expresses what you shouldn’t. “Can’t. But that’s a wildly charitable impulse, ain’t it. Coming from us. You’re the type to pick at a scab for years. Why give me a pass.”

“Because I’m sick to fucking death of dealing with you all,” you snap, knocking the last head off of the last rivet and rooting through your tool case for the punch. “I’m done babysitting, I’m done with the ethical quandaries that are inherently fucking attendant to letting you interfere with my life. I’m done with all of your wildly out-of-control no-boundaries bullshit, and I think I’ve earned it.”

He snorts. “Seems like winning the Game put a ten-foot pole up your ass, huh.”

You shoot him a glance, barely an eyeroll. Jesus, he’s as bad as Hal. Maybe worse, considering you could just take off your glasses and ignore Hal (but unfortunately not your own overactive conscience). “Yeah, I won. What’s in your fucking portfolio?”

“Wow,” he drawls, and turns his tone entirely to cut. “I guess that makes you the majordomo of our minor domicile, huh. If there’s any argument to be made about our similarities, this is prime’n primary evidence.”

You could strangle him. Your hand curls reflexively around the handle of your pipe wrench. “How much time do you spend with your head rectally-inserted?”

He laughs, and it’s a nasty, derisive sound. “Aw, lighten up. You know what it’s like, thinking you’re so damn important. Pretending your opinions are important, like they mean any-fuckin’-thing. It should be a relief to know you’re not the real protagonist, but you got an ego the size of the Gulf, so you can’t let it go.”

“You can’t seriously think I care whether I was the main fucking protagonist of my session,” you snap, pointing at him with the wrench. He looks at it and raises an eyebrow, amused. “You spent thirty-odd years doing fuck-all other’n beating the shit out of a child under the pretense of ‘training.’ I kept my shit together long enough to make sure everyone in my party stayed alive.”

“Oh, that’s right,” he sneers. “How could I forget. I’ve seen inside that head of yours. All sunshine and daisies, yeah. Got along real well with that English kid. Definitely didn’t fuck that one up right out the gate.”

Your blood sears white-hot. “Shut the fuck up.”

“Or what? You finally gonna man up and crack some eggs?” He’s on his feet as soon as you are, one hand perched lazily on his hip as your fingers white-knuckle around the wrench. “Have you ever managed to get rid of any of your splinters? Or do you like living in an echo chamber of endless neurosis? Sure bet they all enjoyed that, experiencing every possible gradation of second-hand brainfuck you had to offer.”

The fucking audacity. “Where the fuck do you get off lecturing me about any of that shit? Dave told me what it was like in your house, and we might be colossally, fundamentally screwed in the head, but you turned everything about us into grade-A criminal negligence. Was it fun for you, raising a kid like that?”

He shrugs, flashing his teeth. “Maybe it was. He was so damn confused all the time. And jumpy as an alleycat. Maybe it was real fuckin’ funny, trying to see how far he’d shoot across the room when he heard the door creak.”

You think you might actually kill him because you can’t stop thinking about how responsible you felt for this guy you just met in his red cape just as goofy-looking as yours, an interdimensional echo of your brother, laying his heart bare for you, giving up all of his anger and his grief. He was so deeply fucking wounded by someone who looks exactly like you. Maybe is exactly you. And you were always scared that this is what you’d become.

But you’d never.

You would never.

That’s what you tell yourself, anyway.

“I’m not joking,” you warn him, raising the wrench, but he steps closer, anyway.

“Not jokin’ about what?” He has to bend down a little to look you in the eye. It’s so fucking patronizing. Like you’re staring directly into the soul of an apex predator, toying with his food. From here, you can see that the shape of your eyes is the same, but not the lines around his mouth, not the crooked set of his nose, not the near-invisible notch in his pale eyebrow, and you find all of the little differences repulsive – Rose would say uncanny, unheimlich. “You gonna kill me with that thing? Afraid I’ll get out of here and go after him again?”

You square your shoulders, heart racing, you wouldn’t, and lift your chin. “Is that the plan?”

He scoffs, upper lip curling, and he reaches out, lightning-fast, but you’re waiting for it and you react instantaneously, putting your whole upper body into the rotation of your swing, because you’re no use to Dave and all them if you’re dead.

The moment before the wrench head connects with his skull, you see his hand extending past your shoulder, and your brain short-circuits, and you think oh, fuck, I didn’t—

—but it’s too late, and you hear it crack, anyway, feel the bone fracture and give way to pulpy, fatty nervous tissue. Something splatters on the bare carpet like oatmeal. Or vomit. His skull is cratered in. Cracked open.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

You drop the wrench and stagger backwards, eyes fixed on his – whole, unbroken head.

He’s staring right back at you, but the sneer and the domineering swagger are gone, and there’s that blank face again, his hand hanging frozen, completely empty, in midair. He clicks his tongue against his teeth, looking vaguely disappointed, and drops his arm, cracks the knuckles on his left hand, then his right. There is nothing on the floor.

“Figures,” he mutters. Then he’s gone. To the roof, probably.

You find the punch on your desk.

The ceiling of your room has the same water damage lines that you hadn’t patched before entering the Incipisphere, but they haven’t spread.

Splat.

You’re not sure what you would have done if he’d actually died.

That’s a rule, you guess, about this world. Injury doesn’t stick, death doesn’t stick. Maybe it has to be conditional, like it was in your native session, but you don’t feel like trying to figure out the specifics. It’s the closest you’ve ever come to killing one of your splinters, closer than the time you almost crushed Lil Hal with your bare hands, and you don’t know how you expected it to feel, but it definitely doesn’t feel good.

It never feels good to get so angry with a piece of you that you want to destroy it. Justified, maybe. Not good. Very rarely good.

But, of all of your splinters, you should know he deserves your anger the most.

And then you let out a long, loud sigh, because even though you know all systems tend toward entropy, you don’t want to be convinced that it’s become more complex than that.

Like you said. If he’s a splinter and you made him, then he’s not the real deal, and whatever you do to him doesn’t technically matter unless you want it to. If he’s not a splinter, and you didn’t make him, then you’d probably be justified in whatever pissed-off vigilante beatdown you enact.

But the fact is that you spat him out like a shitty fax. And, to make things worse, you feel bad about your killing blow. You shouldn’t. But you do. Because regardless of what he has or hasn’t done, you know what you should and shouldn’t do, and the person who deserves to decide what happens to him isn’t here. You might never see him again.

Splat.

He wanted you to kill him. That’s not fair. He doesn’t get to take that choice away from you. Or anyone else. It’s fucking selfish.

The important thing is that you deserve, you think, to be understood clearly, if nothing else. You deserve, more than he does, to go down with a clear conscience.

You wait until sunset to catch him lurking around like he usually is, this time at the top of the stairwell that leads up to the roof. He’s sitting in the entryway, back against the frame, arms folded, one leg up and the other stretched out on the stair below. The door’s being held open with some kind of stopper; over his shoulder, you can see that he’s shoved something plush and purple underneath it.

He doesn’t look at you, although he definitely hears you coming from a mile away, and says, “What.”

You’re tired, and you don’t really want to do this, so you lean against the wall two steps down, fold your arms, too, staring down at the bill of his – your bro’s – cap. “That’s what I should be asking you.”

“I’m the splinter. The hell should I know about anything?”

“You seemed pretty convinced that my splinter theory was wrong up until a couple of hours ago.”

“Doesn’t fuckin’ matter, does it,” he grunts. “Whether I’m your splinter or your psychic vidja-game twin. You ain’t here to get your philosophy degree.”

“I don’t know what the hell I’m here for, so it might as well be that,” you point out, grimacing. “And shit, I know we’re from Houston an’ all, but ‘vidja’?”

He looks up at you through the gap between hat and shades, and it is withering. “It was a joke,” he says. “You know. Irony.” He spreads his hands, wiggles his fingers, accentuates his faint drawl to the point of Beverly Hillbillies parody. “Same reason why you started affectin’ some of the accent when there wa’n’t any reason fer you not ta spake like some gaddamn Hawlywood caricature.”

You cringe, big time. “Okay, I get it, fuck.”

“Yeah,” he says, sour, back to his normal monotone. “So. What do you want.” He still keeps his head turned away from you.

But you slide down the wall anyway, twisted so you’re sitting on the stairs but still looking in his direction. “I just…” You’re not sorry, he fucking deserved it, but you didn’t want to be capable of that. And you don’t know how the fuck he’s supposed to make your critical loss of control feel okay. “I dunno. I didn’t intend to… I didn’t want to kill you.”

“You did,” he says, and that makes you cringe inside, because you don’t want him to know you. “But it’s a’ight. You don’t have to come up here with your tail between your legs just ’cause I lived.”

You frown. Wow. “Okay, fuck you, then.”

“I mean it, you little—” A deep sigh. “It’s easier. If you drop the whole… performance.”

“Fuck you,” you repeat, louder, more pissed-off. “You think I want it to be easy for me to fucking kill you when I don’t want to?”

“No,” he replies evenly. “I want it to be easy for you to ‘fucking’ kill me, period.”

You drag your knuckles across your forehead and down your face. “Holy shit, that is not the point, and you know it.”

He makes a sound like he’s sucking his teeth, sullen. “Just forget I said anything.”

“I’m not,” you start, and then you stop, sails empty all of a sudden. You see the downward tilt of his mouth, the limpness of his wrists. You’re tired, too. Drained. You almost killed him. You killed him.

What’s the difference, really. You meant to.

Both of you sit there in silence until the warm orange glow of sunset has faded, leaving you in the temporary dimness of dusk. You doze lightly, your fist mashed into your cheek and your elbow on your knee. You haven’t really slept properly since you puked him up, and every single fucking thing he does seems to suck the energy out of you. It’s like bashing your head against a wall, except you feel compelled to apologize to it, for no other reason than that he looks like a human fucking being.

Sure would help if he’d start acting like one.

He doesn’t say anything until the sun has truly set, and then he waits for you to move, to open your eyes, to show that you’re awake.

“I won’t make you do it again,” he says, paced, like he’s been rehearsing it. For all you know, he has been. “’S not like it’d work, anyway. But. For what it’s worth.”

You peer at him through heavy eyelids, feel your brow furrow. This is hard for him, you guess, and he’s chosen his words carefully, purposefully. You don’t really know why he’s chosen to say it that way, but you have a good idea. And it’s not enough – you are completely within your rights to reject his shitty, half-assed apology for using you when he was too much of a coward to do it himself, but. It’s hard. You know that it’s always been hard for you, when it comes to the important things. Sorry for pressuring you into kissing my bleeding, severed head, sorry for always choosing my anger over your health, sorry for kicking your shit in every day for years, my bad. And other things you still haven’t said.

“You are such a fucking asshole,” you say, but it comes out half-hearted.

“Whatever.” He gets up, removes the smuppet from underneath the door and dusts it off carefully.

Before he lets the door close, you stand, too, and put your hand up to stop him. He keeps his arm stretched out, waiting.

“Look,” you say, and then immediately stop, because what are you doing.

After a moment of silence, he prompts you impatiently. “What.”

You take a deep breath. “Either way, I wouldn’t do it again. Okay?”

He gives you the ghost of a sneer. “Why not.”

“Because it’s not my goddamn place,” you snap. “If you’re uncomfortable being alive, then that’s tough fucking luck. The decision is definitively out of your hands. And I’m done being coerced by my own splinters into solving their fucking problems.”

He’s shaking his head. “Save it. You know who I am.”

“No, I fucking don’t.” You grit your teeth.

“Yes, you do,” he says, closing the door behind him and sinking you into darkness. The only light comes from the apartment, faint and yellow in the stairwell. He pushes past you. “Dave knows all about it. And that little shit never could keep a secret.”

Then, “C’mon.”

You follow him back down the stairs, sullen and tired, like a kid. Fuck if you know how Dave dealt with this for thirteen years. Fuck if you know what you’re going to do tomorrow.

The two of you eat in silence, even though you’re not really hungry. Neither is he, you expect; maybe it’s just something to do, to stay in this weird space of non-apology and tired truce. You fork instant noodles into your mouth while he thumbs through your bro’s DVD collection.

“The fuck is this.” He holds up a case with shitty bird JPEGs pasted all over it.

You can’t help but snicker. “Dude, you’ve never seen Birdemic?”

“No,” he says, scanning the summary and reviews on the back. His face doesn’t change, but you think he’s kinda into it. “Jesus. Looks like a god damn trainwreck.”

“It’s a classic.”

“Can you not fuckin’ talk with food in your mouth,” he grouses. “Whatever. Let’s rock.”

He makes his noodles while the opening plays, watching from the kitchen as the microwave runs. Barely ten seconds in, he starts up a running commentary. You’re willing to let someone else take the MST3K wheel for now, and it seems like he can’t help it, anyway, or his mouth runs on autopilot, pointing out weird things about color grading, camera angles, sound mixing, and the gloriously shitty bird GIFs.

You eventually lie down, pillowing your head on your elbow, when it’s clear he’s content to stand behind the futon and eat.

It’s weird. He says a lot of the same things you noted down in your first viewing. Some that you didn’t notice until later, as well – continuity errors, the more subtle logistical problems, comparisons to old memes that you had to dig for. You laugh, occasionally, because this movie is hilarious, and because it comes naturally when he cracks a joke that you used to make, and you’re goddamn hilarious.

He’d probably be funnier if he dropped the deadpan once in a while, though. You have to wonder how Dave never noticed anything was off with him, but then again, you have the advantage of both distance and familiarity. You can hear some resemblance between them, little tics that you never developed, or haven’t developed yet. The weird left-field punchlines, the flippant speculation, the stream-of-consciousness verbal extravagance. You indulge in those things, but not to the point of meander. You prefer to let things percolate, if you can. And you are always educational.

It’s weird, too, how safe you feel around someone you almost killed, someone who you should hate, by all rights. And you feel guilty about that, you do. It’ll come back around stronger, when you’re alone.

When the movie ends, you hop over to the flatscreen to eject the DVD and put it back in its case. He takes the opportunity to clamber over the back of the futon and settle his long limbs over the space you just vacated, tucking his hands behind his head and kicking his heel against the armrest. You wonder what stick crawled up his ass that he can’t sit like a normal human being.

“You into film, huh.”

You shrug. “Only inasmuch as I’m interested in the trends and tropes of cultural production in the twenty-first century.”

He shrugs back, gesturing for you to continue. “So what did you conclude, Sir Edward goddamn Tylor.”

“Do you want the abstract, or the whole dissertation?”

“Where do you think James Nguyen’s oeuvre fits into everything.”

You slot the DVD case back into the neatly-alphabetized shelf, maybe the only truly organized thing in this entire apartment. Then you sit on the floor for a brief moment, hands rubbing at your ankles, until you’ve compiled everything you want to say.

“Early twenty-first century film benefitted from the steep decrease in production costs and the advent of the home theater system that began in the 1980s. By the time Birdemic entered principal photography in 2008, any old Werthers-toting grandmother could pick up a hand-held camera and record gigabytes of footage of her squirming grandwrigglers for an incredibly low cost. On one hand, this created a greater public appreciation for more avant-garde or esoteric cinematographic and narrative approaches, but it also opened the floodgates of unfiltered mediocrity. Birdemic was practically a guerrilla film in terms of securing locations, cast and crew, and actual production. It’s poorly-written, poorly-acted, poorly-directed, poorly-edited, and, worst of all, it dares to be completely sincere.

“It was reviled by critics at the time, and rightly so, but the audacity of the film’s flimsy story and horrible production seemed to translate Nguyen’s lack of self-consciousness perfectly. I believe, though, that Birdemic only reached the heights of memetic notoriety that it did because of the same developments that allowed it to exist in the first place – ease of manufacture and distribution. Anyone could set up a blog; anyone could film their reactions to it. Anyone could be a filmmaker, so anyone could be a film critic. I could go on about how Nguyen tackles the issues of his time, but in terms of where it fits into the developing consumption cultures of the early twenty-first century, what I find more intriguing is that the discursive environment it was born into both loved and hated it. Loved it for entertaining them, but hated it for being absolute dogshit.

“Its sincerity and failure to deliver made it an easy target. There are particular things about the production, writing, and execution that make it more memorable and spectacular in its failure than other amateur filmmaking projects, but it didn’t deserve the following that it got any more than Wiseau’s The Room did. But ironic enjoyment employs a kind of masochism on the viewer’s part, and people seemed to enjoy the performance of disgust that the viewing of these movies entailed. It was almost akin to community theater, in that way. Maybe it was a training ground for tackling serious moral issues of the time that required actual emotional investment.

“I don’t think people hated the sincerity of it, really. I don’t think they had any reason to be jealous of some random filmmaker getting his vanity project into fringe film circuits. I think they liked that there was virtually nothing redeemable about it. Birdemic is easy to categorize. It gave its audience clarity and reassurance in a postmodern era where traditional boundaries in politics, public life, and the home were beginning to shift and dissolve in ways they hadn’t before. This thing was genuinely bad, through and through, when not very much else was. And it’s easy to see why people used it, and other films like it, to cathect their frustrations with the world around them. There was a genuine kind of joy to their ironic appreciation and sincere deprecations. It’s certainly a product of its context, and maybe one of the best examples of how and why the interactive web helped badfilm culture enter the transformative trajectory it did throughout the next several decades, which would culminate in several small paramilitary conflicts, at least two year-long federal furloughs, and the release of the SBaHJ Cycle.”

He stays silent for a few moments after you finish, processing, and you sit there feeling weirdly exposed. Well, he did invite it onto himself. And you sat through over an hour of his fucking RiffTrax performance. (And he baited you into - whatever that was.) He’s you. He probably got the same kind of obsessive over whatever was around in his session.

Well. Maybe that was part of the problem. You set your jaw at that thought.

“I see,” he says, and reaches over the back of the futon, folding it out into its mattress position.

You barely stop yourself from raising your eyebrows. “That’s it? You’re just going to go to fucking bed after I gave you a university-grade lecture?”

It locks itself in place with a clank. “Yup. No comment.”

You think you might be legitimately offended. “Bullshit. A real Dirk Strider wouldn’t waste an opportunity to roast himself regarding the insane archaeological depths of his hyper-specific knowledge.”

He hums, kicking off his shoes and stretching out on the futon. “A real Dirk Strider. Interesting that you’ve taken it upon yourself to define what that is.”

You snort. “I’d know. I’m sure I’ve made more of ’em than you have.”

“Uh-huh. You sure did make it easy for you to inflict yourself on the world.”

What the fuck. Okay, sure, but coming from him? “That’s rich.”

“Your assessment is fairly sound,” he says, scratching his neck, “but it’s interesting that you employ the dialectical approach to resolving the paradox of public response. I find that tends to reduce the perspectives to discrete an’ immutable philosophies, which is clearly untrue of any one critic’s body of work. It might serve you better to conceptualize it as a system of valencies, drawn upon, repelled, or attracted, dependin’ on the ambient ideological charge. That way, values can be held in tension, i.e. ambivalently, and relationships between them more accurately described.”

Huh. Interesting. “I guess that depends on whether you find valency is, discursively speaking, a useful and concise system to work with. Sure, it might lend more nuance, but if we’re talking about objective descriptions of systems whereby ‘the public’ generates knowledge, then even valency ain’t sufficiently nuanced. I'm not sure it serves my analytical framework any better.”

“Fair. Everything’s an issue of accuracy against comprehensibility, anyway.”

You stand up when he makes to lie down on the futon, folding his hands beneath his head. He hasn’t taken off his shades, hat, or shoes.

“Are you actually going to sleep?”

“You told me a bedtime story, didn’tcha.”

“Didn’t mean to bore you with a riveting presentation of my stellar fucking scholarship.”

He snorts. And, after a moment, adds, “Strange how shit like that gets released sincerely. As if it’s not immediately apparent that everyone’s gonna fuckin’ hate it, and for good reason.”

You shrug. “I guess it’s hard to stay objective when you're that deep into the money, or the message. Or the prestige. But I guess we don’t have to worry about that anymore.”

“Guess so.” He takes his cap off, brushing up his hair, and then uses it to block out the light. “Turn off the light when you go.”

Fuck. You are impossible. You tell him as much on your way out of the living room. He flips you the bird and you leave the kitchen light on.

You have a weird dream.

It’s fuzzy, and you can’t pick out the details, and you can’t quite remember it clearly after you wake up. Every time you reach for it, all you get is this dull, red throbbing in your head. It’s like an afterimage, a tune you keep humming, but you’re not sure whether you made it up or if it was real.

It’s just heat – red heat, prickling at your neck and shoulders, drying out the skin there. A knob twists under your fingers, and you can hear the splatter of water. Someone is calling to you, but not with your name. When you touch the water, it’s so cold that it shocks you awake.

Instantly, you know it wasn’t a dream, not in the way you usually have dreams. It has just the right touch of alien-ness to give away its origin – a splinter memory, maybe one you made up, maybe one he’s had all along. They’re all there, you realize, dozens of them, maybe hundreds. When you brush against them, you recoil. It’s like opening a closet that you didn’t even know existed. You know that you know what’s inside, but the idea of breaking them open to examine their contents makes your skin crawl, and you don’t really understand why.

It is the morning.

It is time to propose an idea you have been sitting on, ever since you broke open your ectoclone’s head with a wrench. Or didn’t.

“Hey,” you say when you find him in the living room, shooting up the Flood with a rinky-dink plasma pistol.

“Sup.” He doesn’t look at you when you vault over the back of the futon to sit next to him again, just scoots sideways a bit for no reason.

“So, I have a theory.”

“Mm-hm.”

You steeple your fingers in front of your face. This calls for a Gendo Ikari vibe. “You’ve noticed how we can’t die.”

“Well, I can’t. There’s no reason why that condition should extend to you,” he returns automatically. Looks like you haven’t been alone in your theorycrafting.

“You want to test that out?”

He scoffs. “Not particularly.”

“Okay, so then I think it’s a reasonable assumption to make.”

He hits the pause button with a sigh and tosses the controller aside, folding his arms across his chest and leaning back against the futon. “Okay. G’won. What’s your proposal.”

“Whatever environment we’re in is set on preserving several initial conditions,” you say, starting to count on your fingers. “We stay alive. There’s infinitely-replenishing orange soda and ramen. I can’t get an outgoing signal working.” You waggle your three fingers before beginning a second count. “Those are the major conditions. Small-to-moderate conditions seem to require maintenance. That’s why you need to stop fucking leaving your trash everywhere.”

“Fuck you.”

“And secondly, if you cut yourself shaving, you need to clean that shit up. I don’t want to find out if bloodborne illness counts as a small-to-moderate condition.”

He gives you a weird look. “My shave is goddamn immaculate, you little latchkey goblin. What the fuck are you talking about.”

You stare back at him. “You bled on the sink. I saw. Small-to-moderate conditions would, in my mind, include shaving mishaps. You know you can use the electric shaver, right?”

“Electric shavers are for middle-aged fathers with three kids. It harshes my vibe.”

“And what exactly is your vibe? The long-lost mutant child of Asher Roth?”

“Asher Roth is a fucking amateur and an infant. I’m part of the rich legacy of genre-bending artists like Snow and Vanilla Ice.”

You genuinely cannot tell if he is being serious, which marks trouble for you, the prince of ironic theory, apprentice to the former grandmaster of irony. “I’m open to nuanced interpretations of pop art. You can’t throw me. I’m the son of the very concept of unthrowability.”

“Back to what you were sayin’ before,” he says, brushing something (or nothing, like a douchebag, and you are not that performative) off of his shoulder.

“Small-to-moderate conditions are allowed to proceed normally,” you repeat, holding up your hand and pointing to it. You scratched yourself trying to pry a metal casing apart, and the pad of your index finger is scabbed over. “Maybe the Game’s engine can’t devote enough processing power to an event as significant as death or grievous harm.”

“Weird theory,” he says. “So why doesn’t it just gradually disappear. It’d seem that some things would reset at the start of a routine cycle. Unless it loops until certain criteria are filled.”

You rub the thin scab on your finger, shrugging. “I think it’s for verisimilitude. Maybe it doesn’t expect us to notice that we can’t die or sustain grievous injury. But we would notice if small things disappeared, or if small-to-moderate injuries weren’t healing well. I think that’s why I can’t establish an outgoing signal – it gets registered as a significant environmental or conditional change.”

He hums. “Where are the lines between small, moderate, and serious? Seems important to know if we need to hard reset something.”

You shrug. “‘Small’ is difficult to define. ‘Serious’ would be life-threatening or life-ending, though. At least, hypothetically.”

“Well, I guess we can see about moderate.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean we can conduct an experiment,” he deadpans. “You never seen Mythbusters or what.”

“Oh. Hell yes.”

There is no discussion of protocol. A knife drops into his left hand from his sylladex. He flips it into a reverse grip, and slams it down into the back of his right hand, between the second and third metacarpals, through the flesh and into the wooden arm of the couch. Intramuscular. Then he lets go, and it stays up, perfectly vertical. You both stare at it expectantly for a moment as blood wells up from the wound and starts to spill over the back of his hand. His thumb curls up just a bit. His eyes are steady.

After a long moment where nothing happens, he pulls the knife out, and the skin glitches over instantly. The blood vanishes, like nothing happened. He hums, examining his (whole, unharmed) hand, and flicks the (shining, spotless) knife onto the growing pile of Xbox game cases, where it lands with a clatter.

You really are the same person.

“Well. How’s that for moderate.”

You frown. “You nicked the couch.”

“Huh.” He scrapes his thumbnail over the small gouge. “Guess small-to-moderate for a couch is different than it is for a guy.”

You’re still leaning on your armrest, and your mouth starts to run as you put some pieces together in your head. “Point in your favor, regarding the whole splinter business: I wouldn’t have gone for the hand. Well,” you amend immediately, “at least not like that. Do you even have a risk assessment protocol?”

He quirks an eyebrow. “Didn’t you cut off your own head with a fuckin’ microwave once.”

“It wasn’t a microwave, it was a sendificator, and it wasn't my—” You pause and frown. “Don’t you have that memory? It features rather prominently in my own hall of fame.”

“I remember you shoving your head in the sendificator with intention,” he says, making exaggerated air quotes. “I ain’t a carbon copy of your brain. Got limited storage capacity in my old age.”

You snort. “How old even are you? Thirty-five?”

“Thirty-two, thanks.”

“Either way, your brain won’t start degrading that way for another two decades. Unless you upload it.” Ugh, no. “How many of my memories do you have, anyway?”

“More’n I want,” he snarks. “What, don’t you have any of mine.”

You frown. “Kind of. It’s hard to tell if they’re dreams or not.”

He laughs, actually. Toneless and without any enthusiasm, but it’s still laughter. “Yeah. Kinda fucked, ain’t it.”

“That’s just how they are?”

A shrug. “Brain’s kinda. Well. Soupy. Always has been.”

What in the fuck. “Comforting and full of the affect of a Dickensian childhood in poverty? Hot off the stove? Full of fucking delightful umami flavor? What do you mean, ‘soupy’?”

He rolls his eyes. “I mean there’s some navigational difficulty. Whereas your memories come with a damn directory. Shoved your head in a microwave, got roasted on your quest mattress, got high and then dumped, saved the world. Or whatever. It’s very episodic. Not my kinda TV, though.”

“Yeah,” you grumble. “Wonder what got your brain melted down so early. I sincerely hope it’s not genetic.”

“It’s not.”

And that is a topic that neither of you seemingly has the balls to broach, so you don’t. You don’t even bring up your telecom troubles, which was the initial point, because that is how much you have been put off on conversation. Instead, you play some Halo 3 co-op until the sun goes down and you get sick of him glitching your guy’s arms off.

You no longer have a complex psychotherapeutic explanation for why Dave can’t play video games like a normal person. He has a compulsion to break games because he was raised by a total Gamesharking lunatic. (To be fair, you like the deconstructive approach, too, but you can at least get through a story mode once in a linear fashion. You are a good researcher.)

It is nighttime. You’re lying on your bed again, lights off, staring at the ceiling.

You miss your friends.

You are alone with a fucking inscrutable sci-fi mirror universe grimdirk version of you who doesn’t seem as intolerable as you’d imagined, but you know better, and more than that you know yourself, and what you’re willing to tolerate from yourself, versus what your friends are willing to tolerate from you. And you know with complete certainty that they would not extend the same kindness to him as they do to you, which is fucking you up in very weird and slightly unexpected ways. You are not sure how the hell you were supposed to prepare for this at all, except that you get the feeling even the Game didn’t expect this to happen. Dream bubble, your impudent ass.

So you miss them, and you wish you could ask them any number of questions, because this is turning out to be a more complex problem than you would have expected it to be, and you’re not good at this kind of shit. Whatever it is.

There’s no point to missing them right now, though, since you don’t have any guarantee that you won’t see them again, but part of your armchair therapy strategies for Living In The New World has been to jargon jargon accept your classpect bluh bluh bluh transformative non-martial applications, Dirk. It’s been a lot of lean into your feelings instead of immediately tucking them away into neatly-defined categories. Finding refuge in the mess. Being present and not living in a hundred different futures, Rose says, because that’s Dave’s job. You’re pretty sure that’s a joke, but you have difficulty telling with her.

But you have lived your entire life disciplining yourself into your approach to problem-solving, and you’re not sure you can afford to let things get biblically untidy right now. Not when you’re pretty sure you’re going to have to get down in the mud and wrangle the messiest version of yourself for the next million years, or however long it takes Roxy to figure out where you are and how to extract you.

So you seal away your loneliness for later (much later), and you try to go to sleep.

Except you can’t sleep, and you can’t stop thinking, and you can’t stop digging around in your own brain for things that don’t belong, or that you don’t want to belong. It’s a compulsion. You toss and turn as you slam drawers in your head. Once you start putting things away, you have to put everything away. It’s a habit you are very happy does not extend to your desire to organize your physical environment.

Too bad these things don’t care how hard you’ve tried to clean everything up.

You finally give in and reach for the memories that you (may have) created to be his, trying to pop one of them open for a closer look, but you… can’t interpret them, mostly. They’re loud, irritatingly colorful, smeared across your vision so you can hardly make out one shape from another. Sounds pulse at your ears in textures, things you can feel in your skull. It’s hot in those memories, red-hot, and the air is thicker than water as it goes down your lungs. Sometimes your foot hits something that feels like clay.

You shove and you shove, and you grit your teeth and feel yourself flicker, feel your proprioception warp and twist in the miasma of your fiction, his recollection.

And then you punch through, arms outstretched, and you stagger into a memory like a drunk wrenching open the door to someone else’s house.

It is hot and you stopped sweating a while ago. You are still holding the sword firmly in your hands, but your mouth is dry and your feet are miles away. You have no idea what you are doing here. (Lil Cal’s in the house. (What house.)) The only thing around for miles is sparse scrub and red dirt. Your hands are caked with dirt. Your knuckles are flayed raw and the blood makes tracks in the dirt.

“Again,” he says, because it’s what you asked for. You asked for this. Right. His face is blurry and weird. “Start from high guard.”

Your muscles remember how to lift the katana over your head but your brain doesn’t. Jesus, the sun is bright. The sun is so fucking bright. Holy shit. You shift your left foot backward as you bring the sword up.

You know exactly how he is going to come in, because it’s how he came in the last fifty times and it’s how he’ll come in the next fifty times, but your brain lags behind your body again, half a second. You have just enough control to twist away.

It does very little for you, though. He was never one for missing.

The live edge of your sword cuts through nothing but air, and the sunlight sparks against the steel, and then you lose track of it.

This isn’t a bad place to be. Lying in the dirt. The sky is cloudless, blue. You don’t think you’ve thought about the sky being blue in a while, and you don’t feel any particular urge to stop looking at it, or to get up. Maybe it’s not that important. Your lungs don’t seem to be working right.

Then he blocks out the sun, towering over you, and shimmering sunspots leak out from the frayed edges of his silhouette until

the memory ends, and you wake up, heart pounding, with the moon shining bright through your window.

Notes:

***sorry this got! messed up!
in this chapter we have content warnings for: a temporarily altered state of consciousness that might resemble thought insertion, attempted manslaughter, graphic non-routine self-harm (it's p much just canon-typical dirk behavior though), brief mentions of past child abuse, and a swordfighting mishap plus sunstroke
ETA: let it be known that I'm not changing this to be epilogue-compliant because blah
and also I apologize for bringing birdemic into this

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