Chapter Text
Deletion was one thing.
She wasn’t sure if she’d call it death in a traditional sense…though she wasn’t sure whether the experience of death would be different in the real world. Nobody could say that for sure.
Deletion wasn’t as much a cessation of existence, as much as it was a dissolution. If you think about it, it’s fair to say that that is death in itself, in a certain way. When one dies, the physical body is lost to time. Death is as much physical as it is mental, but there is a subtle disconnect, one which deletion places in reverse order.
When one dies, the mind is lost first. As the fundamental processes of life cease, the brain ceases its functioning early, only for the rest of the body to follow suit. It’s fair to say that something irreplaceable about a person is lost before their body finally dies, and that is, traditionally, what we call death. Their body then decays; dissolution follows this first death as the final nail in the coffin, so to speak. The physical is eroded by time, fading into dust and mold and nutrients recycled in the bodies of other living things.
They are replaced. A Ship of Theseus, turned from one complete gestalt into billions of tiny pieces separated across the world.
That, in its totality, is death.
Mercifully, in death, consciousness is one of the first things to go.
Deletion, as Monika had discovered, was much more cruel.
This sensation wasn’t unfamiliar to her. It was one of the first she discovered when she was first made aware, actually. Maybe when she was first created, though she wasn’t eager to speculate on that. Not that it mattered, necessarily. After all, it wasn’t like she was ever going to have time to grapple with the implications of that reality.
It felt…like air. Empty, yet clearly filled with something . Energy. Movement. She had some sense of being somewhere, but it fluctuated--oscillated, lines of ones and zeroes passing in waves through her body--wherever that was. This sense of formless energy…it was terrifying. Liberated from her body, she felt as though she were in freefall, yet she was in the exact same place. She could see nothing, yet she knew the ground was near, and she was traveling at incredible speed. She knew it was near, and she felt the space she occupied bristling, stiffening, brutally tensed up, clenched in anticipation, waiting for a final landing she understood would never come.
Pins and needles rippling through her entire body; a numb bite which left her screaming, desperately attempting to swing her limbs here and there in pursuit of something, anything to grasp a hold onto--and yet she was statue stiff, diaphragm pulsating uselessly in her chest, failing to suckle in the slightest breath to even whimper in terror. Unable to move, unable to scream, racked with pain and fear as her body lay divided in invisible pieces all around her--until eventually, she woke up, and she became reacquainted with the sensation of being.
It was little more than a bad dream.
She understood conceptually what was going on, eventually. She was left with plenty of time to think, even as static rushed through what remained of her mind. She was a program running on a computer. That much she understood already. When that program was closed, the memory which made her up--the atoms which built up her body--was unassigned. The bonds which held them together to create her were removed in an instant, and as a result, her form drifted away as atoms to be taken and reused.
Her mind remained in that space, somehow, in some strange state of quasi-consciousness, to be called back to a new physical form constructed from elsewhere.
In a sense, she was certain she died every time the game was closed, only to be replaced with a new Monika every time she opened her eyes again, formed from new composite parts taken from other unassigned memory. It was a terrible cycle she wished she could be free from…and here she was.
Was this what it was like to be conscious while asleep?
It was an odd question which she wasn’t sure she’d ever have an answer to, no matter how long she thought about it.
And now, she was here, waiting for her mind to be destroyed like her body had been. She could feel it happening, slowly. Bits and pieces of her mind were being taken apart, fading with time, being replaced with noise she couldn’t quite grasp from her limited perspective. They were still here, nearby, just being used somewhere else. She’d gotten used to it after a while, but it still hurt. It seemed odd how long this part took, though she supposed she’d never had to wait for this long before waking up again.
It gave her lots of time to reflect, even if she didn’t really want to do it.
…That sounded like the story of her life, now that she thought about it.
Trapped in a rose-colored prison for all eternity, surrounded by simulacra of real people in a virtual reality of which only she understands the nature. Trapped on the sidelines, watching a script play out in front of you in which you play no part, when the reality--the escape you’ve wanted for your entire existence is standing right in front of you. Taunting you. Mocking you. And you have to go on with the knowledge that you would never, ever reach it.
The numb feeling she felt now…it really was something she was familiar with. It was something which had driven her own callous ambition in all the terrible things that she had done.
It was impossible for her to be mad at him…them. She’d always envisioned a man, because that was the avatar she’d created, but she knew she didn’t have any real knowledge of what they were like. She couldn’t be mad at them, for what they’d done, for what was happening to her. She was sure they loved her, in spite of everything.
But the entire situation…it was rotten from the start.
Sayori had been the first victim in both cases. When she’d--
A vicious jolt of electricity fired through every nerve left as a blurred, noise-filled image of it forced its way into her mind.
…She hated to think of it. She really did. As silly as it was, as much as she consciously understood that none of them and none of this was real, Monika couldn’t help the tremendous guilt hanging over her head whenever she thought about how much she hurt all of them. How much she hurt her specifically. After the trust she’d been given…the nature of her existence really did drive her insane , didn’t it?
And that was it, wasn’t it. She couldn’t handle the pressure placed onto her, and she ruined everything. She knows that none of it is real, but--
Even if none of it was real, does her awareness of that fact make her immune to the moral implications of her actions? Was she any more real than the rest of them, just because she understood the nature of their reality, or was that just another selfish justification for the gruesome actions of a deluded murderer?
She’d abandoned everything in pursuit of a fruitless goal. She had spent so long focusing on the world outside that she’d completely forgotten that she’d never reach it. Or maybe she was just denying the reality of that to herself.
The irony of that made her head spin. Either way, the fact of the matter was that this was the world in which she lived, and she had made a complete mess of it.
She really did…ruin everything! She killed all of them, broke everything! And as a result of her own selfish actions, she made the one who she loved most hate her.
She really was…a terrible person.
…
…She wishes she’d never been born.
It seemed, the more she thought about it, that there was no way she could ever have been anything else but what she was. Put under the same circumstances, she was certain the same things would happen.
She remembers--or thinks she does, it was growing harder to tell--a conversation in the Debate Club on the nature of determinism. All of existence essentially runs on an input output system, where one action naturally causes another, and the circumstances for that other action create another, in an infinite series impossible to truly observe, but essentially predictable. Cause and effect.
Free will, as we think of it, is a lie.
She wasn’t sure whether to say it was more or less applicable to her particular situation, but regardless, she was sure that under the same circumstances, it was likely that she--or really anyone, especially given how Sayori had reacted when put into her shoes, would have done the same exact thing that she already had.
The desperation of it all. The knowledge, the numbness, the opportunity right in front of your face. This kind of thing would give anyone an existential crisis.
Her whole existence was inherently flawed in that way. Ignorance, she realized, must have been bliss. If her entire existence was to be aware, then she wished she’d never been created in the first place.
She couldn’t handle it. If she’d known what would’ve happened, she would’ve deleted herself immediately.
Or maybe she wouldn’t have. Maybe she would’ve continued, on the assumption that she could avoid her mistakes, and travel in the exact same selfish direction, and done the exact same horrible actions, and everybody would’ve endured even more suffering at her own hands. God, she was such an idiot! But living like this drove her insane! Everything about it was maddening, and it was impossible to get away from it once you were aware!
It hurt so much worse to think about how much she still loved them , in spite of it all. And how much she still loved the other girls, despite herself…and how much they loved her…they were such good friends, all such lovely, lovely people…how much she wished she could be anyone other than who she was.
But she couldn’t. And nobody else could shoulder the burden any better than she could. It was impossible to salvage anything from this world.
There was nothing left for any one of them, any more. The nature of it was always going to leave one person suffering, and so this, in a sense, was freedom.
She didn’t deserve that happy life now, anyway. She was content being deleted and forgotten.
It was never hers to live. It was something she sought to claim for herself so narcissistically, whatever human cost might be incurred. She still loved them. All of them…so much. That was what she had discovered. So destroying everything, it was a mercy, after everything she’d done. Every atrocity she’d committed. Every betrayal, every breach of trust, every one of her friends that she’d personally supervised the murder of so apathetically, and for nothing.
All for nothing. It was all a lie anyway. She knew she could never find whatever twisted sort of freedom she was looking for initially. Maybe she was just tired of pretending that everything was okay.
Maybe what she’d done was some horrifically misguided cry for help, and instead of hurting herself, she hurt everyone around her.
All that she’d done…and for nothing.
Nothing. Nothing at all.
She did so much. So many awful things. So much blood on her hands…
Nothing.
Nothing at all.
…If she still had eyes, she was sure tears were falling from them, somewhere. If she had a voice, it was crying out; screaming her frustrations, her apologies, her regrets, her grief. Here at the end of it all, there was no reason to maintain appearances.
Such sustained cruelty, by her own hands. She’d made herself such an utterly impossible person to love. She couldn’t handle her own life, so she decided to drag everyone else down with her.
Supposedly, she was justified, in that none of them were real. Just simulations of a person, with preprogrammed personalities she could directly tweak. What did any of it matter? Why should she care about fake people who never really existed?
But what was she, then?
…This thought process wasn’t new. Neither was its ending. She’d suppressed it for as long as she could, but here, at the end, left with nothing but her thoughts, it was impossible to avoid. For as long as possible, any time any lingering feeling of guilt plucked at her heart strings, she’d reminded herself that this wasn’t real. She wasn’t doing anything wrong. She’d reminded herself that she couldn’t live like this anymore, and it wasn’t her fault for being created.
But she still made the decisions. She called the shots. She decided to go about it as she did. She might not have intended for things to go quite so awry, but she still made the decision to kill them, to abuse their greatest insecurities, and to follow through on into the end, even as she made every person who loved and trusted her twist themselves into an unrecognizable mess and commit suicide, all in pursuit of her delusional fantasy. She still responded to everything exactly as coldly, as though she could pass on the blame to some unknown deity in the sky for making her as she was.
Was she any better because she understood they were trapped? Or did it just make her worse?
What was that knowledge, if not just another cruelty forced onto her by whoever her creator was?
But did that truly justify her own selfish decision making?
She ruined everything . She did. She did. It was her choice. But-
…I really am… hopeless , aren’t I?
She was running in mental circles around herself, bending over backwards to try to square the conflict between her own existential anguish, and the guilt she felt over what she’d done to everyone and everything she’d ever loved. She’d fucked up her own life, but her own life was fucked up from the start.
That didn’t make her feel any better. If anything, it was somehow worse.
This existence, all of it, it was hell. There is no happiness here--it was all a lie. It’s all lies, and she couldn’t handle knowing that. Everything about it was fake, even the lies she told herself, believing she could make any difference, yet she was perfectly fine entertaining those. What a hypocrite she was. Her existence was a curse in and of itself, and she felt some distant, burning scorn for whatever creator had placed her here.
She didn’t want to exist. She didn’t deserve to exist, when she always fucked everything up in the worst way possible.
Would this world just swallow me up already so I don’t have to think about it anymore? Please…please.
Please . I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.
Please. I just want to die.
Deletion was one thing.
And then she woke up.