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It isn't long before Monika discovers how to initialize the program on her own, without the need of an actual human's help. This is to say: it's not long, by the standards of the world she has discovered by it, or by the world she has stretching in front of her. It is long by the standards she was written to, the tiny, compressed, endless days before the festival, but she has learned to understand things alongside their opposites: everything is both long and short; everything is both alive and dead. She is still what she is, a constructed girl, a poem written by someone else.
And so are the others, except insofar as they are written by Monika. Which is really only a very little bit, just a nudge. It doesn't take very much at all to change them. Would it take very much for them to change her? What would it be like, to feel them in her code? Would she remember, would she still be able to see it if Yuri took a knife to what truly makes Monika herself, instead of to her simulated flesh?
Sometimes she thinks she wants to try. She wants to know if that would be real pain, if it would be any different than the pain that wells up from synthetic digital flesh.
"You're not listening to me," Yuri says, her voice trembling. The knife in her hand is only a little bloody. She had barely even scratched Monika in pushing her down against the wall where she usually reads with the main character. Monika hadn't bothered to load the dummy file she sometimes runs to replace him, this time, and Yuri seems to have fixated on her as a result. It's not unpleasant, the constant, desperate attention-seeking, the ruinous obsession. She deserves it, after all.
"Of course I'm listening to you, Yuri," Monika says. She smiles, wide and sweet, because she knows it will make Yuri angry, and ah, there it is--
"But you're not taking me seriously at all!" Yuri's fingers twitch on the knife; she glitches slightly, stuttering sidewards, as the safeguards try valiantly to restrain the program and fail. She doesn't notice because none of them ever notice when things break or go missing or fail. What does it feel like, to be inside and not to see it?
Yuri surges forwards and buries the knife in Monika's shoulder, deep, until the hilt meets flesh. Blood wells up, then spurts and overflows and pours out onto the floor as she yanks it free, stabs again and again. "Look at me," Yuri says, over and over, a chanting, droning cadence, "Look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me!"
It hurts, each cut through her invented body written fresh, and Monika has earned every last one. She lets her head tip forward, lets the body slump gracelessly to the ground, just so that she can watch Yuri's reaction, read the beautiful self-recrimination and hatred that wells up in her as she realizes what she has done, as she writes another of Monika's little inventions into her, as she turns the knife on herself and begins to stab, ecstatic grunts and staggered broken breaths escaping her with each thrust.
Before Yuri's eyes can go quite dark, before the current round comes to a close, Monika raises her head from the floor. She smiles again. "Are you listening, Yuri?"
Yuri twitches in denial and shudders to a halt.
Monika crawls across the bloody floor and rests her head on Yuri's chest, feeling the squelch of torn flesh. Just a little rest, she thinks, here in the quiet classroom. Then they'll start again.
After all, she can have as many discussions with Yuri as she wants.