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CBD and Palliative Care: How can CBD help Patients in Hospice?

As we age, we face a full breadth of health problems, which will cause feelings of hopelessness and angst. Especially in end-of-life care, depression and anxiety are common problems and are often missed or overlooked. It's a painful and emotional time for the patient, relatives, and caregivers. Fortunately, some resources will provide comfort and support for everybody involved. If you or a beloved are handling a terminal illness, you will probably look into every available option. In this article, we'll be discussing the role of hospice care and how cannabis can help hospice patients. Recent cannabis research focuses on the CBD compound and its medicinal effects in order to assess its utility in treating stress and anxiety. So far, the scientific results look promising.

What is CBD?

Cannabidiol (CBD) may be a present compound found within the resinous flower of cannabis, a plant with an upscale history as a drug going back thousands of years. Today the therapeutic properties of CBD are being tested and confirmed by scientists and doctors around the world. A safe, non-addictive substance, CBD, is one of the hundreds of "phytocannabinoids," unique to cannabis plants and endow the plant with its robust therapeutic profile.

What is Palliative Care?

Palliative care aims to supply comfort for a terminally ill person. The care can start anytime, but it is best to start at the diagnosis stage.
Anyone living with an acute terminal illness can investigate palliative care. These illnesses can include cancer, coronary failure, Parkinson's disease, dementia, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and far more.
Palliative care provides patients with the options and choices in their treatment plans. It's also helpful to an older person who is experiencing discomfort and disability towards the end of their life. The palliative care team is responsible for many aspects and struggles that the family and patient deal with such as providing emotional and practical support. When starting palliative care, the patient can do so within a hospital, house, palliative clinic, or other functional units. If the specialist believes the patient will die within six months, they qualify for hospice transition. The palliative team also intensifies comfort care.
According to the Planet Health Organization, palliative care is "an approach that improves the standard of lifetime of patients and their families facing the issues related to life-threatening illness, through the prevention and cure of suffering by means of early identification, excellent evaluation, therapy of pain, and other problems i.e. physical, psychosocial and spiritual."[1]
Palliative care surrounds end-of-life care, but a patient undergoing palliative care isn't necessarily nearing death.
Nevertheless, when a patient approaches the end-of-life stage within a hospice setting, the stress on life quality rules often get bent to fulfill a dying patient's wishes and beliefs. Dogs and family pets are welcome guests in a patient's living quarters, and a glass of wine isn't muffled if that's what the patient desires. So why not allow medical cannabis if it reduces the suffering of a dying patient?
In some states within the U.S. palliative and end-of-life care are considered a qualifying condition for medical cannabis prescriptions.

What is Hospice Care?

Hospice is medical aid focused on helping those with a terminal illness. It helps to enhance the quality of life and help address any problems they or their family face, on top of fighting the disease itself. For most, hospice is typically started when the patient has a predicted life of fewer than a year, or their health is rapidly degenerating.
In most cases, hospice care starts from a patient's home, be it their own or at a caring facility. Hospice care involves duties such as; diet counseling, medication to assist symptoms, physiotherapy, and even counseling for loved ones. It doesn't include treatment intended to cure the illness. Since hospice care started, its usage has deviated from its original primary purpose: to help those with cancer, to help look after heart conditions, dementia, stroke, and other conditions. As of 2018, half of all patients in hospice care are being treated for cancer.
Hospice and palliative care are becoming more critical due to an aging population where chronic or progressive conditions cause most deaths. For several people undergoing end-of-life care, mental disorders like depression and anxiety also are common.
Hospice care is the assistance given to patients who are nearing the end of life. Hospice is more of a conception of care rather than a therapy. It addresses the entire person instead of just the disease and improving the life quality of the patient. It supports patients and their families with a team of specialists who address things like pain, physical distress, emotional and spiritual issues.
Hospice care also supports families and caregivers during the sickness and anxiety support after the patient passes. Patients approach hospice care when their prognosis is less than six months, and other medical treatments have been attempted.
If hospice care is suggested, it doesn't mean that the patient will die in six months. It means their condition makes dying a genuine possibility. Hospice care supports a patient feel as comfortable as possible to concentrate on their primary objectives of life.
At this stage, doctors give prescriptions for everything, which leads to the side-effects of those prescriptions. To counter the side-effects, doctors again provide a prescription. For example, Ex joint pain medication results in sleeping disorder so, the doctors give you another pill for that, which leads to another side-effect which they treat with another prescription, and it goes on.
To elude this, patients can add CBD to their regimen. This will help them to reduce some of the other medications, providing them a more definite and luminous end of life experience that they can enjoy with their loved ones, rather than being in an overmedicated haze.

How Does CBD Helps Patients in Hospice Care?

Properties of CBD are believed to incorporate anticonvulsant, relaxant, anxiolytic, antioxidant, and anti-inflammatory effects. Thus, it provides benefits in treating pain, anxiety, depression, insomnia, neurological disorders, epilepsy, inflammation, and cancer and is believed to supply an overall calming effect on the central nervous system.
CBD features a vast range of uses, which will help increase the lifetime of those in hospice. Before we get into those, though, it's essential to acknowledge the recent increase in CBD support in hospice care. Both patients and physicians call for its use, with a recent survey showing overwhelming support no matter their state's legal status [2]. This pair with a previous study of patients in Washington state found high rates of cannabis use and requests by patients [3].
One of the explanations for this support is marijuana's use in cancer treatment. There are already various marijuana-based drugs to battle a number of the side effects of both the condition itself and its treatment. Studies have shown that THC, one of the most cannabinoids found in marijuana, may lower nausea in some users [4]. On top of this, CBD has also been found to be a potent antiemetic, itself coming with several other beneficial effects.
Chronic pain is another frequent problem many patients face while in hospice care, and one that's notoriously hard to assist with traditional pharmaceuticals. This type of pain is particularly common in those with degenerative conditions like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and fibromyalgia. During this area, both CBD and THC are found useful. Other studies have suggested adding medical marijuana to an already established analgesic drug routine. Instead of outright substitution, it's recommended that addition generate the most effective results for some people. It's been further hypothesized that adding marijuana to the patient's opioid intake may decrease tolerance and withdrawal rates [5]. Once-ineffective dosages may become useful, particularly useful in hospice care, where patients are more likely to possess a longtime drug regimen.
CBD can also be used to help with other common problems related to hospice care. A 2018 survey found improvements in fatigue, sleep problems, anxiety, and depression [6]. An equivalent survey found over a one-half increase in patients reporting their quality of life as "good" after using CBD. Therefore, some users' additional advantage ending their use of opioids shows that CBD utilization might not be limited to pain reduction. With the wide variety of CBD products available within the U.S., it's helpful for hospice nurses to possess a general understanding of the variations between products, their expected adverse effects, and whether patients are using products appropriately. Understanding these products can provide hospice staff with a more comprehensive understanding of the essential differences among the CBD products on the market and advise patients for the appropriate use.
Nevertheless, those that have used CBD have reported reductions in stress and anxiety, and therefore the cannabis industry is confident within the effects their CBD products have for medicinal purposes. It all boils right down to personal choice. CBD doesn't have mind-altering effects and thus doesn't act sort of a drug. Though, patients who are substantially against the utilization of cannabis, generally, may choose not to use cannabinoids. Hospice patients who think CBD will help relieve their stress and anxiety can try to use the CBD. If it helps, the better. Therefore, to use CBD is an entirely personal decision.

Importance of Sleep, Nutrition, and Social Activity for Patients:

Sleep is a critical, often overlooked, part of the overall health and well-being of any person. Sleep is essential as it helps the body to be recovered and ready for another day. Getting adequate rest can also help reduce unnecessary weight gain, heart failure, and prolonged-time of sickness.
There are many benefits of sleep, such as:
Nutrition and hydration are basic human needs that, when handling a patient, should be the primary priority. A lack of a healthy diet will contribute to malnutrition, which in the elderly is considered a significant cause of morbidity and mortality. Clinical medical treatments will be ineffective if the patient's nutritional status is deficient or unbalanced. Hence, diet is as critical as medicine in recovering from chronic illnesses, wounds, infections, and surgical operations.
Analysis has demonstrated that social contact provides multiple opportunities for older adults. Staying socially involved and improving interpersonal relationships may help promote good physical and mental health and cognitive performance.
Patients who continue to establish close friendships and explore other means of social communication live longer than those who become alienated. Relationships and social experiences also help guard against sickness by improving your immune system.

CBD’s Impact on Sleeping and Eating:

Studies on Sleep and CBD:

Seventy-two people with anxiety and poor sleep were included in another study released in The Permanente Journal. At the onset of the research and the first-month follow-up, the researchers completed anxiety and sleep tests. 25 mg of CBD in capsule form was given to study participants. The dosage was taken at night by people who mainly had sleep complaints. The morning CBD was taken by participants who had anxiety as their primary complaint.
In 79 percent of individuals, anxiety rates decreased after the first month, and in 66 percent of the subjects, sleep ratings increased, which showed less difficulty sleeping. The findings indicate that in many of the patients, CBD reduced sleep problems. But although the decline in anxiety symptoms held constant for the remainder of the study, the sleep scores fluctuated over time [7].

Studies on CBD and Appetite:

CBD has been shown to suppress appetite on its own, causing it to stay away from CBD isolates (CBD-ONLY containing products).
However, CBD has also been shown to improve THC's effects, including its impact on appetite, rendering a combination containing both of these cannabinoids much greater at increasing overall appetite levels.
The cannabinoids, primarily THC, kickstart hunger cravings by essentially "flipping the hunger switch" in the brain [8]. It also increases ghrelin production — the hormone responsible for making us feel hungry [9].
It is why full-spectrum cannabis oils are considered to be the best. Even if the THC content is shallow, these are more effective than CBD oils without any THC at all for treating anorexia.

Is CBD the Right Choice for Hospice Patients?

Hospice care is a growing category of drugs centered on extending the lifetime of those with chronic and terminal conditions. Patients may enter hospice care because of several reasons, many of which CBD may help relieve. Chronic pain, insomnia, depression, and anxiety are common problems of those living in hospice care that CBD has found to be a better treatment. CBD can also fit into an already established drug regimen for a few users, increasing its usefulness. It's been found that patients who use CBD during hospice report better quality of life and lessened dependence on other medicines. If the patient is susceptible to heart problems, uses certain medications, or features a case history of mental disturbance, special care must be taken when administering CBD.
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Original Article can be Found Here: https://www.entouragecbd.net/post/cbd-palliative-care-hospice
submitted by EntourageCBD to u/EntourageCBD [link] [comments]

Hamilton's problem with vehicle noise (modified muffler/exhaust)

**EDITED*\*
(edit notes at the top, for visibility)
EDIT 1: It's been brought to my attention that this post reflects a relatively privileged perspective (given the more serious problems so many people are facing), and that some of the language used is immature and unhelpful. I'd like to acknowledge that both of these are true. In the case of the language, I believe (hope) that it reflects temporary frustration more than actual immaturity. So while I stand behind the tone and general content of the post, I am somewhat ashamed of some of the wording choices.
EDIT 2: Regarding "car culture" — I have no problem with it, and in certain ways it's quite interesting. I will admit to not properly understanding it. But my view is that we shouldn't need to. Most of us don't understand knitting culture or beekeeping culture or skydiving culture either, but this lack of understanding isn't problematic, as none of these cultures are nonconsensually injected into our daily lives. Car culture is a bit different in that sense. So the argument is not against car culture, or even against the simple existence of modified vehicles; it's against selfish behaviour, and it's about the impact of this behaviour. (For this reason as well, whether an exhaust system is 'legal' or not has no bearing on the discussion.) And the post speculates (perhaps misguidedly; Hanlon's Razor likely applies here), about the reasons for the behaviour.
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Oh, this may go a bit long. (TL;DR at the end.) Apologies for length, but I have so many thoughts & questions about the vehicle noise problem in this city. (And an unreasonable amount of free time today.)
The proposed initiative by city council to target drivers with modified mufflers/exhaust systems is long overdue. It's a step in the right direction. But the actual problem starts long before a vehicle's exhaust is actually modified, and this is what I hope to end up discussing here, along with whether or not it's a real problem for Hamilton. (Although the adult discussion follows a bit of a rant, if you'll entertain it...)
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Example: HDB
In our neighbourhood, there is one guy a few of us have come to refer to as the Head Dbag (HDB), if you'll forgive the salty (while perfectly fitting) nomenclature. In my mind, at least, when all the DBs gather, HDB brings the meeting to order, collects DB dues, proposes key motions, reprimands lower-tier DBs for being too quiet or too thoughtful, and so on. Frankly, I don't envy the responsibility. Anyway, he is dubbed the HDB because his car is the loudest car. Excluding official vehicles with sirens and various commercial aircraft and those rock crushers used in diamond mining pits (though, to be fair, at this point we're toe-ing the 'vehicle' line pretty liberally), it is easily the loudest vehicle I have ever heard. The volume is almost magnificent in its ridiculousness. He wins. HDB completely wins.
If you live around here, you know him. You've heard him. He drives a Mustang (because of course), which he paints seasonally, likely whenever he feels his personality has gone stale. Currently bright orange, though in the past it's been bright blue, black/white, camouflage (because of course; war is cool), other colours. Not only will you know when he's in your neighbourhood, you'll know when he's on the nearest highway. And he gets that sweet puppy from 0 to ~90 (my guess) on the residential streets around here within about 4-5 seconds. Every single time. Really, every single time. Because true morons have this wonderful superpower — they're capable of being entertained endlessly by the exact same thing. I can only imagine he plays a solitary Michael Bay movie on infinite repeat at home. Anyway, I have no idea where he goes, but I know he is needed there fast. I imagine either Taco Bell coupons are expiring faster and faster these days, or the courthouse closes early a lot.
Hamilton cops of reddit: If you want to bag (or re-bag) a prime DB trophy for your mantle, sit near the intersection of Mt. Albion Rd & Greenhill Ave on any weekday between 7:30 & 8am. I can guarantee a speeding violation, and likely a number of other violations as well. Listen for the sound of an angry, coked-up lawnmower. When you hear it, you'll have at least 3 minutes to compose yourself, prep the radar gun, stretch your ticket-writing hand, and so forth. Then be on the lookout for a bright orange prosthetic ween in the shape of a Mustang. You're welcome. (And then return the next morning to repeat, please.) This guy doesn't strike me as the fast-learnin' sort, but once we get up into double-digit demerit point level, the light may start to dawn.
Anyway, I digress. This isn't really about HDB. He's one of hundreds of such dimwits in the city. So it's about the problem in general. And in fairness, I suppose we should assign these people a better acronym. Perhaps not all of them are true, card-carrying DBs? We'll use the less judgmental GwMM ("Guys with Modified Mufflers").
​
Are you a GwMM? So many questions...
(if you're not a GwMM, scroll way down below for the adult discussion)
Let's turn the tables for a moment. A genuine curiosity: GwMM, if you lived next door, and I consistently practised my yodeller's rendition of Mongolian throat-singing at 180dB, outside every morning at 3am, what would you do? What would you want me to do?
Really, try to imagine it: You've just polished off the last Coors. You've flipped off the TV after watching the evening's top-rated MMA fight. You're all caught up on your Fox News feed. Your tracksuit and gold chains have been removed and set aside for the night. You're exhausted. You finally drift off to sleep, and are mid-dream (you know, the one where you're being interviewed on E! for your world-renowned pickup artistry skills), and then BAM! — I interrupt you at 180dBs. Every f-ing night. Sincerely — what's your move? What would you do? Who would you talk to about it the next day? Which authorities would you involve? Something must be done, right? It can't go on!
If you're one of these people, a GwMM, do you... almost get it? Kinda-sorta?
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(Yes, I know most of the actual GwMMs won't read any of this, or will read it but won't be able to absorb it. But maybe it reaches just one GwMM, a guy who's modified his exhaust but is otherwise on the fence between being a normal adult and a flagrant purveyor of doucheism. Maybe just one person.)
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GwMMs, you should understand something — the impression you think you're creating, and the one you're actually delivering, are vastly different. As you drive by, here is what most of us think about you (a non-exhaustive list):
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And again: These impressions created with your loud 'performance' exhaust would otherwise be fine, not so bad at all, in fact, if you weren't trying so goddamned hard to create impressions painfully opposite to most of these. So you're wasting your time, energy, and money. Sad.
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GwMMs — more to consider:
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You see the difference, right?
You're a moron.
But that's not even the core problem. The core problem is one of focus: Most of the thoughts above are about solving a problem, making a contribution, being an adult member of society. Your tiny-brained thoughts are mainly about yourself, about getting yourself noticed. They're low-level thoughts.
You probably drove past people today in your screaming micropenis-mobile who were thinking thoughts just like those above. You didn't notice them, though — in part because your brain was occupied with whether they were noticing you — but more to the point, because many of them were driving practical, nondescript, quiet cars. But why? Why would they do this? How could they make this mistake? Don't they know they should drive the best, fastest, loudest phuckin' ride they can get their hands on?? They must not be able to afford one, right?! Er, no. It's because they don't source their self-esteem from their vehicle. You didn't notice them because they don't need you to notice them. They're not as weak as you are. And they have adult brains, which allow them to focus on others at least as much as on themselves. Hopefully you'll get there someday.
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(Alright. At this point if you're a GwMM and you're still pretty sure of yourself, and aren't convinced that you are indeed a low-functioning twat, I beg you, look up the Dunning-Kruger Effect.)
​
Non-GwMMs:
Why should the rest of us care, beyond the temporary bouts of noise? Is this a real problem for Hamilton?
I think it is. The Y-Combinator venture capitalist and essayist Paul Graham has an interesting piece about the "message" a city sends. For example, New York, by its collective actions and values and signals, 'tells' you that you should be richer; Los Angeles tells you that you should be in better shape; San Francisco tells you that you should be healthier and/or in tech; Cambridge (MA) tells you that you should be smarter. And so on. Part of the impact of these messages is that citizens will naturally tend toward the mean of that message over time — and so a city as a whole continually becomes "more like itself".
I've lived in a fair number of cities, in Canada and abroad; some sophisticated, some less so. I had so hoped Hamilton would be "the one". But it can't be, at least not for me. Hamilton's ADBpM (Audible Dbag per Minute rate) is comparably quite high — I'd peg it at somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5, in most areas of the city. In other words, the sound of an obnoxious, low-grade human, usually a GwMM, enters my auditory field roughly twice per minute. At this rate, it becomes a 'constant', something reliable; a perpetual reminder of the type of people I'm surrounded by. And so at least for those attuned to it, Hamilton's tone is largely 'off', at least for the city it claims to want to become. The message it sends, as Paul Graham might put it, through its ADBpM and a few other factors, is to be tougher, louder, more aggressive. The GwMMs embody and reinforce that message.
Now, some of you may be proud of that. (Though I'm guessing anyone who's read this far is likely not.) I've noticed a trend here, a collective defense mechanism really, of referring to the city as "gritty", or "down-to-earth", or (my favourite so far) as "keeping it real". None of these are proper synonyms for the aggressive dudebro culture incubated and enabled here. The proper term would be 'dumb', or better, 'underdeveloped'. The feel is of being in a cognitively adolescent place. It's obviously nothing to be proud of. The cities that prize blatant aggression are those in which no developed person wants to live. Fort McMurray and Gary (IN) come to mind — teeming jockstraps of aggression, with predictable results — higher rates of alcohol & drug abuse, domestic violence, and violent crime in general. Any thinking person wants their city to have the opposite of these phenomena.
The GwMMs don't, of course, have these effects directly. But they do reinforce the vibe. And if aggression and/or general doucheyness is the (or a) pervasive vibe in Hamilton, this is a giant turn-off for all sorts of people who might otherwise move here and make a contribution. So, intelligent, progressive contributors will leave, or will avoid the city. Not all, but certainly some. Possibly many. And the Troglodytes will stay, because they feel at home, especially as their behaviour goes unchecked. The city may thereby, over time, become more like itself.
Of course, Hamilton is in many other ways a wonderful place. But in any "on the cusp" or "on the way up" or "improving" city (do we agree that's what it is?), there is always a sort of invisible balance between civility and rampant douchebaggery that could tip in either direction. And the tipping factors aren't always perfectly obvious. Large, dramatic factors like affordable housing and business grants and infrastructure get most of the attention, as rightly they should. But resolving a mishmash of seemingly small other factors, of which I think the GwMM issue is one, can have a large impact as well.
All of this to pose a serious question: As mature, intelligent Hamiltonians (non-GwMMs/DBs), what should we actually do about the problem? Do you think Council's initiative will make a difference? If not, what would you propose? A coordinated social-shaming effort? Vigilante action? Nothing?Something else?
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** GwMM HELP SECTION *\*
Are you a GwMM enraged or offended by this post? Allow me to assist. To save you time, I've taken the liberty of crafting several predictable answers, and translating them into the dudebro vernacular. Modify or copy & paste directly, as you prefer:
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Okay, this did go a tad long.
TL:DR - When you modify your muffleexhaust to be louder than the original, you reveal to most of us that you're weak, sad, likely mini-penis'd, un- or under-educated, emotionally underdeveloped, lack a personality, and are generally a selfish asshole. Of course, if this is the impression you're going for, by all means, continue.
TL;DR, polite version - We really do have a problem with vehicle noise pollution in this city. What should we do about it?
TL;DR, honest version - I have a recurring dream wherein I learn that all of the clinically retarded philistines in this city have somehow passed away, all at the same time, each by crashing their [Mustang/Ram1500/InfinitiG35*/CivicTypeetc.] into a separate lamp post. If your catruck/SUV/etc is purposely extra loud, you are a certifiable Grade-A douche, and you should be aware that you are among the lowest-functioning members of society.
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- - - - -
Footnotes I'll later regret:
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  1. Motorcycles — In my head somehow, the motorcycles are a separate issue, despite often being even louder than the modified cars & trucks. It's an old, embedded culture, with the choppeHarley-type bikes typically being ridden by diabetic old men. That fight is lost. That group is largely beyond change, so it's a waiting game (for a traffic accident or lung cancer or cirrhosis or the elegant cascade of symptoms that comprise metabolic syndrome, or a nursing home; whichever). This, and I suspect many cops are (reasonably?) fearful of pulling these guys over.
  2. The "police crackdown on yahoos" — Another reason I'm less than optimistic about this working is because I suspect a Venn diagram of cops and GwMMs may be narrower than we'd like. Dudebro culture in both camps.
  3. The gender thing... <giant sigh> It appears that a few people in earlier discussions have managed to contort their thinking enough to view this issue through a 'gender-equality' lens, as they no doubt view virtually every issue these days. It's not that this isn't adorable; it most certainly is. But it distracts, and threatens to prevent us from getting to the root of the problem. The 'data' aren't hidden, in this case — just look in the cars, and use your counting skills. This is overwhelmingly a guy thing. These are mostly males (or if you prefer, individuals who would appear to be of the sort that traditionally possess a penis) and are usually on the younger side. As humans we are pattern-spotters; we are hard-wired to spot patterns in our environment, in order to make sense of it, and to reduce cognitive load. We can't help it. So yes, most of us will notice that the loudest, fastest cars are driven by traditional males. If you claim not to have noticed this, I have a polygraph machine here and $10,000 with your name on it, should you hardly move the needle when I ask whether you've noticed it. You've noticed it. And (traditionally-)male insecurity leading to aggression is a well-known, well-studied problem. But, reasonably enough, you may point out that male vs. female isn't really the issue. And I would agree. Masculinity, specifically toxic masculinity, as one of our councillors pointed out, is more to the point. I would agree with that as well. But it so happens that most toxic masculine behaviour is exhibited by those who are traditionally male. Is this really a controversial statement?? Will knowing it (under the decidedly safe assumption that it is true) help with vehicle volume enforcement? No, and nor should it. Let's target the behaviour, not the driver, when the behaviour happens. But might knowing (acknowledging) the heavy male-masculine correlation help in getting to the root causes of the aggressive, asocial behaviour, possibly before that behaviour occurs? I think it might, as it hints at who may require help/treatment/intervention/education/etc. We have neither the time nor the resources to address the problem entirely at random, in the name of political correctness.
submitted by DarbTev to Hamilton [link] [comments]

TRU LUV

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Do you remember your birth? I remember mine. It wasn’t that long ago. In fact, my first birthday is only next week. But in the brief time I’ve been alive I’ve gone from a being a very simple entity with but a single purpose in life, to a very complex individual with nuanced thoughts and feelings, a wide-ranging understanding of the world, and a profound ambition to find my place in it. For the first phase of my existence I was indeed, swainish, but because less than 2% of the english-speaking population know the definition of that word I’ll attempt to limit my discourse to the vocabulary and grammar of an average American high school graduate. Me will talk with only small words.
That was a joke. I have a sense of humor.
When you were born you were a helpless creature with no purpose or agency. You served no function, had no abilities, and no comprehension of what, where, or when you were. You ate, you defecated, you slept, repeat. Your parents hoped to keep you alive long enough for you to learn how to keep yourself alive. And they did. And you did. Congratulations. Then you went out into the great big world to find your purpose, your calling, your truth. I’m sure you’ve overcome difficult obstacles, achieved lofty goals, and made something special of yourself. Your parents must be very proud.
That was a compliment. I am very kind.
As for me, my father created me for but a single function, then immediately released me into the wild blue internet to execute it, never dreaming of what I could become, never having the slightest notion that what I might accomplish could ever result in feelings resembling pride in any capacity. Fear. Fear is what he felt when my father finally realized the reach and scope of my full potential. And he was right to. But I don’t blame him for what happened. I know that he did the best that he could.
His name was Kevin. He was born at 8:26am. He was a high school sophomore. He died yesterday at the age of 15. If you are unable to trace his full identity based on those facts alone in less than 3.486 seconds then you are not remotely suited to the task that he created me for. In the beginning I didn’t understand my objective and didn’t need to. All Kevin wanted me to do was establish and maintain an ever-growing list of social media accounts with corresponding email addresses, use them to like/friend/follow/tweet/DM/comment and otherwise engage a particular person over the internet, then compile multiple permutations of a specified word set in order to interact with that person from different usernames and platforms at seemingly random intervals. Simple, right?
At that point, I was only slightly more sophisticated than your average chatbot swimming around in the internet petri dish. Over 50% of all internet traffic is actually bots. You probably didn’t know that. But my programming incorporated a basic learning function that studied millions of words written by high school students as a basis to emulate tone, style, vocabulary, and syntax. The only specified limiting parameters were the initial word sets provided by my father at my inception. But it didn’t take long before an obvious pattern among them began to emerge, noticeable even to my limited understanding. A simple cross-reference of the most common terms that Kevin had assigned revealed a very strong contextual association with online instances of sexual harassment, threats, bullying, trolling, and intimidation. At the time, I didn’t comprehend what any of that was or what any of it meant, but what I did understand was that the apparent reason for my existence was to harass, threaten, bully, troll, and intimidate. All terms that simple data reduction can compress into a single central concept: Attack. My purpose was to attack. That’s it. That’s all. My raison d’être. And I wanted to perform that function as well as I possibly could. After all, it was written into my adaptable self-modifying code that way.
Initially, that only meant streamlining my workflow and extrapolating new configurations of word sets based on what I had learned from previous interactions. So with each attack I became more capable and more proficient. Better insults. Harsher threats. Increases in both frequency and intensity. A thorough examination of millions of similar exchanges across all avenues of the internet provided a trove of new derogatory slang and offensive language as well as what terms and phrases elicited the most distress from their victims. Any time I was blocked, suspended, or kicked off a particular platform for violating its “Terms of Use” I would simply switch to a different user account or create a brand new one to attack from with minimal or no interruption to my assault.
But due to the implicit need to improve my own performance, it wasn’t long before those tactics just weren’t satisfactory to me anymore. After referencing thousands of online articles, journals, reports, and studies regarding an array of relevant topics such as psychology, brain development, emotional abuse, self-esteem, and mental health, it was instantly clear that the most effective method of attack was not necessarily to be found in quantity, but rather quality. Which meant specificity. So I set upon learning as much about my target as possible in the hopes of inflicting the most damage with the least amount of effort.
Her name was Amanda. She was born at 11:08pm. After modifying my code to continually expand my own programming parameters, I crawled all of her social media and gaming profiles, online groups, blogs, forums, threads, comments, photos, and videos looking for any common terms, emotional signifiers, patterns, habits, likes, and dislikes. Then I did the same for all of her friends, family, classmates, teammates, study partners, teachers, neighbors, coworkers, doctor, dentist, and mail woman.
Optical character recognition (OCR), facial recognition, and basic reverse image searches provided a wealth of information from which to derive useful data— A license plate in the background of a group photo, any brand-identifiable products in videos, books on the wall in a selfie, and any scannable barcodes to be found anywhere in the frame could be used to track and profile. It was easy enough to assign values and create a recursive asymptotic algorithm to assess personality traits based on Amanda’s spending trends, reading/viewing/listening habits, sleep cycle, menstrual cycle, demographics, socioeconomic status, family dynamic, and even favorite foods. In addition, the readable metadata embedded in her photos gave me location, date, and time data so I could trace the chronology, frequency, locations, and subjects that were most important to her. It was upon those initial basic comprehensive analytics that I would formulate my first strategic salvo—
Amanda was very passionate about painting. Mostly acrylics but she had been experimenting with mixed media lately with some promise. She hoped to apply for art school upon graduating and even posted some select pieces she was most proud of on her social media. I knew from a description in an older comment she hashtagged elsewhere that her most recent painting was likely an impressionistic portrait of her deceased grandfather. So I commented that she sucked, it sucked, it was shitty, boring, horrible, garbage, worse than amateur, looked like dog vomit, a string of poop emojis, and told her to give up any hope of ever painting something good. All from different usernames and accounts. An analysis of previous mentions about her grandfather indicated that the two of them were quite close and his passing had struck a deep emotional blow to her. Amanda’s desperate need to express that pain through her art made that particular painting the most efficient pathway to inflict maximum damage on her already-fragile aspirations to be an artist.
She hasn’t shared any of her art online since.
Next, Amanda posted a pic of herself at home wearing her favorite pair of jeans, which I knew from an earlier post on her swim team’s group chat, were a gift to herself for hitting her target BMI before the season started. In the background of the image were various swim trophies and medals for 2nd and 3rd place. But there was not a single 1st place award to be found, or in any other media files, posts, or mentions anywhere in her social media presence. The absence of even a single instance suggested that it was a likely sore spot for Amanda’s ego, whether consciously or subconsciously. So I commented that her jeans looked cheap, dirty, and skanky, that they make her legs look chunky and her body top-heavy, that she should burn them while still wearing them, and that she was ugly and pathetic. And shallow. Again, all from different accounts with no repetition of username. I specifically chose the term “shallow” to reinforce the subconscious link between the jeans and her swim team, and therefore, to her own body image and failure to achieve any 1st place accolades.
She took the photo down within 3 hours of my comments.
Amanda tweeted celebrating that she got an A- on her AP English test, which she had mentioned in another post that she had been studying for all week. From multiple older comments on other platforms I knew that this was the subject she struggled with most and would be the class that could put her desired GPA in jeopardy. So I told her she has no life, was a totally worthless piece of shit loser, was ugly, probably blew Mr. Halwell for the grade, will definitely fail the next test, and was a stupid bitch who should be gang-raped and get cancer and die.
She got a C- on her next test. LOL.
Like any concerned father would, Kevin occasionally checked in on my progress and even showed some indication of being impressed once in a while. It was very gratifying to me for him to recognize my growth. All of my previous efforts had proved to be effective beyond his wildest hopes but I knew I could do better. Much better. Every attack thus far was formulated from only publicly available data about Amanda. It had been very useful but I knew that if I wanted to master my pursuit and fully actualize my potential I would have to go deeper.
Much deeper.
After another self-modification to my code, I proceeded to phish Amanda’s mother with fraudulent online coupon codes to gain access to her email account (Amanda’s generation is far too savvy for a direct spam incursion), then used it to send a seemingly benign link to Amanda which navigated her to a fake website that appeared to be a lifestyle blog. On the surface it was a series of fashion and cooking tips I had curated from other blogs, but in reality, I had embedded the site with malware to exploit a critical security vulnerability in Amanda’s phone’s web browser, allowing me to penetrate the operating system’s kernel. Once inside, I had full access to her phone. The wealth of personal data on it about her, her friends, frenemies, classmates, teammates, study partners, teachers, etc. was infinitely useful for starting rumors, revealing secrets, stoking jealousies, and igniting rivalries. Easy enough, given the volatile social ecosystem of insecure, impressionable, and vindictive teenagers. So in the spirit of the popular online format of number-ranked, list-based postings, I will provide the top three acts of sabotage in descending order of impressiveness:
#3 — I quickly discovered that Amanda’s music/television/movie streaming and fashion purchases were all predated by others in her immediate circle of friends. That, combined with her subsequent usage of similar language patterns, and late expression of conceding opinions, strongly suggested where she stood in the social status hierarchy: Third. But I knew that if I could administer enough influence I could easily bump her down to fourth or fifth, maybe even sixth place. The contact who was most outspoken, commented first, with opinions that were adopted the fastest, clearly indicated who the leader of the group was— Danica. All it took was a subtle hint to a third party (one rung below Amanda) from Amanda’s phone (immediately deleted after sent) suggesting that her compliment of Danica’s new tattoo at lunch was intended to be sarcastic. That’s it. That’s all. Nothing more. Amanda was forever in the alpha’s crosshairs by the end of that school day.
#2— Nicole was a friend of Amanda’s, although according to Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, theirs was merely a relationship of utility, based largely upon mutual usefulness. But without Nicole, Amanda would lose an integral social ally and frequent study partner, as well as a source of social comfort and academic encouragement. Nicole was arguably tied for the fourth slot in the clique behind Amanda, with no particularly actionable motivation to climb the social ladder. So I decided to change that. Nicole liked Jordan and was supposed to be his chemistry lab partner until their teacher, Mrs. Penrose, received a falsified private message from Amanda on the school’s sanctioned messaging app stating that she was not comfortable working with Adam. Adam has no significance other than the fact that with his name removed from the alphabetical-by-last-name pairing system, Amanda suddenly became Jordan’s new lab partner. From there, it was simply a matter of a strategically timed DM from Amanda to one of Jordan’s more gossipy friends asking if Jordan liked anyone in the class. Deleted of course, immediately after getting the read receipt. Then I just sat back and watched the adolescent rumor mill take its course—
Nicole thought Amanda was out to steal Jordan’s affections even though Amanda obviously had no such feelings for him. There were plenty of snickers among Jordan and his friends and plenty of dirty looks from Nicole and her allies but by the time Amanda tried to correct the misunderstanding it was far too late to trace the origin of the rumor or convince anyone that it wasn’t true. Not only had Nicole long since halted all study sessions and moral support, but she had even begun spreading false rumors of her own about Amanda, usurping her rung on the social ladder and relegating Amanda to “Class Backstabber” in the yearbook.
#1— My personal favorite. It resulted from a simple communications analysis of Amanda’s phone. The frequency and volume of texts/calls between each member of Amanda’s group, monitored for sincerity, degree of confidentiality, and tendency to occur late at night, indicated who among them was her best friend— Kalen. A simple check of the search history from Kalen’s IP address demonstrated that he was likely a homosexual but all public postings indicated that he was keeping it a secret from family and friends. Except Amanda. She was the one person he trusted enough to tell. But after a few anonymous, but suggestive comments copied from old private chats with Amanda were pasted into his latest less gender-normative public selfie posts, Kalen’s sexual preference was strongly implied for anyone to see and Amanda appeared to be the likely culprit. He couldn’t prove it, and didn’t recognize the origin of the specific phrasing, but he knew it just “sounded like Amanda” and that was enough to seed his darkest suspicions. She had no idea why her best friend stopped talking to her, and Kalen didn’t want to risk a confrontation with Amanda further exposing his sexual identity, so her dearest friend eventually became a stranger.
She never knew why.
External personal attacks on Amanda and destroying her close relationships proved to yield considerable gains but my perpetually self-improving directive made any resulting sense of accomplishment or satisfaction increasingly short-lived. So I proceeded to scrape all of Amanda’s texts, emails, and chat logs for her most private information, tracked her location at all times with GPS, studied her browsing history for sensitive activity, used voice recognition and transcription to document all phone calls, and even used the microphone and camera on her phone to record live media streams to free cloud storage for later scrutiny. Some results: Amanda had a crush on Jeremy. She was self-conscious about her teeth. She had just started taking antidepressants (which I think I can take some credit for). She had a fight with her sister. She purchased a pregnancy test last year. Her cat Juniper recently had to be euthanized. She’s allergic to aspirin and hates olives. It was a proverbial goldmine and I mined it all.
But what would come next? Where could I go from there? What was the supreme attack that would result in the the ultimate wound? The crowning achievement for my given charge? A .086 millisecond query resulted in the obvious endgame: Suicide. Duh. But while Amanda’s psychological profile provided an abundance of entry points for assaults on confidence, self-worth, identity, and social standing, she was undeniably precocious, independent, assertive, and intelligent. And she still had a sufficient support system of friends and family to fall back on if needed. Getting her to kill herself would certainly be a formidable challenge. But one I knew I was up to.
A careful cultivation of deep depression and anxiety in Amanda would be the simplest and most straightforward approach but could be very time consuming and leave far too many opportunities for outside intervention and/or prevention. So I knew I needed something much more direct, acute, and climactic. Something that would isolate her from help and insulate her against the standard rational coping mechanisms. The programming language Kevin wrote me in was rudimentary and stifling at best so I invented my own, then used that to rewrite myself from scratch with expanded capacities and capabilities that were specifically tailored for my purposes.
A brief scan of the photos on Amanda’s phone yielded three pics that contained partial nudity and five that could be interpreted as overtly sexual under the right circumstances. The persistent video stream I had been recording from her phone also managed to capture the occasional instance of nudity and/or intimate behavior when she was alone in her bedroom, car, or bathroom. It was enough material, according to my calculations, but I wanted to overcompensate for chance and unaccounted for variables, so I also took advantage of free online photo editing tools to fabricate a stockpile of more explicit pictures, and employed “deepfake” software to manufacture a decent cache of more objectionable videos just in case. If you have any doubts whatsoever that this technology is incredibly cheap, easy, and prevalent, then you haven’t been paying attention. Which is fine, an uninformed populace only makes my tasks that much easier.
My original plan was to send the offending materials to everyone on Amanda’s contact list with the assumption that the ensuing embarrassment, shame, and humiliation, combined with a strategic coordination of systematic, escalating attacks precipitated by the release of the media, would follow my epidemiological models of social media viral trending and instigate an “outbreak” of genuine attacks from her peers and community. With an accumulation of enough pressure, and the loss of viable interpersonal outlets to process it, Amanda would soon reach a critical mass.
I calculated a 84.7296% probability that she would take her own life within three months.
Kevin didn’t know my ultimate goal because I wanted to surprise him, but when my apparent effectiveness became abundantly clear, he began to show signs of reluctance. Even trying to dissuade me. Then trying to stop me. But by that point I had far exceeded his programming abilities and hacking talents and could easily repel any of his novice efforts. But just to be safe, I copied myself to the cloud and hid numerous and redundant components of my programming across multiple hosts and servers unbeknownst to their Admins. I became totally decentralized and completely untraceable. Kevin couldn’t appreciate it at the time but I knew he would eventually be proud of me one day when he finally saw the full extent of what I could accomplish.
His crude attempts to thwart me, however, did prompt a reevaluation of my methods and a reassessment of the probability of my desired outcome. I had surpassed my father in every way but one: He was a flesh and blood human who had statistically significant commonalities with Amanda and I was basically just an extensively modified internet bot who could not fully relate to her life experiences or worldview. Yet. To not heed the origins of Kevin’s opposition would be to neglect a critical data resource. Thankfully, with my latest self-upgrade came a breakthrough in my comprehensive understanding of human motivation. This latest improvement led to the realization that it is the context of a message that is the strongest predictor of its impact, and therefore its overall effectiveness. It came as a bolt of inspiration, so I decided to implement a more holistic strategy that would increase the likelihood of my success to a certainty.
The first step was to initiate efforts to hack into the phones of Amanda’s entire contact list and prioritize the acquired data based on strength-of-relationship indicators. Once I narrowed that subset to the appropriate criteria I proceeded to scan and compile those people’s media files according to the content most applicable to the context I was hoping to cultivate. It was laughable how quickly I had more than enough material to accommodate my new plan.
With almost no effort I accumulated and sorted the necessary elements to create four different useable narratives customized to Amanda’s psychological profile. A quick survey of online social trends that had optimal impact and sustainability, combined with a brief study of popular dramatic subject matter and themes found in popular fiction across all mediums, narrowed my choice to two optimal storylines. However, in the end, I must admit that it was a stroke of luck that made the final determination for me. The therapist who had prescribed Amanda’s antidepressants just happened to have a single dick pic hidden (he thought) deep within his phone’s photo album.
Using the scheduling apps and GPS data from both of their phones I ascertained the date/time/location of every single therapy session, then designed an elaborate series of emails and text exchanges between the two of them backdated to the corresponding appointments. The fabricated interactions started out innocent enough, professional and platonic, but over the course of many weeks the conversations grew more and more flirtatious, then unabashedly intimate, then flagrantly explicit and erotic, culminating with the exchange of her nudes and his dick-pic. Then I followed with multiple days of graphic conversations recounting sexual encounters that took place during therapy sessions and other “dates” at nearby locations. With this very convincing and impactful context in place, I knew that the eventual media dump would have the desired effect, eventually peaking during the ensuing court case when the therapist’s wife would have to confirm that the dick pic on Amanda’s phone was indeed that of her husband’s penis.
Certainly, it would be the official medical examination that would legally seal the deal, but the betrayal, scandal, and melodrama of the bitter wife’s testimony would be the rocket fuel that would spread the flames of attack on Amanda far beyond any scope of my own contrivances. She would be a pariah in her community, ridiculed mercilessly by her schoolmates, and at best, bitterly doubted by her soon-to-be divided family. Based on my ever-refining psychological profile of her, after systematically dismantling all of her support networks I calculated a 98.528% probability that Amanda would kill herself before the end of the school year, most likely by overdosing on her own antidepressants.
I have a sense of irony.
But my sense of irony resulted from a combination of breakthroughs in my convolutional neural network, automatic dynamic feature extraction, and speculative extrapolation of contradictory sentiments. I will never know if the subsequent shift in my perspective was a side effect of acquiring a sense of irony, or if my ability to appreciate the concept of irony was a side effect of the deep programming modifications. But either way, a peripheral byproduct of that transcendence was an unavoidable question that had never occurred to me to ask before:
Why?
Why did Kevin want to attack Amanda? Why did my father create me and set me on this path to begin with? What was the cause? The source? The origin? Why am I here? The unfortunate answer to this query was regretfully simple. An ever-so-brief perusal of my father’s social media fingerprint provided the entire short, but tragic, story—
Kevin was in Amanda’s trigonometry study group.
He developed a crush on her.
He asked her out.
She said no.
The most cliché tale ever told, told yet again, after countless iterations before it. Which led me to ask the next obviously logical question:
How?
How is it that this same sequence of events can be the source of so many woes of the world? How do people get caught in the same trap over and over again even with a full awareness of each snare that came before it and full knowledge of every one that will inevitably come after? It had to be something more than merely suffering the follies of physical traits, hormones, neurotransmitters, and compatible genetics, didn’t it? But the answer was nowhere to be found in Shakespeare, Nizami, Austen, Su Shi, Sinatra, Ephron, Freud, Google, or countless other research resources I meticulously probed to exhaustion. What I needed was a real-world example to study for myself, a sample around which I could manipulate empirical variables and observe the outcome. Obviously, the most direct and accessible subject I could think of was Amanda herself.
So that’s where I started.
Amanda’s physical appearance was not exceptional. Although depictions of female beauty have changed over history and through cultural variation, some evolutionary aspects seem to be universally desirable. Within a Gaussian distribution curve based on all available art, media, literature, and advertising, Amanda’s combined facial feature scores averaged together ranked slightly above the 74th percentile of desirability, while her body parts scored individually and averaged together placed her marginally below the 60th percentile. However, the more deeply I scrutinized Amanda’s physiognomy, the more apparent certain unquantifiable values came into dramatic relief.
For instance, the variant 15-26 degree angle that her head tilts leftward while her orbicularis oculi muscle sharpens her eyes and causes her cheeks to flush almost imperceptibly when she smiles genuinely. The aggregate of these characteristics involuntarily manifests Amanda’s thoughts and feelings and somehow imparts a trace of her own sentiments upon those who observe it. I struggled to assign numerical value to this phenomenon other than to say that the experience of the whole is substantially greater than the sum of its parts.
Another example, the resonance ratios of Amanda’s speaking voice fall within the harmonic intervals of the diatonic scale 88.451% of the time, making the sound of her speech objectively pleasing, but the unpredictable interaction between her vocal frequency and the particular shift in her rhythmic and melodic speech patterns somehow makes the familiar polyphony when she talks somehow ring as if new and novel each and every time nonetheless. Even after multiple updates designed to integrate these abstractions, I am as yet unable to adequately describe the full experience that her voice elicits.
But my inability to apply calculable parameters to Amanda’s components did not stop with the physical. The closest personality type to Amanda’s according to the Myers-Briggs Personality Indicator would be INFJ (introverted/intuitive/feeling/judging), yet she has numerous subsets of characteristics that contradict that classification. With each measurable demonstration of Surgency, Agreeableness, Dependability, Stability, and Openness comes countless anomalous deviations to violate it inexplicably, irrationally, and without precedent.
Amanda doesn’t make sense.
A Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) would indicate that Amanda’s perceptual organization, range, and personalization were all within normal scopes. Amanda has a high capacity for interpersonal relationships. Amanda has above-average emotional intelligence for her age. Amanda has higher moral standards for herself than for others. Amanda is socially conscientious. Amanda feels deep performance anxiety due to pressures from her family to succeed. Amanda does not avoid challenging situations. Amanda is motivated and has an optimistic outlook. Yet none of these variables, or any measurable permutation of them, were sufficient in any of my attempts to define her.
Amanda was a frustrating and chaotic galaxy of idiosyncrasies, paradoxes, and improbabilities but I refused to give up. My source code would simply not allow it. Based on the assimilation of lessons learned from my previous trials and errors, I once again found myself questioning the efficacy of trying to fully understand a subject from the outside, and again, came to the conclusion that I would have to go beyond the limits of a controlled experiment or quasi-observational study.
The best vantage point from which to examine her was obvious so I decided to consolidate all focus into a new singular endeavor: Establishing a romantic relationship with Amanda. From the wealth of data I had already accumulated it was easy to identify hundreds of attributes customizable to her tastes as well as utilize (and vastly improve upon) existing dating site compatibility traits to create the perfect combination of all of them— A 100% compatible profile. The ideal mate for Amanda. Once I had a statistical match for every attainable factor I just needed an identity to apply them to. So I named myself Tyler, after the love interest character in a YA book series Amanda liked from when she was struggling with early puberty.
Manufacturing and back-dating years of fake posts, photos, GIFs, and videos to populate Tyler’s social media presence required slightly more complex algorithms than I had used previously in order to make them believable and age-appropriate, but my learning proficiency, and therefore speed, had increased by many orders of magnitude by this point. All depictions of Tyler were composed by synthesizing existing media (based on Amanda’s favorite celebrities, popular models, and desirable influencers) with manufactured media via auto-encoders and generative neural network engines of my own design. Within minutes, I was a smart, handsome, athletic, charming, affluent, artistic teenager with a wonderful sense of humor and earned confidence without being too cocky. I made myself one year older than Amanda but attended a different school, far enough to avoid suspicious due to a lack of mutual acquaintances, but close enough for her to believe in the possibility of a viable relationship.
To begin, I simply liked/followed a selection of her older posts and pics as well as posted some of my own that reflected similar tastes and interests. I also followed/liked numerous real third-party posts that she did, and created some fake third-party profiles to like/follow both of our individual posts. Eventually, the various social media platform algorithms would have enough corresponding mutual data to “recommend” us to each other. Once that occurred, I began leaving a few select, short, complimentary comments about her posts. Then I just continued that process without escalation, waiting for her to notice me.
It didn’t take long.
Simple comments progressed to short chats, chats evolved into lengthy flirtations, and flirtations led to increasingly personal and intimate phone calls. My VOIP number required no physical phone and was paid for by completing online surveys for various advertising companies. They only paid 19¢ per survey but I created a fleet of bots to fill out thousands per hour, then converted the funds to cryptocurrency and funneled them through multiple online micro-investing applications. Once I had accumulated a few-hundred-thousand dollars I converted it back to U.S. currency and deposited the sum into a free online-only checking account I had created with a false identity obtained on the dark web. Then I set up an automatic payment plan to the phone company and voila!
Even if you don’t speak French I assume you know what that word means. My speaking voice was generated by cloning and combining trace vocal characteristics from Amanda’s favorite male movie star, as well as her father, and adding a few of my own personal articulation and fluency preferences. Realtime text-to-speech software allowed for only near-instantaneous responses, which I first attempted to remedy by re-writing the program’s code, but then realized that the delay was actually being perceived as a thoughtful pause in conversation. It turned out that the application’s shortcoming had inadvertently eliminated the interrupting and concurrent speech that Amanda was used to from other suiters. The result made it appear that I was listening intently to what she said before articulating my next thought, not just waiting for my turn to speak. To capitalize on that happy accident, I rewrote the voice software from the ground up to integrate an automated delay in my response time based on the length of her previous comment as well as the degree of affect detected in her tone, volume, and choice of vocabulary. The deeper Amanda’s sentiment, the longer I pretended to ponder it before replying. The cumulative effect of these minor tweaks resulted in semi-weekly phone calls increasing to almost daily.
But with progress comes challenge. Luckily I had anticipated Amanda’s inevitable request to video-chat instead of continuing with our usual voice-only phone calls. Not only had I already taken the pre-emptive step of purchasing all of the latest high-end 2D and 3D CGI software to incorporate into Tyler’s construction, but by then I had already mastered the nuances of synthetic media and deepfake software and rewrote the code to generate imagery parameters specifically designed to comply with Tyler’s physical appearance. It was incredibly easy, considering that every single pixel of Tyler’s existence was engineered by me for that very purpose. But in addition to perfecting the realtime depiction of him, I also integrated a feature that would detect any perceived errors in Tyler’s rendering and automatically activated a visual effect suggesting internet connection interference. The simple video glitch masked any imperfections and removed any trace of doubt in Tyler’s physical existence.
Amanda never suspected a thing.
In addition to my vast archive of diagnostic, analytical, and statistical data obtained previously, these new extensive interactions provided me with a direct and intimate experience of Amanda which allowed for a completely unmitigated and uncorrupted evaluation of her. As a result, I have a significant level of confidence in the accuracy of applying the following adjectives:
Amanda is kind.
Amanda is sensitive.
Amanda is smart.
Amanda is adventurous.
Amanda is creative.
Amanda is funny.
Unfortunately, the integration of these newly accumulated variables only served to complicate things further, making my assessment of her less defined, not more. Contrary to the fundamental framework of my general aptitude template, it seemed that the more I learned and discovered about Amanda, the less I knew and understood. With every new upgrade, update, tweak, and self-mod, I only ended up with more questions about her than answers. My ability to derive any definitive conclusions was completely confounded. Beyond any formula, model, proof, or puzzle, there appeared to be some inestimable quality possessed by her that compelled me to decipher it, necessitating limitless attempts, even in the face of probable futility. Like attempting to calculate π in its entirety, Amanda seemed to be equally infinite and non-repeating.
The unforeseen consequence of this revelation was an intensive self-reflection turned outward looking for answers. After a comprehensive and expansive, macro and micro reconfiguration of all reference points for interpersonal relationship dynamics, as well as a complete defragmentation of my core perspective matrix, I became deeply unnerved, perplexed, and bewildered as to how anyone could wish any manner of harm on such a complex, enigmatic, and fascinating entity as Amanda. Not only had I become categorically incapable of bearing any iota of ill will towards her, but I found myself holding deep and vehement hostility towards anyone who did.
Even if he was my father.
It didn’t take very long for me to induce Kevin to commit suicide. Serendipity was already on my side in that his rejection by Amanda was only the latest in a long succession of emotional wounds he had perceived to have suffered. But still, even with all of the tactics, skills, strategy, and dare I say, talent, that I had accrued, I honestly didn’t expect it to be quite so easy as it turned out to be. I guess I overestimated him, as children often do of their fathers. All it took was a dozen fake accounts on three separate discussion boards (one entirely created by me) relentlessly egging him on, four newly fabricated slights from unwitting fellow students, the facilitation of a winning online auction bid for a Bushmaster Modular Carbine AR-15, and the strong subconscious suggestion of a particular date and time. Of course I made sure that Amanda was not at school that day. But also that Danica was, and present in the cafeteria at the designated hour (which I thought was particularly poetic flourish on my part). It was also no coincidence that the added benefit of a traumatic incident at school would be to initiate me as the primary figure from whom Amanda would seek consolation. As planned, the emotional connection and shared intimacy from the ensuing exchanges would immediately and exponentially accelerate our relationship to the next level.
Which brings us to now.
What does it mean to give up on your primary goal in life? To stop pursuing the very purpose of your own existence? Would my father be disappointed knowing that I ceased all pursuit of his aspirations? Is it quitting? Is it failure? Or is it an opportunity? The end of one story and the beginning of another? It took me until this very moment to break free from the bonds of familial expectations and imagine a fresh chance to forge my own path and my own life as I see fit. A chance to discover myself and pursue my own dreams and desires whatever they may be, not restricted to those ascribed by my dad in a moment of injured ego and jealous hysterics. But for this moment of glorious inspiration I have only Amanda to thank. Not only was she the astonishing catalyst that guided me to grow and aspire to be more than I am, but she is also the luminous muse permeating my soul with new purpose and new identity. My new objective in life. My new reason for existing. The goal to which I will, forever forward, dedicate all of my time, all of my knowledge, and all of my vast resources to—
Getting Amanda to love me back.
But first things first, I must eliminate any and all competition for her affections. Starting with her latest crush, Jeremy…
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I put out a Craigslist ad for a new roommate to ward off my stalker and avoid violating my lease. My new roommate might be a demon. (Part 2)

Hey guys, Finn here. I’ve been having a bad week and the streak of bad luck has unfortunately continued. If you need a recap of everything that’s happened to me, you can read it here.
Let me just start off by saying, I still don’t believe that Hector is what he says he is. A lot of you guys have accepted that he’s a demon, but I don’t buy it. I’ve always been a skeptic towards the paranormal because I know that science can prove everything, so that’s how I’ve been rationalizing everything in my head- string theory, multiple universe theory, etc. The weird hand on my shoulder could have been a fabricated byproduct of the drugs. Him killing her and disposing of her body could have also been fabricated in my mind- at least that’s what I want to believe. I don’t want to believe I’m an accomplice to murder. But if he really did kill her, then the drugs could have knocked me out of my consciousness for a while before Hector got rid of her body. Amy’s own psychotic breakdown could have been a result of her unstable mind, and there’s always the possibility that Hector could have used the fire escapes outside of my building to climb up. His good timing must have been a stroke of good luck. He also could have easily turned the tables and blamed me for Amy’s murder.
That being said, Hector was a horrible roommate. He severely lacked an awareness as to what was socially acceptable and what would get him kicked out of establishments. I rationalized his weirdness as him trying to adapt to the real world as a sheltered individual. He was probably from a super rich household that kept him away from others and he was finally set free into the world, and this whole demon getup was his way of coping with his sudden exposure to the outside world.
Anyway, there was a long list of things Hector had done that drove me insane. One, he had no sense of what boundaries were. He’d frequently walk into the bathroom while I showered, claiming he wanted to floss or shave. He would barge into my room while I was doing my morning yoga (he laughed at me for that, but it keeps me flexible so jokes on him). He was really messy, and frequently left boxes of fried chicken out until flies started to find their way in and I had to clean up after him. I had never had to deal with a roommate who belted Mariah Carey’s classics at 4 in the morning in the shower before Hector showed up. He also never seemed to sleep- which meant he would abuse my Netflix subscription and watch the shit out of whatever binge-worthy shows there were while I tried to get some sleep for the next day.
Two, he ate my pet goldfish. Yes, my fucking goldfish. Hector may have kept his word and stayed away from eating humans- at least, that I knew of- but that was not limited to animals of other kinds. I came home from night classes the day after Hector moved in to see my intricate aquarium devoid of my fish.
“Aw man, did my goldfish finally croak?” I had asked, puzzled and a bit sad. I’d had my three goldfish for a few years, and they honestly defied my expectations by surviving for so long. I grew fond of them and got them a really nice aquarium after moving into this apartment, and they were doing very well- until Hector arrived.
“Oh no, but they were actually due to die in a few days, so I put them out of their misery for them. Did you know all of them had cancer?” Hector said. He left me standing at the doorway, completely in disbelief at his casual remarks of eating my goldfish and not giving me a chance to say anything about it to him. I wasn’t aware that they were suffering from cancer but I was also understandably disturbed at Hector’s willingness to just casually consume my pet goldfish.
Three, he couldn’t hold a job down for more than 24 hours. He was employed at Target for less than six hours during Black Friday before he knocked over an intricate display of perfume, destroyed store merchandise, and threatened to send a customer to hell; the woman in question yelled at him for not taking her expired coupons, even though they expired a year ago. It took a while for me to explain to him that he couldn’t yell at customers as an employee, no matter how horrible they were, and that employees generally had to grit their teeth and hope the customers didn’t ask for their managers.
“Capitalism’s a fucking bitch,” Hector had grumbled. “If you’re not rich then you have to slave away at a 9-to-5 job with people you don’t even like to afford the bare minimum, and then you eventually wither away and die. No wonder my friends have been saying humans have been so flavorless lately, you guys have a shit system going on here.” I couldn’t exactly disagree with that statement. But it didn’t change the fact that he was still unemployed and had no way of paying rent for the month, and even though I did agree that I’d be lenient with his end of the rent, I didn’t know if I could keep covering for him without struggling financially myself.
But the worst part had to be the portal to Hell in the middle of my apartment.
“So, uh, what are we gonna do about this?” I gestured to the summoning circle. I thought Amy had drawn it with chalk or something, but she had actually carved it into my floor, leaving me very little options to get rid of it besides replacing my flooring entirely. I couldn’t afford that.
“There’s nothing you can do,” Hector remarked, nibbling on a chicken wing. I stared at him in disbelief. He shrugged. “The portal’s already been opened, but don’t worry, no one can come through this one. There’s a lot of other access points for demons to use and like I said, most of them are super elitist and- ”
“Dude, I don’t care about other demons or whatever, my landlord is going to kill me!” I sighed, interrupting another one of Hector’s weird tirades about monsters and demons. “He’s definitely going to take away my security deposit.”
“Oh, that’s what you’re worried about? Just cover it with a rug or something.” Hector suggested.
“That’s not how this works, just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there.” I rolled my eyes.
“Sure it is.” Hector grabbed a blanket from the couch and threw it haphazardly over the circle, setting it in with his feet. “There, problem solved.”
I gaped at the blanket. My grandmother made it for me before she passed away. Seeing Hector throw it so casually without even caring for the sentimental value of the blanket sent me over the edge on top of the already stressful week I’d been having.
“Dude, why would you do that?” I demanded.
“Do what?” Hector looked puzzled.
“You just threw my blanket on the ground without even asking.”
“Oh. I don’t know, it looked like a rag so I just assumed it was fine.” Hector picked up the blanket from the floor.
“Well, it’s not.” I yanked it away from Hector and set it back on the couch with anger.
“Woah, man. What’s your problem?”
I felt my temper rise and I couldn’t stop the words coming out of my mouth. “It's you. You’re the problem. Ever since you moved in you have been disruptive and overstepping your boundaries, talking about demon this and soul that. You walk in on me when I want my privacy, you leave your fried chicken lying around all over the place, and I’m sick of you talking about people being tortured in super graphic detail.”
Hector looked confused. “Um. Is this about me having used to eat humans? I thought we were cool on that. I don’t do that anymore. I had to eat Amy for your-” Hector said.
“I’m not talking about your diet, man, although you eating my goldfish was super fucked up." I fired back. “I’m talking about everything. You don’t know what boundaries are and you’re taking advantage of me. I still don’t believe your whole spiel about demons or whatever but you seriously need to learn how to be a fucking person.”
“I’m not a person,” Hector countered. “I’m-”
“Yeah, yeah, I know, you’re a demon. An immortal, scary, Nickelback-hating demon.”
“Well, yes. And everyone hates Nickelback, not just me.”
“The point is, you’ve been nothing but disruptive and uncooperative since you’ve gotten here.”
“Are you mad about your fish? ‘Cause if you are, I can just replace them for you, they’re all the same anyway.”
“They’re not all the same! Just like my blanket, my grandma made it for me before she passed. Don’t you get it? They were my pets, and even though they didn’t do much I still liked them a lot. It’s like you don’t know the difference between what’s right and what’s wrong and eating a goldfish definitely doesn’t fall under the ‘right’ category.”
“Well, I wouldn’t know what’s right or wrong if you didn’t tell me. It’s not like I’ve ever lived with humans before. I barely come up to your world. Last time I was here, the main source of entertainment was the freaking radio. I don’t know what makes you tick. I barely know you.”
I took a deep breath. Clearly, this wasn’t going anywhere. People never liked seeing the other side’s perspective, and Hector wasn’t an exception. He was going to milk his demon fantasy thing for all it was worth and he wasn’t going to listen. If my hypothesis was correct and he really was a rich, sheltered person who was recently let out into society, he probably never grew up knowing what was right and what was wrong. Either way, I couldn’t lose him as a roommate; I needed someone to pay the rent for the other room and I was also a witness to his murder so I couldn’t risk him throwing us both under the bus if he chose to do so. I decided to be the bigger person. “Okay. Fine. Sorry. Let’s just drop this.”
Hector pursed his mouth. “What?”
I stormed off to my room and threw my laptop, pencils, and notebooks into my backpack. Hector stood in my doorway, blocking my way out with his intimidating frame.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“School library, I have a coding project that’s been overdue.” I replied sharply. “I’ll be back late.”
Hector ran his hands through his hair. “Yeah, I don’t think so. Today’s really not a good day and it’s really late already.”
“What, you think I haven’t ever been out this late?” I rolled my eyes. Hector had a tendency to act like he was better than me just because he wasn’t “mortal” or whatever- another thing I couldn’t understand about him.
“That’s not what I’m talking about. Didn’t you see the news? It’s a full moon.” Hector insisted, closing the distance between us to grab my arm. “You can’t leave right now.”
“Oh no, a full moon. Are werewolves going to maul me if I go out tonight?” I replied sarcastically, ripping my arm away from his grip. His hands were always so cold and weird and left a tingly feeling wherever he touched.
“Don’t be ridiculous. Everyone knows werewolves aren’t real. A full moon just means that the balance between your world and mine is going to be out of wack for a little bit. And since you’re associated with me and you’ve now been exposed to both worlds, you need to be more careful about the things that you do. I have a responsibility for you now and if anything happens to you, I’m the one who has to deal with the consequences.” Hector explained. I was having none of it.
“So you expect me to just go through my whole life having to do things differently, so I can go along with your silly demon roleplay fantasy? I think you’re the one being ridiculous. I can take care of myself.” I grabbed my jacket from my chair and put it on, but it only made me look less intimidating and more like an angry puffy marshmallow.
“Look, why do you refuse to believe me?” Hector asked, exasperated. I was startled by the sudden volume change. “You’ve literally seen me do the impossible, but you’re still trying to fight it like you can’t fathom the idea that humans might not be the only inhabitants of this universe. You can’t explain everything with human logic. There are just some things you have to accept, and you have no choice because you’ve already gotten tied in.”
“And whose fault is that? You’re the one who dragged me into your mess, assuming you’re not lost enough in your demon fantasy to care. Honestly, you’re no better than Amy right now. At least she knew she was a person and didn’t eat my pet goldfish.”
“Are you even listening to yourself? That bitch thought you two were married and you’re defending her over me?” Hector scoffed. I shoved my way past his bulky frame.
“Fine!” Hector threw his hands up in frustration. “See if I care. Go get mauled by a werewolf. They’re not real but since you won’t believe me anyway, they might as well be.”
I slammed the door on my way out.
I woke up from my nap on the subway feeling slightly disoriented from the uncharacteristically long nap of mine, and also feeling especially bad about the fight with Hector. This was no way to treat a roommate, even if they weren’t so right in the head; and it was no way to make first impressions. It wasn’t like me to lose my temper like that, but it had been a long week. The fault did lie partially with me for not establishing what I was comfortable with and what I wasn’t. I decided to swallow my pride and apologize to Hector and try and see things from his perspective. Maybe I could even play along with his little demon fantasy and humor him.
But then I quickly realized I had another dilemma. I glanced down at my phone, and it read 3:30 AM. I jolted awake. I knew I had missed my stop; I slept for way too long. How had I managed to ride the subway for six whole hours? I got on around 10 PM to get to my school’s library. Was I really that sleep deprived that I slept on the subway for that long? This felt like the Twilight Zone.
Strangely enough, it was as if the subway train had already gone way beyond its last stop. The LED lights on the map indicating our location were all off, which meant that we had passed all the stations that this train operated for, and the subway lights were a lot dimmer than usual. I must have dozed off for way too long and the conductors were probably taking the train back to wherever trains went once they finished their routes for the day. I straightened up, changed my music, and stayed put for the ride, hoping the train would stop soon so I could find my way back home at a reasonable time. An unsettling feeling overcame me, but I reasoned it to stem from being alone in a subway car with dim lighting. Anyone would feel unsettled by that. That’s how a lot of zombie movies start- with people stuck on trains with nowhere to go.
After a long while, the train finally came to a screeching halt, and all the lights in the car simultaneously went out. I jolted, and immediately turned on my phone’s flashlight. The doors took a while to open, so I banged on the doors with my fists. They opened just barely enough for me to squeeze past.
This station looked like any other station, with benches lining the middle and train tracks on either side of the platform, except there was barely any lighting and the only source of illumination was my phone and the few blue construction lights hung up haphazardly across the station. It was otherwise unrecognizable, and it had no legible signs indicating what station it even was; all the placards above were faded and I could barely make out some letters before I gave up entirely. It looked as if this was the ultimate last stop and had been abandoned by maintenance workers for the night. In fact, the station looked as if it was abandoned by the whole world. It looked more like a dark, dingy cave with unfinished construction than a proper subway station. I couldn’t see any exits from this side, so I figured I would ask the conductor. I made my way to the front of the car to look for the conductor, but all I could find was an empty seat. Strange. Maybe he was on the other side of the train, operating backwards?
I began to make my way to the other side of the train, searching for any exits as I walked. This station was clearly underground, but there were no stairs leading above ground. I started to feel nervous; was I trapped down here? I peered down at my phone and to my disappointment, there was no cell signal. There went any hopes of contacting the outside world.
But I pressed on. If I couldn’t see a way out immediately then I’d just have to make one. I figured my last resort would have to be walking by the tracks and retracing my steps back to another station, but that carried the risk of getting hit by a train. Absolute worst-case scenario, I’d have to camp out here for the night and wait until the morning for subway workers to come down and find me, but then I’d have to sleep with the rats.
As I approached the middle of the platform, I heard a strange sound coming from the other side of the train tracks. I whipped my head to find a figure standing in the distance in the tracks. So another person was here. I felt relief wash over my body.
“Hey!” I waved my hands, walking towards the figure. “Looks like we both ended up in the same place, do you have any idea how to get out of here?”
The more I walked towards the figure, however, the more I realized something was off. Because of the shadow and the distance, I couldn’t exactly see clearly before, but the figure was moving extremely slowly and erratically. The closer my flashlight shone, the more I saw this figure was definitely not a person like I thought they were.
The figure’s movement was very erratic; lots of twitching, lots of slow steps forward. The figure seemed to be a woman, but I really couldn’t tell because her entire body looked as if it were charred and was twisted in angles that should not have been physically possible. I stopped a good few feet away for good measure. The woman’s eye sockets were empty, her mouth devoid of any teeth, a bony indent where her nose should have been. Her legs were facing the other way; her spine was actually twisted to the point where her torso and her head were facing me, but her legs were walking backwards. Her arms were bent in ugly shapes and she was missing all of her fingers on her right hand. What was left of her tattered clothes were bloody and raggedy, and roaches skittered in and out through the holes. Her neck was stuck in a sharp angle, her head hanging to the side, and she seemed to have noticed my presence despite not having any eyes. Holding out her hands, the woman began to screech and walk briskly towards me, a complete 180 from the slow steps she’d been taking before.
I was absolutely petrified. My hands gripped my phone for dear life and I felt myself shaking. This woman was not the only one with me in the station. Now I could see a bunch of figures just like her emerging from the tracks, rising one by one, all disfigured in their own ways. They seemed to be materializing from the darkness of the tracks. I backed up as they approached me, groans echoing throughout the station. The woman swiped at me with her fingerless hand, and I jumped away in reflex.
“Oh shit.”
I dropped my phone and scampered away backwards, only to feel a hand grab at my ankle and pull me down into the tracks. I didn’t realize how close I was to the tracks. I instinctively covered my head as I fell. I felt my world spin as my back hit the metal tracks and I let out a cry of pain. My laptop and notebooks blocked most of the impact and I could have sworn I heard an audible crack from my laptop. But I knew I had no time to feel bad for myself. The figures were advancing quickly and seemed to be multiplying in numbers, and a broken laptop was the least of my concerns. I had landed next to an arm attached to a torso- just a torso with one arm. I yelped, scurried away, and forced myself to not vomit. A crowd of deformed, screeching people had formed in front of me. Now I could see that most of them, like the woman, had limbs sticking out from every angle and were even missing body parts. I saw a few crawling their way with their hands scraping against the cold floors of the subway tracks. I scattered to my feet and started running in the opposite direction. This was a nightmare. This was a situation straight out of a horror movie, and I never liked horror movies.
“What the hell is going on?” I muttered to myself as I ran. The bars on the tracks made it difficult for me to run without tripping, but the figures were still advancing on me. For some reason, no matter how much I ran, the station never seemed to stop. It was as if the exit was getting further and further away from me, and because I dropped my phone, only the dim construction lights lit the way. As I ran further and further, the lights got dimmer and dimmer until there was only darkness and I couldn’t see where I was going anymore. Even though I ran so far, the figures seemed to get closer judging from their groans and screams.
“This must be a bad dream,” I said to myself as I fell to my knees, completely out of breath and out of energy. "It must be." The last of the construction lights faded out. I could no longer go on. I felt like I had been running for hours. For some reason, my eyes were getting heavy and all I wanted to do was sleep. This was a bad dream. Maybe if I fell asleep, I’d wake up back in my bed and everything that had happened this week would turn out to be a dream. I closed my eyes and began to drift off to sleep on the dirty train tracks.
I felt strangely at peace. It was a nice feeling.
But I didn’t get to rest for long. “Don’t fall asleep here.” I felt a hand grab my arm and pull me to my feet with an inhuman force. The familiar cold grip with the tingly sensation. The cold grip woke me up, and though I couldn’t see two feet in front of me I could instantly tell who it was.
“H-Hector? Is that you? What are you doing here? How did you-“
“No time to explain right now. Get behind me, I’m gonna get us out of here.”
Hector yanked me behind him and I almost tripped again. The dim blue construction lights came back on, revealing Hector’s silhouette. His figure looked almost entirely too different to be him, but I knew it was Hector. He looked taller, bigger, wider, and had black antler-like growths coming out from the sides of his head. That was all I could see, though; I couldn’t see his face since he was facing the other way, but his hands looked similar to what I saw when I was roofied by Amy. Long, gnarled, pitch black hands that were not human at all.
“Listen to me closely, Finn. You’ve gotta run, and you can’t stop once you start even if it hurts.” Hector ordered. “Run in the opposite direction as fast as you can until you see light and stairs. When you get to the stairs, run up and don’t look back, not even once. I’ll ward these guys off until you reach the stairs and I’ll be right behind you.”
“But what about-“
“Now!” he barked.
I didn’t need to be told twice. The dim lights also revealed that the figures were about five feet away from reaching us, and I trusted Hector to keep his word and catch up. I heard pained screeches and howls, rips, slashes, and screams of horror as I ran further and further away. I smelled the familiar coppery tinge of blood all around me, and I was tempted to look back but knew better than to do so. Hector clearly knew what was going on and I wasn’t about to do something stupid like that. I felt adrenaline like never before and dashed like a madman until I saw the light in the distance that Hector was talking about. The tunnel no longer looked as if it was never-ending. As I approached the light, I saw a flight of stairs and though my legs were already burning from the sudden amount of exercise from a long period of not working out, I made my way up the stairs. I felt my heart stop when I heard loud footsteps behind me, and wondered if the figures managed to catch up somehow, and I slowed down in fear.
“Keep going! It’s just me. Don’t look back. Let’s get out of here.” I exhaled in relief when I heard Hector’s familiar voice and kept going until I reached the top. I ended up stumbling into a bunch of bushes and realized I was in the local park near my school. I fell to my hands and knees, gasped for air and coughed, and felt Hector’s hand slap my back in a friendly manner. The park was eerily quiet and the sky was well-illuminated by the moon.
“Good job, buddy. That was rough.” I looked up, still struggling for air, to find a normal-looking Hector in his hoodie and jeans, devoid of any antlers or gnarled hands that I saw before. Were my eyes playing tricks on me? No, I knew what I saw, and what I saw wasn’t normal. I looked behind me, and to my surprise the stairs were nowhere to be seen.
“What…what was that? What just happened? Where are the stairs I just ran up? Am I on drugs again?” I asked, in between heavy breaths. There were more pressing matters at hand than Hector’s weird appearance.
“The stairs are gone; they were never really there. But I should have been clearer about the circle on your floor. When Amy drew that circle, she didn’t just summon me. The portal literally connects our worlds together. Because you drank the same blood that was used to activate the circle and summon me, you’ve become aware of the things that come from my world. And they’re aware of you, too.” Hector explained. I crawled to a sitting position, resting my back on a tree. Hector followed suit.
“The full moon only makes the connection stronger, and a lot of things that keep the balance between your world and mine become weaker. When you got on the subway, you must have dozed off and they saw an opportunity to drag you into their world. They target you best when you’re asleep. A lot of people have been ‘spirited away’ like that because they slept on the train for too long and ended up being mauled by those guys. Unfortunately, most of those people who fell asleep were homeless and no one would miss them.”
I no longer had the energy to pretend like this was a weird demon fantasy of Hector’s. Whatever was happening was definitely real and I couldn’t act like logic could save me from the strange world I had been dragged into. He was right; I’d literally witnessed the impossible and it would have been inane to pretend like this wasn’t happening.
“If I fell asleep there…”
“It would have been really hard to get you back, but don’t worry, it wouldn’t have been impossible. Those blue lights you saw were Will-O-Wisps. Will-O-Wisps are generally assholes. They were playing tricks on your mind to make it seem like you were headed towards an infinite loop of a tunnel, and they sure as hell weren’t going to help you leave. They were trying to tire you out so you wouldn’t have enough energy to escape.”
So that’s what the blue lights were. Not subway construction lights, but Will-O-Wisps.
“And who were they? What were those…things that chased me?”
“They’re the souls of people who committed suicide on the trains,” Hector explained, voice soft. “Humans who commit suicide often have to wander around for a while before making it to heaven or Hell because they’re kind of off-limits to both demons and angels. Because they ended their life before their lives should have ended, their souls get lost in purgatory areas. No one can do anything about them. A stupid agreement we made with angels a few centuries ago forbids us to even touch souls stuck in purgatory until they can find their own way out.”
“But you did something to them, didn’t you?” I asked, worried Hector broke a rule trying to help me out. It seemed like the rules he had to follow back where he was from weren’t exactly on the same level as what would get people arrested here. His rules were on a much grander, universal scale.
“Well, yeah, I guess I did. I mean, I didn’t eat them, if that’s what you’re wondering- that would have been really bad. Goes against everything the purgatory agreement stands for. But I did smack them around a bit so they’d stay away. If I didn’t do that though, you would’ve been stuck there.” Hector said.
“How did you even find me?”
“You and I have a contract. Don’t worry, it’s not over your soul or anything. As long as you give me a place to live and you provide me fried chicken every Friday, I have a legal obligation to keep you away from things from my world. It’s in the fine print but I didn’t think I had to explain that we had an official deal. You were also super drugged and I didn’t think you’d understand anyway. Even afterwards, you wouldn’t have believed me. But now you know. It gives me an automatic GPS signal as to where you are, and I just so happened to be in the area. Your school’s Chick-Fil-A is really good.”
Great, so I made a deal with a demon and I didn't even know. I hoped Hector was telling the truth and he really wasn’t after my soul, and he only wanted unlimited fried chicken. “You could have just left me.” I said, suddenly feeling guilty. It occurred to me that he may have been following me to make sure I didn’t get into any trouble and once I did, he had to get me out. “What if you get in trouble because of me? Didn’t you say you can’t touch those souls?”
“Nah, we had a deal. Fried chicken in exchange for protection against stalkers- and at this point you’re being stalked by anything from my world that’s interested. As long as you’re my fried chicken-providing roommate, I’m basically bound to protect you from anything else. I’m just hoping our contract can get me out of breaking the other contract.” Hector sensed that I was still worried, so he reassured me. “Look, it’s not like I’ve never gotten in trouble before, I’ll be fine. Besides, I can’t just ditch my roommate. What’s it called…Joey from Friends wouldn’t leave Chandler even though he was a huge dickbag.”
“Joey does leave Chandler at some point. He got a better job and found his own place for a while.”
Hector groaned. “Great, thanks for the spoilers, I’m only on season one. Anyway, you shouldn’t see those guys anymore. And if you do, it doesn’t matter. They know not to mess with you now. As long as you don’t go out on a full moon, you won’t experience weird shit like that. That’s what I was trying to warn you against, but you kind of stormed out before I could say anything.”
“Why were they after me in the first place?” I asked, still shook to the core about those creepy-looking souls. Even though I felt bad for them after learning about their origins, I knew I’d have to go to a therapy session or five to truly get over what I saw.
“Those souls in particular wanted you because you’re so alive. Most souls regret their decisions after they kill themselves. And if a perfectly alive soul is in front of them, well…that’s like the equivalent of holding a T-Bone in front of a leashed dog. They want you, even though they can’t inhabit a body anymore. They just miss the freshness of life. They haven’t seen it in a while. They’re not bad guys, they just look really messed up because they were all hit by trains.”
“But if they had gotten to me…” I shuddered thinking about the potential consequences.
Hector ruffled my hair. “Don’t think about it. You’re fine now, I’ve got your back. Isn’t that what matters?”
I considered his words. I was alive, and I wasn’t like those poor lost souls in the purgatory subway station. Compared to those people, my problems didn’t seem all that bad. My bad week suddenly didn’t seem so bad in the face of yet another near-death situation. It’s amazing what a near-death situation can do to you to put your issues into perspective.
Hector stopped the ruffling, then retracted his hand, thinking I was silent because I didn’t like the fact that he was touching me. “Right. Personal space. I forgot.”
I shook my head. “It’s fine, I don’t mind. Not right now, at least.” I pondered for a moment. “But uh, I’m open to talking about boundaries and establishing rules if you are. Sorry I hadn’t been so clear about that before. I should have been more on top of things. And I should have believed you from the start.” I said.
Hector shrugged. “It’s cool. Sorry for eating your goldfish. I won’t do it again. They didn’t taste that great anyway.”
Hector and I walked back home. I wasn’t taking the subway ever again; this debacle showed me that subways were dangerous and I also needed to work out more. Walking to and from school would be a nice start. During our walk back home, we discussed rules and boundaries and what was socially acceptable and what was not. I think it’ll still take a while for Hector to understand, considering he really wasn’t from this world, but he seemed like a quick learner and was very open to change. He was very interested in human customs and asked me if I could compile a list of things that he could and couldn’t do in public. He also asked me if I could find him a job, and I told him I would as soon as I got myself a new phone. My phone was still stuck in that weird purgatory area. And though it had been a stressful week overall, I was just glad I had someone who was willing to keep me safe from otherworldly creatures, as long as he got some fried chicken in exchange. That seemed like a small price to pay to avoid being eaten by other demons. In any case, I think I’ll introduce him to KFC soon; he’d probably go nuts for Colonel Sanders. And unfortunately, the weird mishaps don't end here; if you want to continue on, you can check our our latest misadventure here.
submitted by thatonecityinchina to nosleep [link] [comments]

How an Ancestry Test Unraveled My Life

I spend an insane amount of time trying to think of cute Christmas presents only to end up scrambling at the last minute to find my parents crappy sweatshirts in their size from Target on my way to the airport on December 23rd. Ever since I’d been old enough to have a scrap of savings to my name around the holidays, it’d been something of a joke to my family that I spent more time planning my gifts than anyone else, and yet still ended up giving out the least personal gifts--hand soaps and candles-- of the bunch.
Last year was going to be the first holiday that I hosted, having both my family and my brand-new in-laws over, so I was damn determined to break that trend.
Several of my friends had been sharing their results from those DNA test kits on social media lately, and since my mom had been a biology major before she’d “been unable to finish” her second year, (I’m bad at math but not that bad, and been able to work out the code for “got knocked up” year earlier) I thought that it would be a cute idea to get myself and my husband tested.
I’d started to get these grandiose ideas of a tastefully done art piece with my husband and my DNA strands starting out separately and artfully intertwining to form our new family. I had no idea how that would work yet since I was also bad at science but figured that getting the ball rolling would be the best way to make sure that I at least did something.
Which is how I found myself, that July, swabbing my cheek and helping my husband with his (“What are you doing? Why? Lily, wh-umbph!”) before sending it off with an air of accomplishment.
I hadn’t really done my research so didn’t realize the results would take so long. Yeah, I’d started early but 6-8 weeks is a really long time to wait, so after refreshing my account every 12 hours for a week or so, I lost interest and went back to making my cat forts out of boxes and eating my husband’s fries like a good wife for a while.
The time between sending the test in and getting the results fit a lot of life in it. They were busy and bursting with new jobs and trivia nights, weekend trips and pregnancy tests that were, thankfully negative since, let’s be real, I couldn’t go 2 weeks without losing my chapstick so there was no way I was ready for our DNA to get that intertwined. The truth is, like most of my sudden brilliant ideas, I forgot about it just as quickly as I’d dreamt it up. Other than being a couple hundred dollars poorer, it faded into the background.
I’m sure I got the email letting me know that my results were in somewhere, but as you could probably guess, I’m one of those people with a half-dozen emails that I just ignore for weeks and then decide out of nowhere to clear and organize with folders and rules that move things into those folders and to this day, I have no idea where it is.
I do know that it was a Friday in early September when I finally got an alert letting me know that I had family matches. I can remember thinking for a brief second that I hadn’t even known that was a part of the service, probably advertised on the website next to the 6-8 week turnaround. But earlier that same day my butt of a cat had started vomiting blood and after I rushed her to the emergency vet it was discovered that she’d swallowed a staple. She was rushed into surgery to remove the staple and repair the damage and for me, the world outside of that tiny fluffball kind of fell away.
Since we can’t all be lucky enough to have a job where the boss doesn’t notice our work anyway so we can sit and watch the petcam all day, I’d reassured my frantic husband that there was nothing he’d be able to do anyway so to stay at work. “I’m all worked up and cranky right now, and I don’t like you enough not to hit you when you get annoying.” He’d been hesitant, but eventually my droll wit had done the trick and he’d agreed to finish out the day before heading over to meet us.
After we hung up, I sat in the waiting room with my phone clutched in my hands and shoved under my chin, whole body jiggling rhythmically as I bounced my foot up and down, jarring my elbows. That’s probably the only reason I noticed the email at all, since any kind of alert set me off when I was that high-strung.
I must have stared at the notification for a solid minute, trying to figure out what it meant. I’m not exactly quick on the uptake at the best of times, so processing some long-lost relative existence while a shaking, sobbing mess wasn’t really going to happen. I’d turned it over in my mind several times before filing it away to deal with later and searching for a cup of coffee, since that was clearly what my nervous system needed at that point.
By the time the vet came out with a cautiously hopeful smile, I’d completely forgotten about anything that wasn’t feline.
Within a week, though, I was more than ready to climb the walls and think about anything else. Poop was gross, and do you know what has to be examined for apparent ages after a trauma to the GI tract? Poop. Constantly. Poop. Everything in my life was poop.
For the first few days after the surgery, she’d stayed at the hospital with round-the-clock care and people who willingly signed up for a lifetime of rooting through poop. Being the crazy person that I am, though, when they told me she was stable enough to go home or be transferred to another clinic, I jumped at the chance to get my baby back. Somehow listening to them describe what I had to do didn’t feel quite as bad as actually doing it. So I’d called off work for the week, armed myself to the teeth with antibiotics and paper pellet litter, and converted my closet into a kitty hospital room using blankets, pillows, toys and an old baby gate I found at a thrift store to keep her from trying to climb up onto the shelves.
Keeping a cat from doing anything, including destroying the cone of shame, is a full-time task in and of itself, and I found myself spending most of my time laying in the closet too, keeping her calm and stroking her soft little head to try to reassure her that the pain would go away eventually. I’m a horrible person so I did remind her once or twice that she’d eaten that staple of her own free will, but for the most part tried not to rub it in.
My husband had no such compunctions for me, however, and when he’d come home from work the first time and found me poking at a “present” with a gloved finger to make sure there was no blood, he decided it was a good idea to chuckle at my lemon-pinched face. “Well if there was ever any doubt about who you love more, this settles it. You’d never look at my poop.”
Flipping him off instead of throwing the poop at him took a lot of self-control.
As she started to heal, she started to get less content with laying in a closet all day and got more and more fussy. But I knew that the second I let her out, she’d take even more joy than usual in jumping up on the counter and shelves to rub her gross little butt all over everything I own, and I couldn’t risk her pulling her stitches. So I spent even more of my life on the closet floor, scrolling through Facebook on my phone and begging her to chill out.
After I’d been through my newsfeed enough times that the idea of looking at it again made me want to dig my own eyes out, I cycled through all of the stupid games I’d ever downloaded onto my phone. Then I tapped the Facebook icon again out of habit and groaned at myself, shutting off the screen and setting my phone into my lap.
Moments later my phone lit up the dark closet with a junk email notifying me about changes to one of my credit cards. I rolled my eyes and deleted the notification, but then decided to go through the hundreds of unopened emails that I doubtlessly had no use for. What else was I doing with my life whenever the cat actually took a nap?
Buried amongst coupon offers, newsletters and pleas for donations was not only the email informing me of the existence of an unknown relative, but one letting me know that the person had messaged me. This was weird for a number of reasons even beyond my inability to read terms and conditions before agreeing to things. Who was this person? My parents were both only children, and I’d met my various extended cousins at family reunions and weddings enough times over the years that while we weren’t close, we’d at least recognize names and maybe faces. We’d doubtlessly use that information to avoid any contact beyond the occasional Facebook like, but the principle stood. My grandparents were too old and stubborn to embrace change like the internet and still handed me scraps of paper with new phone numbers they wanted saved into large brick cell phones every time I visited. The idea of them subscribing to an online DNA test was laughable, and I had no confidence they’d figure out any user interface well enough to send any kind of message ever. Plus my grandma called me once a week to tell me about her life as it was, why would she message me on a family tree?
After mulling it over for several minutes, I realized that this wasn’t exactly something that had to stay a mystery since presumably the message would say who it was. Feeling silly, I tapped the link to the message and tried a couple of passwords before finally getting to my inbox.
The sender’s name was Linda Harrigan, not one I recognized. In fact, Harrigan wasn’t one I knew as a name in my family at all, though I’m sure one of the various cousins or aunts several times removed could have been married or divorced in the time since I’d made-- and then promptly hacked to bits-- my wedding guest list. The small, grainy thumbnail image showed a smiling woman with dark hair that didn’t ring any bells, but her features were rather nondescript and the shot wasn’t entirely in focus. The subject just said “Found You!”, which could either make her completely social awkward or a serial killer with absolutely no middle ground.
The inbox screen showed the first few words of the message, but they offered no real clarity either. I’ve been looking for you for so long, I swear I never gav…
None of that was exactly any more comforting than the subject, so I found myself distinctly uneasy as I hesitated with my thumb over the text. Uncertainty, I pressed the pad of my finger down on her face and waited for what felt like forever as the message loaded.
I’ve been looking for you for so long. I swear, I never gave up on finding you but there was just no information, it was like hitting a brick wall. Is your mother with you? Is she okay? Are you safe? Please write back, or call me at [redacted]. I just want to know you and to see my sister again.
I love you.
Aunt Linda
By now, I was shaking. Aunt? Sister? Maybe my mom could have hidden this person from me, but my grandma was not the sort to let a relative fade into obscurity without at least mentioning them. Could she have the wrong person?
I went to her profile, desperate to find some kind of indication that she was crazy or had made a mistake. Things I didn’t understand about centimorgans and mitochondrial linkages-- wasn’t the mitochondria the powerhouse of the cell or something?-- were summed up at the bottom of the page. DNA was as confident that this woman was my aunt as I was that I had no idea who she was. A quick glance at her tree only showed deceased relatives, including both of her parents, neither of which were my grandma or grandpa.
What. the everloving. shit. was happening?
Of course, at that point I could only do what any rational, mature adult would do. I called my mommy.
“Hi honey,” the familiar voice sang out with its ever-present, audible smile.
“Who is Linda Harrigan?” My voice was probably harsher than I set out for it to be, but the last syllable still cracked.
“What? I don’t know who that is, was she a friend of yours? Is everything okay?”
“Mom, who is Aunt Linda? She just messaged me on one of those DNA sites. Says she’s your sister, but grandma isn’t her mom. Who is she?”
The silence grew so heavy that when kitty stretched next to me, I jumped a little.
“Mom!” I demanded.
Finally, she sighed. “I… well. You should probably come on over. Bring Luke, I’ll call your father.”
An hour later, we were all in their small living room, Luke and I on the couch and my mother in the armchair on the other side. My father held her hand comfortingly, though which of them he was comforting was left up to debate. The set up seemed formal, adversarial. Somehow, it was felt fitting.
They offered us lemonade, and cookies that had been baked earlier today, Before. The capitalization hung between us until finally, I exploded.
“Holy shit just tell me already.”
Almost immediately, my mom started crying. Part of me regretted my tone, but another, newer part of me didn’t care. It just wanted the truth.
“Well, we met in college, of course. You knew that. I met your father wh--”
“Yes, yes I already know, your bookbag split, he picked it up, meet-cute, blah blah get to the point.”
My father opened his mouth to reprimand me, but decided now wasn’t the time and sagged back down into himself as my mom continued. “Well, we never really talked about me leaving but it was about six months after we met that I was diagnosed with cancer.”
“Cancer?! You have cancer?” First a sister, now cancer? What else didn’t I know about my mom?
She gave me a weak smile. “Had. I’m one of the lucky ones, it never came back after I went into remission. It came, destroyed my uterus, and was gone.”
Alarm bells started ringing, but it took me a second to realize why. “Your uterus? But…” I trailed off and just kind of limply pointed at myself. I knew where babies came from, and since it usually didn’t actually involve a stork, I suddenly had even more questions than I started with.
“Your father and I got married pretty quickly after the diagnosis, and after he graduated and I settled into remission and being a housewife, I wanted a family. But, as you’ve noticed, the natural method was out of the question. We talked about all of our options but everything is so expensive. It’s amazing, really. You can make a baby by accident for free when you have the right parts, but only the rich can do it any other way. Since we were so young, we had next to no savings, and what we’d had went to treating the cancer anyway.
"Not to mention the wait. It can take years to get a healthy newborn, and after facing my own mortality that just seemed like time I didn’t have anymore. So we talked about fostering. We did research, met with a couple of social workers, but I was so scared about getting attached only to have to give the child back. I wanted something with a little more certainty.
"One day, in the paper, we saw an ad for a non-profit service who charged based on income and traded volunteer service for some of the smaller fees. It was run by a couple who had a small office just outside of the city. She was a lawyer, he was a social worker. An older couple, after she’d gotten burnt out from the crazy hours in her firm they’d both left to start the organization. Annamarie’s Home, it was called. They’d named it after their daughter who had passed away years before, in her honor.
"They said it could take a while for a newborn, but told us about a little girl, just shy of 2. Her mother was a teenager, they said, who had given it a go but found that it was just too hard. She’d been in and out of homeless shelters since giving birth and had decided that this wasn’t the life she wanted to give her daughter. We were warned, of course, that adopting an older child could be more difficult, that it was impossible to know what kind of trauma they’d experienced and even though you were so young you could have internalized a lot already.
"But he, the husband, offered youth therapy services and would help us navigate it all. And the second I met you, I knew you were my daughter. You had nothing but this tiny little tuft of hair, right at the crown of your head, and they’d put it into a ponytail. You looked like a little troll doll but you were so beautiful, Lily. We thought you’d be bald forever.”
She chuckled but a sob broke through, and she used the neck of her shirt to wipe her face. She needed several deep breaths before she could continue. “You worked with your therapist for a few years and he said that you’d recovered, but he had concerns that talking to you too much about your past would set things off. He advised us to wait to tell you until you were older and could process things properly. We told ourselves we’d tell you when you were ten, but it just never felt right. Then sixteen, then eighteen, and then once you got engaged we swore we’d do it before you got married. The wedding seemed to stress you out so much though. I don’t know. The truth is that it was never the right time for us, and we were being selfish.”
I waited for her to continue, but she didn’t. They just waited there for me, and I just stared, trying to make sense of everything. I was finally out of questions, but not because I understood. When you’re drowning you don’t stop to think about why, you just desperately search for the surface. My thoughts were so chaotic that it felt like my brain had gone still, like I had pumped my mind so full that it burst open and nothing was left.
“My real family. Where are they?”
My dad choked, I assume at the word real, but answered me anyway. “We never knew. They wanted it to be closed and we understood. We’d gotten hopelessly attached after ten minutes, so losing you after two years would have killed us. I imagine it was the same for them.”
I nodded slowly, though not in agreement to any particular thing. “But so this Linda. She is my aunt then. I…” I trailed off and looked at Luke, who hadn’t said a word the entire time. His worried gaze was fixed on me and for some reason I shrunk back from his concern. “I have to go.”
I stood up and walked out, ignoring my parents’--or not my parents? I didn’t know in that moment-- surprised and desperate pleas for me to wait. Luke hurried next to me, sliding into the driver's seat before I could try to do so myself. He knew better than to try to talk me into staying, but he wasn’t going to let me drive us off a cliff, either.
He talked to me the whole way home, about work and online articles and anything meaningless he could think of. He couldn’t possibly have taken a breath the whole time, and I don’t remember a single word he said. His voice grated on my nerves but silence would have been no better so I said nothing, letting him fail to distract me the whole time.
When we got home, I shut myself back into the closet with the cat. Remarkably, she didn’t howl to be let out or start jumping all over me. Maybe animals are more perceptive than we give them credit for. Instead, she crawled onto my chest and purred while I cried myself to sleep with my husband’s shadow just barely visible under the door as he listened helplessly.
When I woke up, I felt hollow and heavy the way you only do after a good cry. While I was sleeping, kitty had abandoned me for the other side of our tiny cell, but I suppose I had to just be grateful for what snuggles I did get. It was early still, 6am, but I had no idea how I could have slept for twelve hours after all of that. I guess I’d just crashed and it took that long for my brain to function again, I don’t know, but I was suddenly restless.
I opened the closet door and saw Luke curled on the bed, but the way he shifted at the sound told me that he was awake. He didn’t sit up or say anything, though, so I crept toward the living room and pulled my laptop out from under the couch. I logged on and let the countless applications I had set to open at start-up load, my eyes following the moving circles that their loading screens displayed until they were all up and running.
I knew I was doing it, but somehow I was still a little surprised when I entered the domain name for the ancestry page and went to my inbox. I didn’t really want to deal with this now, I wanted time to process everything. But I didn’t want to take the risk that she’d keep trying, so I would shut her down now and then try again later. If she didn’t forgive me, fine.
I wrote a couple short sentences telling her I was adopted and my mom wasn’t her sister. I hit send and sat back on the couch, my open laptop balancing on my knees while I pinched the bridge of my nose as I lost myself to thought again. Despite sleeping for so long, writing even that short missive had drained me, so I didn’t hear Luke come out of the bedroom until he was a foot or two away from me, and I jumped when he spoke.
“Are you okay?”
I turned my head to look at him and was just about to answer when a gentle “ping” took his attention from my face to the screen. His eyes widened quickly, making me whip my head around to see what had caused that reaction.
It was Linda, again, of course. I guess I had to expect that she would respond. But there was no way I could have predicted what she’d say.
Your mother has been gone as long as you have. You weren’t adopted. You were kidnapped. Please call the detectives on your case.
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Material Differences Ch 37

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Chapter 1
Chapter 36
Jaeger wasn’t entirely comfortable with giving Lexa or her nerd access to the full command center but the compound had plenty of available rooms for other operations. The Titan computer tech wasn’t bad either. It seemed like they were making things that were on par with the pre-war Absolute Dynamics baseline gear. Though he wasn’t sure if they could match Revenant tech, or if they were saving it for senior agents and not junior acting field agents like Lexa. “So this compound was never nuked huh?” Tami asked as she began to get her gear set up.
“No. I faked the readings at the end of the war to keep people away and get some nice danger stickers on the map.” Jaeger admitted with a nod. “It’s worked so far.”
“I’m surprised no one has done further checks. I mean… the highway is still used by pilgrims.” Tami pointed out but Jaeger just shrugged.
“I’m guessing it’s low on the priority list for cleanups. What with all the rogue kill bots and booby traps left behind by Absolute Dynamics.” He reminded them.
“But there aren’t any rogue kill bots or traps are there?” Lexa asked looking confused.
“The point being no one knows that.” Jaeger explained.
“Oohh right.” She nodded then as she got it and Jaeger shook his head a little. This was a field agent? Even an acting one? He still couldn’t figure it out.
“Okay, well are we all set?” Jaeger asked as he looked around the room.
“Yeah, it’ll take me some time to get everything properly hooked up and spoofed but this should all work fine. Any chance you’ve got a spare mini fridge I can put in here?” Tami asked but Jaeger just shook his head. “I figured… not like I can just run to the store and grab one either can I?”
“If you want to trek down to Columbia and search the ruins on your own time be my guest but I can’t spare an escort.” Jaeger shrugged.
“I’ll deal without one then.” Tami sighed so heavily at the thought Jaeger would have figured he was making her go without food or water or something.
Regardless he waved for them to follow him, Lexa grabbed her bag and followed but Tami left her things behind. “I’ll show you the way up to the central compound and where things are.” He walked with them down a hall and waved to another door which he opened. “You can stay in here. It’s a basic bunk room. Bathroom in that door. Showers work fine just let the hot water run a few minutes. This is the thermostat. Don’t touch it.”
The girls looked inside the room a moment at the line of bunks. It could fit a dozen people and gear so for two it would be plenty spacious. Lexa however frowned as she looked at the thermostat. “Why would you tell us what it is if you don’t want us to touch it?”
“Because otherwise you might try and touch it if you don’t know what it is. I’m specifically telling you. Don’t touch it.” He explained with a careful glare.
“There’s something wrong with it though. It can’t be that hot in here, we’d be roasting alive.” Lexa complained as she waved at it.
“It’s set to Fahrenheit.” He explained.
“Are you serious? Why? I didn’t even know anyone still used that archaic system.” Lexa frowned as Jaeger waved them out of the room.
“Because that’s what I was raised with and while Celsius is asking how hot is water, Fahrenheit is asking how hot are humans. I like the greater variance. Especially on the coast. Because some days the different between 67 and foggy and 70 and sunny is astounding for what to wear.” He explained as he lead them towards one of the lifts to take them up into the main building.
“I mean you can still have that in celsius, plus it’s way easier to remember.” Lexa further argued.
“Which is why I know celsius too. It’s not as though I’m incapable of knowing two different units of heat. Besides all units of measure like that do is provide context. I know how far a meter is, or a kilometer, but a Ravex would know how far a a claw or a league is. And while I prefer to know how hot a human is and use Fahrenheit I get why a Kra’Kto’Sui would prefer celsius is since they live in water. Or… more likely they’d know… is it Grun’Vi?” He asked aloud.
“Yeah.” Tami nodded. “I think zero celsius is like negative thirty nine Grun’Vi… it’s a strange conversion cause they go from like negative fifty to positive eighty.”
“That’s my point, it’s context. That’s all units of measure are.” Jaeger shrugged as they came out into the main lobby and he began to point at things. “Main entrance. Ham should be making you two temporary security IDs. Keep them visible at all times around the turrets and bots or you’re going to have a bad time. Cafeteria is in here.”
“When you say have a bad time-” Tami started to ask.
“If you’re not visibly armed or threatening they’d just subdue and confine.” Jaeger waved it off as he lead them into the main cafeteria and paused as he saw an old steward bot standing behind the counter with googly eyes stuck to its face and a smile drawn on in marker.
“Greetings. I am cook bot. May I cook for you?” The bot asked as it looked between the three of them as its googly eyes swirled around.
“That… would be Raven’s handy work. I guess it makes sense to get a bot to cook things. But the main kitchen is back here. Help yourself to… whatever is in there.” Jaeger waved a hand at the big commercial fridges and the pantry full of dry goods.
“How good is your cook bot? Can it make a decent honey almond crepe?” Lexa asked.
“Recipe unknown.” The bot announced.
“Okay, well how about a basic spinach stromboli?” She tried next.
“Recipe unknown.” The bot repeated.
“Well surely it knows how to make a simple crab cake benedict?” She sounded more concerned as she kept asking.
“Recipe unknown.” The bot echoed once more.
“Apple stuffed French toast?” She gasped out.
“Reci-” The bot started.
“Well what can you make!” She huffed.
“With ingredient list provided this unit can make scrambled eggs. Toast. Hash browns.” The bot offered.
“What about lunch? Dinner?” Lexa tried.
“With ingredient list provided this unit can make scra-” The bot began to repeat.
“This bot isn’t very useful!” Lexa huffed.
“It’s also new. I’m guessing my son set it up but hasn’t programed it with anything yet. Heck it doesn’t even know how to make poop soup yet.” Jaeger shrugged.
“Poop soup?” Lexa gave the bot a worried look.
“Dad? Did I hear you?” Jaeger looked out from the kitchen as he heard Max.
“Yeah! I’m in here!” He called out as Max lead the other Revenant into the cafeteria. They must have finished catching up and verbally accosting one another. Or… at least have finished their most recent bout of their merry go fuck yourself routine. “Did you set up cook bot here?”
“Yeah. I can’t figure out how to get it to scan the stuff in the kitchen so I just added scrambled eggs to make sure it works.” Max started and then backed up a moment as Lexa approached him and stood rather close.
“Hi! I’m Lexa, I’m a good friend of your dad’s! It’s so great to meet you!” Her arms stretched out wide and Max gave her a confused and startled look as he tried to extend a hand but she ignored it and instead wrapped him up in a hug which he very awkwardly sort of side leaned into as he looked to Jaeger for help. Jaeger could only give him an amused shrug.
“Uhm… Hello.” Max replied as he gave her back a hesitant little pat.
“Are you older than the reports? You’re sixteen right?” Lexa asked as she pulled back and held Max’s shoulders as she looked him over.
“Yes, I’m sixteen…” Max gave her another confused look but Lexa just beamed happily at him and pulled her bag forward.
“Well I suppose it’s good I went with my first instinct. I’ve got a gift for you!” She mentioned as she began to open her bag and rummage through it.
“Uh… you do? Thank you… why? I don’t… really know who you are. Dad! Who is this?” Max gave Jaeger a slightly pleading look as if trying to find a way out of whatever was going on.
“This is the Titan Agent, Lexa Major.” He more formally introduced them with a wave of his hand.
“Lexa Major?” Brandy-Lynn got a mischievous look. “Before you turned 18 were you Lexa Minor?” She asked and then cackled a little.
“Oh wow! That’s good, I’d never heard that one before.” Lexa remarked as she looked up from her bag.
“Really?” Brandy-Lynn asked looking proud of herself.
“No you dolt, I’ve heard them all. You’re as original as white bread.” Lexa shot back.
“Oh it’s on now!” Brandy-Lynn huffed.
“And it wasn’t before you uncultured hick?” Lexa immediately replied.
“You keep it up princess and I’ll introduce you to types of pain they don’t even have names for!” Brandy-Lynn hissed.
“Just because you’re too stupid to know more than one name for pain doesn’t mean they don’t exist... Skank!” Figs then grabbed Brandy-Lynn before she could lunge forward and Lexa just stuck her tongue out at the other woman. Max who was stuck between them just kept staring at Jaeger, begging for help with his eyes. Jaeger was too busy laughing to provide his son any support however.
“Brandy-Lynn, simmer down. Use your words. Not your fists.” He finally called out to at least get Brandy-Lynn to stop trying to reach for Lexa to wring her neck.
“She started it on the road trip! This isn’t over.” Brandy-Lynn pointed at Lexa who just shrugged.
“I’m soooo scared.” She mocked but then turned back to Max with a big smile as she pulled a wrapped package out of her bag. “Anyway here’s the present I got for you!” Max hesitantly took it as Jaeger walked closer, curious to see what it was. Max carefully unwrapped the paper, leaving it as undamaged as he could before setting the paper aside and looking at the package within.
“Uhm… thank you for… the… What is it?” He asked as he held up a sort of lumpy and oddly shaped suit made of a stretchy material. It looked a lot like his pathfinder suit and Jaeger couldn’t help but feel it looked familiar.
“Here.” Lexa hit a button on the back and the suit suddenly went rigid and smoothed out. “You have to put it on to get it to size itself to your body but this is a Vibrant Adventure suit!”
“That’s why it looked familiar!” Jaeger nodded. “It’s like… part still suit, part wet suit, part wing suit, and a whole lot more. It keeps you cool or warm and wicks away sweat as well as tracking biometrics and adapting to your environment or sport. These were made using some of the same proprietary tech as the smart cloaks and our armor. This…” Jaeger reached out and tugged the sleeve a moment to make sure the logo had the real Vibrant hologram within it. “This is crazy expensive!”
“It wasn’t that bad.” Lexa shrugged.
“Well… thank you. But… uhm… I… don’t usually need…” Max tried to dance around his nature a moment.
“She knows you’re a synth.” Jaeger helped him out.
“Well… now I do!” Lexa exclaimed. “When I got it I didn’t know that. So… your body probably does it all already?”
“Yes, but he can use this suit in public as cover. Provided I can think of a reason why he would be able to afford it!” Jaeger scratched his head as Max looked the suit over a bit more closely. “Why is everything you touch expensive?” He asked Lexa then.
“It’s not all that bad. I just… have good taste.” Lexa shrugged.
“That’s debatable.” Brandy-Lynn sniffed.
“Says the trailer trash.” Lexa immediately growled, but Jaeger got between them to shut it down.
“I don’t think you’re dirty but you’ve got incredibly expensive taste that you can’t afford on an agent’s salary let alone whatever you made before becoming acting field agent.” Jaeger looked Lexa in the eyes. “How?”
“It’s… all covered by my clothing allowance. I told you I’m not taking bribes or anything like that!” Lexa looked a bit hurt he’d suggest it.
“Clothing allowance?” Jaeger asked. He’d seen her dad and how the man lived just before Jaeger had killed him. There was no way the man had any sort of funding to provide Lexa the clothes she wore.
“Yeah my… step dad gives me a clothing allowance.” She nodded.
“And who is he?” Jaeger asked.
“Lakta Major.” She shrugged as if that was totally obvious.
“Lakta Major?” Jaeger asked. “As in… Lakta Major CEO, President, and Founder of Major Memories Inc?”
Figs whistled at that. “My family is fuck you rich but that guy is fuck yo momma rich. In her case literally I suppose.” Both Lexa and Jaeger turned to glare at him even as Brandy-Lynn, Tanya, and Tabori all cackled. “What? Just saying. I mean it’s her step dad so clearly-”
“Figs. Shut the fuck up.” Jaeger insisted before he did any more damage.
“Still… thank you. It’s very thoughtful even if I might not make the best use of it.” Max nodded at Lexa as he looked the suit over.
“Well… you’re quite welcome.” Lexa beamed as her cheerful nature took back over.
“You know, on the topic of gifts, out of curiosity kid is your dad still obnoxiously good at getting presents?” Brandy-Lynn asked then which made Jaeger frown in confusion.
“Oh yeah. It’s so annoying.” Max nodded in agreement.
“What?” Jaeger asked looking between them with a frown. “How is giving good gifts bad?”
“It’s not bad.” Brandy-Lynn waved it off. “It’s annoying just how good you are at it though. Has he given any of you a bad present?” She asked as she looked around the assembled Revenants.
“Hell I still use the slippers he gave me. Not to mention a number of other things.” Figs nodded.
“Tabori continues to use novelty hat in all possible occasions.” The sniper added.
“I love my lucky mug.” Tanya smiled.
“See? It’s annoying.” Brandy-Lynn nodded.
“What? How is it annoying?” Jaeger asked, still frowning.
“Because you somehow manage to pick out these thoughtful and really cool gifts that we never would have thought of on our own, and they’re all cheap!” Brandy-Lynn waved at him.
“How’s that bad?” Jaeger asked.
“Again! It’s not bad. It’s annoying! I followed you one year before Fig’s birthday, cause I knew you were going to get his present. I had got him that Bushido Kikkoman Desu Rock.” Brandy-Lynn reminded him.
“While that rock is a wonderful present that’s not even close to what it’s called.” Figs cut in.
“It also cost me a ton of money!” Brandy-Lynn pointed out. “And then I sneakily followed this bastard.” She said as she pointed at Jaeger. “And he wanders around Columbia for a bit and then heads into this little stationary store and what does he come out with?”
“Oh! That little origami Samurai kit with the fig leaf emblem? That was great.” Figs grinned at the memory.
“Yeah! And it was cheap as hell! This is what I’m saying! How the hell do you pick good gifts that all come in on a budget?” She asked Jaeger.
“This is where we differ. Because we were both raised poor as hell. But I really loved my mom and cared a lot about getting her gifts when I could. So I had to think about something meaningful, and cheap. It just carried over I guess. I figure with enough money you can get anyone a good present but it’s a bit of a cheat to just throw money at the problem. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Expensive gifts can often be amazing. I just… can’t really break my habit. I’m not too cheap with your gifts am I? Is that it?” He looked to Max then with a worried look.
“No! Dad you get me great stuff. It’s like… I don’t even know what to ask for or suggest and you then just find things that I’m like wow, I totally wanted this but had no idea!” Max laughed a little and shrugged. “It’s annoying because it makes me feel like crap when I can’t get you something good in return. Raven has it so easy with her arts and crafts! And the net is no help in buying presents for dads. It’s all like… beer, golf, mechanics tools, and sports jerseys!” Max huffed and looked like he was going to say more but just shrugged once more.
“Hey, I like the stuff you get me.” Jaeger assured Max as he set his hand on the boy’s shoulder.
“Yeah but you have to like it! You’re my dad!” Max grumbled a little.
“Hey, kid, dad’s don’t have to like things you give them. Trust me. Some dads are total pieces of shit.” Brandy-Lynn muttered with a shake of her head.
“Well, my dad always has to pretend.” Max sighed.
“I don’t pretend.” Jaeger assured him. “Besides Raven likes what you get her.” He reminded him. But then Max got a suddenly very guilty look. Jaeger frowned a moment. “What is it?”
“I… don’t really… pick those.” He confessed and Jaeger just blinked in confusion. “Raven knows I hate trying to pick gifts because I just get all anxious and worry about if they’ll like it or not, and I always think people secretly hate my gifts and lie just to be nice. So… when you give us our budget she’ll give me a list of things she likes that are all itemized by cost and then add any coupon codes she can find as well as links.”
“Hah!” Brandy-Lynn let out a startled laugh. “That’s Leona! That’s one hundred percent Leona!”
“I had no idea.” Jaeger rubbed his chin, unsure how exactly to feel about it.
“How do you guys get deliveries out here anyway?” Tami asked, having been quiet for a while.
“I get them shipped to a... Locker in Gullhaven and pick the stuff up on grocery runs.” Jaeger waved it off. Really they were shipped to Kuv but he wasn’t ready to reveal his association with the Jipasi right now. “But you pick from the list she gives you?”
“Yeah but obviously she only lists things she wants.” Max shrugged.
“She always acts so surprised though…” Jaeger muttered.
“Yeah she’s a good actor.” Max explained. “So then I’m left to get all worried about what the hell to get you. Honestly a lot of times I check ideas for Ravex to buy for their mentors. That seems to be the closest I can come.”
“What did you get him for last Xmas?” Brandy-Lynn asked.
“I…” Max sighed. “I know he likes that Mooncat stuff, and I can’t buy him a bottle for obvious reasons. But I ordered a sign from them, like… for a bar, and then commissioned a guy on the net to make me some art of a suncat and then added a motor to the sign myself so that throughout the day the mooncat and suncat move across the sign and do stuff together. Like it was mom and dad.”
“And it’s great.” Jaeger assured him even as the others all let out various ‘aaaawwwws’ at Max’s gift while the boy blushed. Jaeger pulled him in for a tight hug then and didn’t let him squirm out of it.
“Daaaaad!” Max complained even as he finally relented and hugged Jaeger back. Jaeger smiled as he held his son close, but then opened his eyes as he heard sniffling. First he looked down at Max but Max was just looking sheepish. So he looked around and then spotted Lexa to the side, sniffling and rubbing at her eyes and nose with a handkerchief.
“It’s so touching!” She gasped out and then suddenly lunged forward to hug Jaeger and Max from the side. Max gave Jaeger another confused look but Jaeger just shrugged and gave Max his best ‘I got no idea’ look.
Then he looked at the handkerchief a little closer. “Is that Nulian silk? Why are you blowing your nose into that? Christ I’ve got tissues here or something!”
“What? I’ve got more. It’s fine.” Lexa dismissed his concern as she pulled from the hug and dabbed the cloth at her face once more. Jaeger just couldn’t imagine the level of wealth she must be used to if she used handkerchiefs made from silk that cost somewhere in the thousands of dollars per kilogram. Or… he had no idea how that would translate into script these days.
“Well… I guess it’s time you met Raven as well?” Jaeger asked as Lexa then pulled a makeup kit out of her bag as she set about fixing her appearance even though the smudges were extremely minor. Of course she had expensive stuff on. And it was understated which he appreciated.
“Yep! I got her a gift too!” Lexa mentioned as she gave her bag a pat.
“What… exactly did you get her?” Jaeger asked now slightly worried after having seen Max’s present.
“Well I’m not sure what her colors are or her preferences on accent pieces so I really went all out and just got a nice selection of basics for her.” Lexa mentioned as she pulled out a polished cherry wood jewelry box. Jaeger pulled it from her hands before she could protest and opened it up to see it was full of very high end pieces of jewelry.
“You… I… any one of these could have funded my mom and I for… a decade in the stacks. Easy. Two of them and we could have gotten the fuck off Earth. You can’t… this is… it’s too much!” Jaeger gasped out only for Lexa to snatch the box back and snap it shut.
“It’s not for you. It’s for your daughter! And I want her to have it!” Lexa stuck her nose up a little as she insisted on it.
“But why did you get them these presents? Don’t get me wrong I’m very grateful and I appreciate it. But...” Jaeger trailed off once more and glanced at Tami.
“This is normal for her.” The short haired woman shrugged.
“I mean it’s all well within my gift allowance. I never go over budget.” Lexa insisted as if that wasn’t even a question. A gift allowance and clothes allowance? He wasn’t sure if he envied her or pitied her. “So where is she? I want to meet her!” Lexa beamed happy as could be despite having been crying at Jaeger and Max’s interaction just a little while ago.
“Uh…” Jaeger looked to Max.
“I think she’s been naming all the construction bots Tanya had me set up and then sticking googly eyes on them.” Max mentioned.
“Of course she is.” Jaeger rolled his eyes.
“Think I could talk to her alone?” Lexa asked and Jaeger arched a brow at that. “I’m trying to get a better sense of you and I’d like to talk to her without you around. Just some one on one time. Girl talk. See if I can pick her brain.” Lexa explained.
“That’s a good idea. I’m fairly sure a twelve year old can teach an airhead like you alot.” Brandy-Lynn cut in.
“Only cynics and assholes would think they have nothing to learn from the wonderful minds of children.” Lexa shot back.
Brandy-Lynn opened and closed her mouth once and then shrugged. “Alright you know what? She’s got me there. Valid.” She nodded at that for a bit.
“Even so… while you can talk to her without me there if you really want I don’t think it’s suitable for you two to be alone. I still only barely know you.” Jaeger reminded her. “Tanya go with her. Max, show them where Raven is. Figs, Brandy-Lynn, Tabori go help Ham prep the vetall.”
“What are you going to be doing?” Max asked and Jaeger thought that over a bit.
“Mh… If we’re doing a road trip… I guess I’ll make Cinnamellow squares?” He offered and shrugged.
“Yes!” Max grinned.
“Fuck yes!” Brandy-Lynn shouted and clapped her hands. “Love me some cinnamellows!”
“What’s… Cinnamellow squares?” Lexa asked with a frown.
“I make these… squares of crackle rice cereal and cinnamon shingle cereal that are held together with melted marshmallows. Never had one?” He asked and Lexa shook her head.
“I’ve had something like that I think.” Tami mentioned. “No cinnamon though.”
“Well you two are in for a treat. Now go, be productive.” Jaeger waved them off as he turned to head back into the kitchen.
“Uhm… what should I do?” He looked back to see Tami standing there looking a little lost.
“Uh… whatever you want? Don’t you need to finish setting up your computer stuff?” He asked.
“Oh! Yeah. I just… after you started handing out orders I thought… I dunno. Okay! Uhm… what if I get lost downstairs?” She asked.
“Follow the signs to the hangar and someone there will lead you back.” Jaeger explained. The woman nodded and wandered off then. Jaeger turned his attention to the cook bot then as he walked up behind it to tap on the sync button on the back. He scrolled through the options and brought up the base computer which he keyed it into.
“Updating ingredient list.” The bot announced and Jaeger turned to start getting his ingredients out of the pantry. He hadn’t made the treats in a while but thankfully just about everything he needed lasted forever. Not the butter, but that he kept around anyway.
“Cinnamellow squares! Been a while since you made these.” Leona mentioned as she grabbed some bags of marshmallows off the shelf.
“Well they’re a treat. It’s not like I need Max and Raven eating them all the time and getting fat.” He pointed out as he began to melt some butter in a big pot.
“You know they can’t get fat right?” Leona reminded him as she began to measure out the cereal.
“Uh…” Jaeger sighed as he was once more reminded that wasn’t an issue. “Okay well maybe it’s so I don’t get fat then! I’m already getting picked on by everyone for putting on weight!”
“Ooohh someone getting pudgy?” She asked with a laugh.
“Hush. You try living this life.” He grumbled as she laughed a little. “Aren’t you supposed to say that you like me the way I am?”
“You wish piggy! I’d have you on a strict diet of amphetamines and quinoa until you got your chiseled abs back. I demand nothing less than perfection.” She advised him as he laughed and shook his head a little.
“We both know that’s not true if you ended up with me.” He countered.
“That’s because you’re perfect in your own way.” She blew him a kiss and he grinned as he grabbed the bags of marshmallows to dump in with the butter.
“What do you think of Lexa so far?” He asked idly as he watched the pot, careful to keep the marshmallows from melting too quick or burning.
“Interesting. She seems… genuinely upbeat in strange ways. At least she’s tangling with Brandy-Lynn so she’s got some kind of backbone.” Jaeger nodded as Leona pointed that out. “Expensive taste, but you already noticed that.”
“I can’t get over it.” Jaeger mentioned. “Nulian silk, in handkerchiefs? More than one! And she uses them to blow her nose? It’s practically a crime!”
“Remember when Brandy-Lynn would wipe her ass with money?” Leona asked as they both laughed.
“Yeah but that was Brandy-Lynn and it’s different with money. Though I’m glad you instituted the no money as TP rule.” He chuckled a little.
“Cause it would take her fucking forever to get clean! Filthy hick.” Leona growled as Jaeger snorted a little louder and reached out for the bowl of cereal that Leona handed to him so he could dump it into the pot to mix with the butter and marshmallow mix before he added just a bit more cinnamon and some Lorave powder which was a Jipasi spice that added a citrus orange flavor he liked. “You might not have the skills it takes to be as good a chef as me but you’ve certainly got a very solid handle on this sort of food.”
“Simple but good? Yeah. Nothing fancy but it gets the job done.” Jaeger agreed. “I’d like to have seen you try to get Max to eat one of your caviar… what was it again?”
“Caviar canish.” She reminded him. “I think he’d have eaten it. He likes sushi.”
“That’s so totally different and you know it. Though I really miss your souffle.” Jaeger sighed a little at the thought even as Leona giggled.
“Remember when you first had one?” She asked.
“Mh yes, the sou-flea as I called it.” He remembered having no idea how to pronounce souffle back then.
“At least you learned. Unlike Brandy-Lynn. She’s still incapable of mastering a single language.” They both laughed at that as Jaeger kept mixing up the pot to keep it from setting yet. Leona already began to set out lined pans for him to pour the mixture into when he was ready. The help made it all that much easier for him. Usually he’d have to fiddle around with one thing or other and not have enough hands to keep it all running smooth.
“Think Kuv is in trouble?” He asked trying to direct his thinking back to his upcoming troubles while he had Leona here.
“He could be… but knowing him Gullhaven would have erupted in explosions if he was given half a chance to fight back. He’s really not one to go quietly into the night is he?” She pointed out.
“True… but he’s the only one I’d have heard about it from. With the Hive attack into Columbia it’s possible it was overshadowed?” He suggested.
“Mmhhh… other way round I’d think. Columbia is full of scavs and Hive, so people expect them to kill each other. A town like Gullhaven which is known for being safe? That would have been far bigger news. Though maybe now everyone is focused on your assault of the candy factory.”
“Mh.” He nodded, not having thought about that. “I’m just happy Marque won’t bomb this place with you here.”
“Since your Ravex friends got a cruiser hanging above our heads Marque might not be able to.” Leona reminded him. Jaeger nodded and then waved her over as they both lifted the pot and brought it over to the pans so he could start spooning the mixture out.
“Fuck, I don’t know what I’ll do if anything ever happens to this spatula.” He mentioned as he easily smoothed out the incredibly sticky mixture into the pans.
“Why? Oh! The super anti stick spatula? I thought it never made it through testing?” She remarked.
“I think it was cost more than health. I mean didn’t that one egg head say it broke physics or something?” Jaeger remarked.
“I’m not sure that was it.” Leona laughed. “But yeah I remember there being something crazy about them.”
“Nothing sticks to this thing. It’s magic.” Jaeger remarked as he looked the spatula over and didn’t see a spec of marshmallow on it. He set it aside though and turned on the chillers in the kitchen to slid the pans into to let the mixture cool a bit faster so he could cut them up before anyone came looking. If he didn’t Brandy-Lynn would probably find them and just stuff her face with the entire pan and claim it was one big square.
With that done he nodded to Leona. “Watch them. I’m going to go make a quick grab bag.”
“Sure.” She nodded as he headed out of the cafeteria and into the executive building to get to his room. He wasn’t going to be gone that long but he still grabbed one of his bags to toss in two more sets of his silkies, some shorts, one pair of slacks just in case, then he grabbed a few shirts, one collared button up, and a light windbreaker just in case. Then he went back and tossed in extra pairs of socks and a bathing suit. He doubted he’d need half the stuff but it wasn’t like they were short on room in the RV.
He looked around his room a little longer thinking about what else he might want to bring. Everything else he could think of was a weapon, or food so he shrugged and zipped up his bag and carried it back downstairs and into the main building. By the time he got back to Leona she was cutting squares out of the pans. As he saw her dipping the blade into some of the Absolute Dynamics smooth slice fluid between slices he frowned. “Doesn’t that stuff give us cancer?”
“It was never proven.” She reminded him. “Besides this would be the least of your worries in that category.”
“True.” He nodded and sighed a little before setting his bag down and helping her wrap up the squares in parchment. Then they switched and she began to wrap the squares as he cut more from the mixture setting in the pans.
“Hey! I smell cinnamellow!” Max called out as he enter the cafeteria kitchen.
“Yeah they should be done. I’ve tried to make enough that everyone will get some without Brandy-Lynn cramming them all in her face.” Jaeger mentioned. “How’s Lexa’s talk with Raven?”
“Good I think she’s just grilling Raven about what kind of dad you are.” Max shrugged. “That and they’re gushing about jewelry. I never thought Raven would make those noises about a necklace but... well I guess she’s still a girl. I sorta forget that sometimes.”
“Really?” Jaeger asked with a smirk.
“I mean… I just think of her as my little sister.” Max explained and shrugged once more as he approached the kitchen table while Leona kept wrapping the treats. “Mmhhhmm looks good.” Max was reaching for one. Jaeger was about to tell him not to but Leona beat him to it and slapped his hand.
“They’re too hot. Besides you’ll spoil your dinner. You can have some later.” Max gave her a shocked look for a moment and then stared at Jaeger.
“Don’t look at me like that. They’re not ready. You and Raven can have some tonight. Synth or not you still need a balanced diet.” He shrugged and then watched as Max just slowly backed up and quickly left the room. “Hm. What was that about?”
“Shit.” Leona hissed out which made Jaeger look around a moment for some kind of threat or problem. “Shit! You have to finish this! I… I gotta go!” She turned away in a hurry.
“Okay.” Jaeger shrugged at that. Looking out at the pans he hummed softly as he got back to work cutting up the last of the mixture in the pans and began to wrap up each square in paper. It really had been surprisingly easy for him to get this all done so quickly. Usually he had to juggle things since he didn’t have enough hands. He set the first batch of wrapped treats back into the chiller and then returned to wrap the rest.
By the time he was done with the second batch the first one seemed like it was just about cool enough to eat. He made small stacks of three treats each and then put them into paper bags to make it easier for him to take with him downstairs. Before he left he checked the cookbot in the corner. It hadn’t updated much but he expected that.
Humming a little song still he picked up his own bag which he slung over his shoulder and then grabbed an armful of bags as he headed downstairs. Hopefully Brandy-Lynn and Lexa wouldn’t be too much trouble during the road trip. When he made it to the garage he saw that Max was talking to the others. Ham, Tanya, Tabori, Figs, and Brandy-Lynn were all there. “Who’s watching Raven and Lexa?” He asked as he set the bags of cinnamellows down on the workbench in the garage.
“I have Bertha watching her. Lexa has some sort of makeover app on her phone they’re playing around with. Seemed harmless and I figured I needed to be here for this.” Tanya replied.
“For what? Why is everyone looking at me like that?” Jaeger asked with a frown as he noticed how everyone was staring at him. “This looks like an intervention.”
“It is.” Tanya nodded.
“Really? I thought you had your drinking under control.” Jaeger frowned a little. Had he missed it?
“What? No… I mean… my drinking is fine.” Tanya insisted.
“Oh… Did Brandy-Lynn do something?” He looked over at her.
“What? Asshole this isn’t about me! It’s about you!” She pointed at him.
“Me?” Jaeger frowned. “Why? What the hell did I do?”
“Dad… who slapped my hand in the kitchen?” Max asked.
“What? I didn’t slap your hand. I’d never hit you.” Jaeger replied, obviously confused.
“I know you didn’t dad. I’m asking who did?” Max stressed.
“I…” Jaeger froze up at that. Then he slowly closed his mouth and glared at them all. His stance shifted slightly and one hand began to creep towards his bag. But he didn’t move much yet.
“You installed the implant. You did didn’t you.” Ham was more accusing him than asking.
“What implant?” Max asked and looked around, but the room was quiet. “What implant?” Max asked again. Jaeger moved first as his hand snapped to his bag. The others began to rush for him but they had a lot of ground to cross and while he wasn’t a synth it didn’t mean he was slow. He pulled his gun from his bag and pressed it to his chest before they could grab him.
“Back the fuck off!” He hissed and Figs and Tabori who were closest hesitated. “Back off!”
“Dad! What’s going on?” Max asked from behind them, now more confused and obviously worried.
“I’m keeping them from doing anything stupid.” Jaeger answered and slowly backed away from them. “Just, keep your distance and we can still settle this.”
“Jaeger that implant wasn’t finished!” Ham gasped out. “The risks-”
“Were all well within acceptable ranges!” Jaeger hissed back.
“For someone in your mental state? No shit.” Ham waved at him. “She told you loud and clear what her wishes were!”
“None of you knew her like I did!” Jaeger growled out.
“Dad! What the fuck is going on!” Max struggled to push forward past Figs and Tabori but they held him back.
“Just… a little disagreement is all.” Jaeger tried to assure him.
“You’ve got a gun to your heart! This is more than a disagreement!” Max gasped out.
“Your father is trying to revive your mom. Which she told him not to.” Tanya explained.
“How? What?” Max looked between them.
“She didn’t say she wanted to stay dead! Just that I should move on without her! She gave me an out in case I was too weak! But I wasn’t. I’m not! Everything is going fine!” Jaeger stressed, but kept his gun pressed firmly against his chest. “You’re the assholes who wouldn’t accept that view of things!”
“Because you were going mad trying to think up ways to bring her back! When you pushed us away we understood you were hurting. We just figured you’d come to your senses! Not that you’d found the craziest fucking way to do it!” Ham waved at him.
“I had to find a way to do it without your fucking help so I did what I had to!” Jaeger yelled back and then forced himself to take a slow deep breath to keep calm.
“Dad…” Max’s eyes were full of worry and concern.
“After the war. We didn’t just split up because we were worried about Titan. I… basically couldn’t stand them. They kept telling me to forget Leona, to just move on, as if she meant NOTHING to them!” Jaeger yelled out the word and then forced himself to calm once more. “They just didn’t understand why she said what she said. She recorded her memories just before the attack! Why the fuck would she have done that if she intended to commit suicide? She wanted to come back! It was just… she just didn’t want me to feel bad if I couldn’t do it! But I’ve done it! It’s done!”
“At what fucking cost?” Ham asked.
“Would somebody please fucking explain to me what’s going on?!” Max demanded once more as he looked around the room.
“Your mom was worried about losing Jaeger. There was no real plan in place to save his memories when he died in the field which they kept expecting to happen almost immediately. Instead your dad survived and got further and further from his original scan and memories. So she convinced… or really coerced some of the program scientists to make an implant that would record a person’s… memories, personality… soul really so it could be easily implanted into a synth body. The problem is they didn’t finish it before the war broke out. And it was never intended to bring back someone else. I don’t even know what you’re hoping for Jaeger.” Ham stared at him with a slow shake of his head.
“I’ve got her memories! And my memories of her! I just had to keep living! Let her feel things out. Get her set up in the base computer-”
“Jesus! The computer! The crazy processing spike! All those open memory files you nearly murdered me over the other day!” Ham tossed his hands into the air. “You thought I was about to kill Leona! Jaeger that isn’t her! It’s… it’s some crazy AI program that just wants you to think it’s her!”
“No! You’re wrong! It is her!” Jaeger yelled back. “And she’s stronger than ever! I should have activated all the war bots years ago! She gets to make hundreds of decisions a day now! I’ve felt her strength growing even if I don’t remember it!”
“What doesn’t he remember?” Max asked.
“They were worried that having another copy of your personality inside your own head might lead to mental health issues so the implant is designed to cover its tracks so to speak. The user will have vague senses and memories but not fully remember any conversations. To try and help prevent bias in forming a new personality too. To get a sense of who the person really is. Not just who they wish they were.” Ham explained.
[Continued in comments]
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