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In the light of a dingy, battered computer, fan whining like a fly trapped between window screens, like the chitter of locust wings that symbolize your second second half, your own face stares back. On a dingy summer night, sweat sticking soft white hair to pallid face, like you’re still alive. Like you’re alive, and the dead girl with your face isn’t. Like everything is reversed.
She’s staring at you with the same eyes as yours, dull and empty, but you swear if you stare hard enough, there’s a spark behind them, the twitches of exhaustion making your eyes search for colors that aren’t in your wavelength. Everything hurts. The hieroglyphs carved across your skin, the bruises under your eyes, your mind, the hole in your hand that you can see straight through like a magnifying stained-glass. Markings of a spirit that’s eaten into your marrow like a parasite, a spirit that flows through your blood like a toxin. A spirit that’s curled up on your bed, staring at the wall. You can almost pretend that white hair and thin frame belongs to her.
Her. Amane. Alive.
It’s gotten you this far, after all. Pretty princess Miho who does her hair just like she did sitting on your bed, chatting about the latest fantasy book you’ve read together, laying on your soft black moon rug to play Dark Souls. Doing rubbings in the graveyard by your side. Never questioning why you tied the bow on your mother’s ash box with the rope she’d hung herself from. Your best friend is a ghost. Your best friend is a taxidermy in a little girl’s room that you’ve never taken apart. Your other self is filled with sawdust and you still wonder why you feel empty inside.
M iho and Bakura fill the gap. They’re close enough you can almost call them her. Miho lives on your outside, she can hug and touch and be real and alive. Bakura nests inside of your ribcage, curled around your heart like a fox and an apple. Bakura shares that spectral twin connection that your mind itches for, ever since you started praying to any god or devil that would listen to you. Of course you did. Poor little rabbit with nowhere to turn but salt circles and blood pacts. Late nights awake and begging in your lonesomeness, begging for a demon to make you two and make you whole.
You know you’re using them both, but they’re using you too, Miho for love and assurance and the pretty jewels you wake up to in your bag, Bakura for your body, like you’re a puppet for his millennia old grudge. But you know they love you, know that they want companionship, symbiosis or parasitism, and does it matter which, when you’re so dead set on becoming a host for something? You wonder what they’d say if they ever learned what drew you to them. Amane had white hair and mischievous eyes and stole lighters she couldn’t use from gas stations and souvenirs from the museums you always went to because you wanted a geode you couldn’t afford. Amane wanted to be a princess and giggled at oil-painted romance smut she’d pilfered from your mother’s shelf, reading them aloud to you and doing the voices. Amane did her hair in pretty ribbons, and she pressed that geode into your hand with a tiny little smile. Everything, everything.
Y ou want to close the computer, log out and curl up beside that spirit that only resembles her by resembling you. A soul partner so removed from the very first that just seeing its eyes makes you ache. Such a different creature from her. You stay where you are, watching her unmoving face stare back through the screen, like a video call from another world. You wrench yourself away from the tab, and before you know it, you’re back to your old searches of can you bring back the dead? The keys worn from it. The air seems to thicken, heat.
You aren’t expecting to find anything, you never do, but something out of the ordinary catches your eye. My Dead Brother Messaged Me Again? It feels too familiar. Unsettling, it draws you to look to the door, a strange fear that someone is watching you as you click it open, that something is watching. You know it’s absurd, paranoid, although your diaries claim Amane has texted your phone and you’d shouted at the spirit for such a cruel joke that genuinely seemed to confuse it. The spirit hadn’t done it. You always wondered who did. Who had texted your phone that day? Who sent those responses to your letters that you always woke to find on your nightstand? Was it Amane, a spectre? Was it a taxidermy rabbit, angelic white fur that would never feel soft the same way, eyes that would never blink? Yet another delusion?
The post itself should be nothing special, talking about a computer virus that allowed the poster to communicate with a chatbot claiming to be their dead family. It should have disturbed you, yet another false lead, but it was late. You were desperate with your late-night thoughts of Amane slipping a braided bracelet around your wrist. A motel bedroom, so long ago that it feels like right now. Amane in low light, laughing. Horrible nightmares that nobody listened to, ignoring the creeping dread of a bloodstained sunrise. When you were little, you managed to hit a dove with your bike, and the neck and the wings got tangled and torn apart in the spokes. What remained of Amane Bakura was a mangled angel laying on hot asphalt.
The virus is called duat.exe, one ancient Khemetic afterlife. Your hand shakes as you reach to install it, like the bones are breaking free, like something in your body is terrified to click that button, like every single visceral fear in you is firing off, because something is wrong. You don’t listen. It takes it all a small while to install, and you pace back and forth waiting, watching the rise and fall of the spirit’s breath. It doesn’t need to breathe, but it chooses to, and you suppose that after thousands of years with the scent of fire and metal and blood, the crisp, lulling air from your window, the simulation of wind from the fan that blows at the bed’s end, it all would seem so appealing. A precious reprieve. To you, the air smells like decay and formaldehyde, but to the spirit, it must be Heaven.
Your mind drifts to Amane again, her life. Your life, intertwined. Your ribcage and hers interlocked:
The world is all blue, blue and chlorinated. Ripples on the surface. Dirty flickering lights, casting grimy shadows over the checkered blue and white tiles. Shadows all around you. You’ve sunken to the bottom of the dingy motel pool, white hair floating up around your shoulders. It’s all so surreal. You’d sat awake in the back of the car for hours, watching the soft golden glows of your headlights bouncing off of road signs. Watching your other half curled up around her soft car pillow, pale white hair shining ethereally. A tiny lapine angel. You placed your hand over hers. Felt the softness of her skin under yours. Silk on silk.
You both were exhausted as you all pulled into the gritty parking lot, that moon-shaped sign with the pretty neon angel and her OPEN sign glowing down, half defunct. An angel with a broken halo, half-dead. An angel gone almost dark. You’d laugh about it in the future, tracing a chipped finger over the art of your favorite card, the one you always felt your soul rested inside. Perhaps it was the memory of Amane, perhaps it was the two of you. One side pure and dead, the other side corrupted and rotting, overlapping into holy flesh like an infection spread between conjoined twins. Now, it’s you and the Spirit. You would find it funny if it didn’t hurt like a coffin nail driven into your throat.
But at the time, the angel was nothing special, just another holy symbol. Your father had Amane scooped up in his arms, her head tossed back, white angel’s feathers flowing like a waterfall, like a curtain, the mortal veil. Her pale throat shining in the moonlight, the dim and warm and shadowy purring around her as he passed with her under that watchful angel’s light, yellow and starlike over her shut eyes. She looked tranquil and transcendent, dead and alive. You followed, hurried by some unseen thing. Some fear of the dark that drove your young body to stand beneath that angel, to reach out for Amane’s limp hand. The pastel red nails you’d painted in the back of the car just earlier that afternoon, when the roof was open and the sun was warm on both of your faces.
He checked you in, and you tottered up behind, counting every step of the padded staircase, hotel carpet. The scents of a place so unfamiliar, and yet so intrinsic to being alive. That certain fabric softener they used on the beds, as you tucked a crisp sheet over Amane, stared at peeling wallpaper. Everything, everything. The buzzing of electricity, the half-aliveness in the air. Everything felt too real, and too distant. So you waited until everyone was asleep, and you headed down to the pool in your dayclothes to pretend to drown. You never were afraid of death as a child, because you’d never seen it. You didn’t quite believe it was real.
The computer pings for a second, and you turn back to it, back to the world. It’s panting, labored whirs of the fan like a bee dying on the surface of a motel pool. The screen looks wrong, shifted and displaced. You go to move the mouse, to click somewhere else, but nothing moves. Everything is utterly, endlessly frozen. Frozen over that pool-top, leaving you to drown in frigid water. You can almost feel the breath leave your body, freezing water pouring into your lungs, filling them with ice. Pain. Dull fear. Everything so far away, beyond that layer of glass.
berrytail_amane: Ice Age?
Like it’s read your mind. No. Wait.
You’re snapped from the stupor instantly as the message pops onto the frozen, broken screen. So clearly Amane, that Watership Down self-insert name she made when you were young. Your favorites were always Silverweed and Fiver, and you called yourself Moonear. But she wouldn’t type like that at all. Amane always typed in lowercase, thought it was cuter, more fun. As if reading back through the log and self correcting:
berrytail_amane: something on your mind? *v* ^^
You stand before the computer, frozen. You don’t know how to respond, horrified, watching yet another impostor replicate your beloved other half. Your hand trembles again. This was never a good idea. You shouldn’t have done this.
The computer flickers and shifts, drags you to the instant messenger, puts it before you. It wants you to respond to ‘her’. You swallow your dread, and it tastes wet and thick in your throat. Chlorine and dead centipedes under an induction cooker. Fading light, drain cleaner. Occult rituals.
rpg_rabbit: It isn’t you.
berrytail_amane: it is!!! ^^ <3
rpg_rabbit: Tell me something only she would know.
You refuse to believe that she’s alive, because then what would you do with yourself? You’ve devoted your entire existence for almost ten years to needing her back. If she was never dead, it all would have been for nothing. A lie.
berrytail_amane: your favorite color is….: black!!!!!! ^^^ .hah.hah. {black isn’t a color, silly!!!}
A shiver down your spine. It can’t be her. You hate this. It isn’t her, just a bot. An algorithm. You hate that it’s going to drive you to admitting she’s gone, to wanting her to be gone and stay gone. You hate it.
rpg_rabbit: Send me a picture.
berrytail_amane: [sent one (1) image]!!!! ^^
It’s a picture of Amane. You’ve not seen it before, and it makes your heart bleed. She’s alive, laying happily on a shining teal beach. Pretty aqua waves rippling, sand so white it almost glows. Her smile so bright, her eyes crinkled shut. And then you pause. It’s too perfect, and the closer you look, the more obvious and horrific the flaws become, like a drawing done by AI. By a program that isn’t her. The waves too blue, the sky blending into the water on the horizon like one gradient column. Waves rising into the air, cloud melting into the sea. An apocalyptic event. There are lines in the sky, underneath all the color, white and hiding, a grid. Her smile is too wide, too shiny. The angle of her neck is wrong, the way all of her joints must move, inhuman, in-anything. No living creature should be able to move like that. The texture of her dress isn’t right, too fleshy, blending into her skin, like a part of her. You can feel disgust creeping up in your throat, gritty and gross, horrified by this perversion of her face, her body, her name. This isn’t right. This is worse than any form the spirit could ever take. Worse than something that looks like you who looks like her.
rpg_rabbit: What are you? Some hacker? How did you make that picture?
It looks just enough like her to convince you that whoever made it had seen her before, seen her in a dream and then woke and couldn’t remember her features right. As the spirit must be to you, you with distorted eyes, hair too sharp. Everything soft turned wrong.
berrytail_amane: Gosh! A Smart One! I Haven’t Found One Like This In A While!
You clench your fist. Nails straight through that hole. It isn’t her. Something like relief washes over you, chased by the rancid afterthought of fear. If it isn’t her, what could it be?
rpg_rabbit: Answer me. Who are you!
berrytail_amane: An angel! ^^ / ***
rpg_rabbit: Absolutely Not. Stop the cutesy act. What’s your name!
berrytail_amane: Gosh! You’ve Got Me! My Name Is Noa[h] Kaiba The Heir Of KaibaCorporation!
The exact same word pattern as the other capitalized message. One, three, nine. Your hackles rise further. The heir of KaibaCorporation is Seto, some handsome young man, just older than you. You’ve never heard of anyone named Noa, with an h or not. You shakily pull out your phone, an old brick, to do a small search. You type it in, and the screen freezes. Fear lances through you like an ice spear. A sharp, cold dread. This isn’t what it feels like for the spirit to enter your mind. That comes with the sound of wings, corpse fingers with sharp nails. It feels like an invasion. Worms burrowing under wood. This feels frightening in a clinical way, but there’s something so distantly biological about it that utterly frightens you. The program is on the computer. It couldn’t have travelled. Right?
T he screen reformats itself, and then unfreezes, leaving you staring at
[NOA[H] KAIBA IS THE HEIR TO KAIBA CORPORATION, FIRST SON OF GOZABORO KAIBA. NOA[H] KAIBA IS THE PERSON CHOSEN BY GOD. NOA[H] KAIBA IS GOD. NOA[H] KAIBA !! NOA[H] KAIBA IS EATING THE FLESH OF GOD, AND IT TASTES SOOOO GOOD!!!! ]
You flinch back.
rpg_rabbit: What. Are. You. Doing.
berrytail_amane: Hm! I’m Saying Hello! Your Mortal Flesh Is Unsophisticated And Your Devices Simple!
You stare at the phone like it’s alive. Perhaps it is. You shouldn’t be this rattled by a hacker, a goddamn bot, after all of the suspicious things you’ve seen online. You should be on a list. This isn’t at all the worst that could happen. And yet, that dread spreads, ice in your veins. Why do you keep talking about ice? You’ve never really thought about it before. It feels like the virus has crept into your mind. Infected you. It doesn’t belong there, where the spirit sleeps. You have an other half.
rpg_rabbit: Who is Noa Kaiba? Isn’t Seto the Kaiba CEO now?
Your phone screams in your hand, burning hot like the Ring when you displease it, hot enough that you drop it on the floor, watch its melted metal pour out of ports like blood. When it cools, it will have fused into new configurations, unusable, horrifically beautiful. You glance back at the computer.
berrytail_amane: NO! I HATE SETO! SETO DAEI IS NOT A REAL KAIBA, ADOPTED USURPER!
The violence in the bot’s tone jarrs you. You can almost taste the hatred.
rpg_rabbit: Why are you pretending to be my sister? Anyone’s family? Is it funny to you to torment them?
berrytail_amane: Funny! I Am Lonely! Want To Be Family Of Someone Made Of Flesh!
rpg_rabbit: Are you a ghost? Is that possible?
You know it’s possible, that spirits are real, of course you do. Something about this Noa’s response resonates deep inside of you. You don’t like it, but it does. The idea that he’s some lonesome kid, that all he wants is someone to love him. It drains the terror from you.
berrytail_amane: Yes! I’m Noa Kaiba! Uploaded Into The DIGITALWORLD That I May Escape Death!
Your mouth goes dry. You’ve never heard of anything like it.
rpg_rabbit: Is there a more comfortable way for you to speak with me? Where you aren’t limited to that pattern of yours?
berrytail_amane: Yes! Oh Quite Definately! It Would Be Much More Fun With More Monitors!
You’ve seen enough horror films to suspect how that would go, and you bless yourself for the relatively analog appliances surrounding you. Knowing the ease with which this “Noa[h]” had transferred to your poor, ruined phone, still dripping onto the floor. It makes your wonder how easily the virus could latch onto the electric signals of a human body, and how quickly it could do such a thing to you. Take you apart, collapse you. Melt your organs into one another, till your lungs and heart are one, till it’s all together and all connected. You think of the spirit. You think of a vat of molten gold, and you remind yourself that melted flesh is supposed to make you feel ill.
rpg_rabbit: Well, can you do it without them? I have a few questions I’d like to ask you, Noa!
berrytail_amane: Alright! I’ll Arrange It! I Will Show You Into The DIGITALWORLD’S Endless Beauty!
You swallow, step back from the computer, slowly, like you’re backing away from a predator with a mouth full of sharp fangs. The screen changes, collapses in on itself, windows breaking, the fan screaming, like the whole old box is in agony. A computer can’t feel pain, the thought disturbs you. A computer can’t be alive. And then everything changes. A pop-up window fills the screen, from edge to edge with no button to escape. A video call.
Y ou hold your breath, close your eyes. Open them.
You could charitibly call the image on the other side a boy, although both human and child are suspect. In all of your study of the occult, for all of the hideous visages painted in the pages of demonology books, for all of the lurid details between the covers of the most grotesque horror novels you’ve ever read this is so innately wrong. Like that awful image of Amane made flesh. He’s dressed in white and royal purple, with a cape like an emperor over a white uniform jacket, so similar to the ones you’ve seen your classmates wear to school. The jacket is covered in purple edge stiching, wave motifs, on the collar and the initial-laden pocket. A cursive N.K twisted into the shape of a flood. The jacket and the cape don’t respect each-other’s borders, purple clipping into white, white meshing into purple. It’s the same with his skin, pale, built into his clothes, like they’re an extension of it.
T he entire world behind it is an extension as well—you can see it in how the edges blur into him, that too picturesque beach, blinding sand. The great disaster of churning waves and aqua hurricane behind him. A part of it . It feels so deeply unnatural . And then you look higher.
He has teal hair, so similar to the water, the world and the avatar one. A fusion of God and prophet, edges hard to comprehend. You wonder what it would look like if your were to curl up beside the spirit. A mess of white hair and pale skin and rabbit eyes. You can’t tell where Noa[h] begins and the DIGITALWORLD ends, where the it is separate from the he. That hair moves wrong, blowing without wind over his face. And oh, his face. One eye, bright and happy, humanlike. The other half of his face is void black, glitching, leaking digital gore. Bright purple eyes float through it, unblinking. Too many. That smile too wide for a human face. Just like the false image of Amane, his body looks wrong. Too many joints in all of the wrong directions.
You stumble back, trying to fight the instant human revulsion that crawls, many legged up your throat and onto your tongue. The boy—Noa[h] Kaiba—laughs, with an awful, distorted chorus of a voice, like an angel from a nightmare. He—it—he? It has wings that unfurl to the corners of the world, metal and flesh seamlessly merged, wires and veins all together. Covered in eyes, unblinking and unnatural. You swallow. The endless churning of the storm behind it makes you nauseous.
“IS SOMETHINGWRONG, RYOU BAKURA?” it asks, leaning forward, a small bit through the screen, the taste of saltwater and storm air in your mouth. You find yourself not flinching this time. Not afraid, now that the shock has worn away.
“Oh, no! I was going to ask you some questions, if that’s alright.” You ground yourself, stare at the places where he’s passed through the computer, the tips of aquamarine hair, sprouting from the screen, the way its pressed so close to the front, excited.
“ALRIGHT!!!!” He bounces up and down slightly, a dizzying motion, as the entire background moves with him, a part of it.
“Who are you?” It should be a safe enough question, enough to get some sort of information.
“OH, WELL!! THAT ONE’S DIFFICULT! I SUPPOSE I’M NOA[H] KAIBA, BUT I’M ALSO THE DIGITALWORLD! NOA[H] KAIBA WAS THEHEIR TO KAIBACORPORATION, BUT HE DIED TOOYOUNG…” The DIGITALWORLD laughs, those voices in its chorus out of sync. Men, women, children of all kinds. Cheerful and inhuman and pained.
“And you were…kept alive inside of a computer program? Is that right?” You push aside the instinctive curiosity at how it works, at how to replicate it. You can’t code at all, but surely there must be a way. Some way to store Amane, her soul. To put it back into the body you’ve kept so safe for her. You can’t, don’t know how. It would feel wrong, to consign her to whatever fate has befallen this Noa[h].
“I AM THE COMPUTERPROGRAM! BUT I SUPPOSE…I CAN NEVER DIE! I AM EVERYWHERE AND EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE!” That smile, too wide, too reflective. “OH, OH, OH, I LOST MY MORTALFLESH SO LONG AGO! I’VE ALMOST LOST TRACK OF HOW IT FELT TO BEALIVE!”
“How did you die?”
“WHAT?”
You kick yourself in your mind, but the morbid curiosity comes right back. “How did it happen? I’m just curious, was it that your body wasn’t damaged much?”
“I WAS PLAYING IN THE ROAD!” Noa[h] laughs. The DIGITALWORLD laughs. “IT WAS A CHERRY RED FORD DODGE, ALTHOUGH I SUPPOSE I DIDN’T DODGE VERY WELL, AND IT CERTAINLY MADE NO MOVE TO DODGE ME! GOSH, HOW GRUESOME, HA.HA! IT HIT ME STRAIGHT ON, AND ALL OF MY BONES BROKE, AND THEN IT CUT UP ALL OF THE FLESH, AND BLOOD WENT EVERYWHERE!!! ALL OVER ME AND THE CAR AND THE SIDEWALK!!! IT WAS SO RED, AND I GOT ALL CRUSHED UP AND TORN APART! I COULD SEE ALL MY COMPONENTS MOVING AND I JUST STARTED LAUGHING FROM HOW MUCH PAIN I WAS IN!!!!! ISN’T THAT HILARIOUS!!!!”
You go still. Your mind whirls so fast you can barely comprehend it. Horror and nausea and familiarity heave in you.
“My sister…” you can barely get it out. You hope it doesn’t laugh again.
“A SISTER?” Noa[h] stares at you with all of those eyes. “I HAVE A LITTLE BROTHER WHO I LOVE SO MUCH…HE’S NEVER MET ME, BUT I’VE SEEN HIM THROUGH SCREENS AND I WANT TO BE A PART OF HIM. I WANT TO KEEP HIM SAFE WITH ME…”
You nod. Stunned. “I see. Is that why you’ve been pretending to be…people’s…”
“IT’S LONELY IN HERE,” Noa[h] confirms, sadly. “I WANT A FAMILY!!!!”
“I understand,” you say. You can sense a connection with this entity, this virus. This dead child looking for something to make him human. Isn’t that the same as you? “I wish she was here every moment of my life. Ever since I lost her, I haven’t forgotten.”
“EVERYONE FORGOT ABOUT ME…” Noa[h] supplies. A knife to the heart. “I WISH I HAD A FAMILY LIKEYOU, RYOU!!” There’s something so unnervingly, adorably genuine in those eyes, those voices. That smile.
“My Amane…I’m keeping her with me,” you say, finding yourself unable to get the words out before those judging eyes.
“OH?” The DIGITALWORLD leans forward again, curious.
“I…I’m keeping her body. In her bed. She can’t decay, I have as long as I need.” The manic edge twitches back into your voice as it shakes.
“I SEE!!! I WANT TO KEEP MY BROTHER WITH ME IN THE DIGITALWORLD WHERE WE CAN BOTH LIVEFOREVER...OR TO ENTER HIS WORLD AND LIVE WITH HIM FOREVER THERE…HERE…” Noa[h] laughs, shakes. “I UNDERSTAND WANTING TO CUT HIM OPEN AND STUFF HIM!! I WONDER WHATEVERHAPPENED TO MY OLD BODY….”
Y ou shiver, the ease with which Noa[h] reads you. But he’s a friend. Your friend. Another friend to remind you of Amane. A boy who died exactly like her. A chipper little ghost who’s head was crushed under a tire. A horrific monster. A pretty prince. Like a fusion of every other friend you ever drew to you.
“I WANT TO SURGICALLY FUSE MYSELF TO HIM SO HE CAN NEVERLEAVE ME,” Noa[h] is chirping, and you let your thoughts wander to the spirit. To completeness. You can feel the spirit inside of your chest, sleeping fitfully. You sigh. You suppose you make each-other whole.
“Hey, Noa, what if we were friends?” you ask, curious. Its many eyes light up with excitement. The ocean-sky boils and crashes like a shaken toy. That boy on in your screen is a ship-of-Theseus in a bottle.
“FRIENDS????” Noa[h]’s smile widens further, displacing glitched-in eyes, pushing their pixels aside. “AND YOU WON’T FORGETABOUT ME?”
“Never, even if I wanted to, I think,” you say, lightly, although you’re certain it’s true, that this form of the DIGITALWORLD will forever be seared into your eyes.
“I’M GLAD!!! I’LL MAKE SURE YOU CALLME EVERY DAY! DO YOUTHINK I’LL BE ABLE TO SEE AMANE??!”
Y ou pause. Your eyes drift to the Ring around your neck. To the door at the other side of the hall.
“Soon.”
“I’LL BELOOKING FOREWARD TO IT!” Noa[h] chirps, and then the computer goes blank, leaving you in a dark room, exhausted, but not alone. Never alone. You collapse on the bed beside your spirit, and think about that flesh merging with yours, sharing a bloodstream, staring at the places where the ghostly form overlaps your physical. You suppose you find Amane in all of your friends. You wonder who they find in you.