Why? | A flash fiction story
68 of đź’Ż
My room has become a dark mountain of garbage. At the very top, I slouch on my throne of wrappings of food and drinks and drugs: the supreme king of trash. The small rectangular area I used to call a bed is now a pile of clothes in varying levels of dirtiness — the purple jacket is somewhere in there. I haven’t put the cleaning bots to work in a couple of weeks. Why bother?
The bright street ads piercing through the blinds are all the light this room gets, but I don’t see it. My mind is attached to the simulated worlds of the Aether, the machine feeding me constant visual stimuli, but I don’t see that either. My eyes are closed.
Escaping from this world into the virtual ones kept the voice in my head silent for a while. Now I lost interest in the fake realities, so I gave in to the worlds that the voice creates in the darkness of my mind. The voice isn’t loud, but it’s constant, always there, droning in the background: Why? Why try? Why the effort? Why bother? I’m out of answers.
The first therapy session was yesterday. Zik sent me a coupon. “Agh,” they said, “I need you to go to therapy. I need you to take care of yourself. I need you.”
Stupid Zik. It’s not like I care for them, but I like that they care for me. It made me think of the bounties we collected together: them, the brains in the machine; me, the muscle in the streets. I thought about the green plus sign on the side of the numbers on my account. It felt nice. Maybe that’s what matters, that it feels nice. Maybe that’s the answer to why.
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