Work Text:
There is a presence in your mind. A not-you. It likes the same things as you — engineering, anime, your bro's old movies — but not in the same ways.
Sometimes you blink, and you know it's been there in your place, moving your hands and legs and working on your projects. Out of spite, you undo what it's done.
Other times you feel it watching you in the back of your mind. You think you should watch it, too, just to be fair, but you never quite manage to.
-
You don't remember writing half the messages you send, but that's fine. Your memory is good for the things that matter.
Your friends don't notice. Or at least, you don't think they do. Roxy probably could if she tried.
-
Sometimes, you let yourself entertain the idea that this is some side effect of your upbringing. Effects of Total Isolation on a Growing Mind, A Case Study. That sort of thing.
You found the idea in one of the diaries you kept as a kid, back when you thought you should leave something behind more elegant and thoughtful than the forum posts and blogs you found online. You can't remember writing it or coming up with the idea, but you can't remember most of your childhood anyway.
It's a stupid theory. Roxy's never mentioned something like this, and she's not in the business of keeping secrets. It's more likely that this is just something wrong with you in particular, a unique and special wrongness that no other human has ever experienced.
-
You imagine what your bro would say sometimes. It's your favorite and most childish fantasy, the one where he's inexplicably alive 1000 years after his death. He lives with you (or you live with him?) and he tells you the secret meanings of every interview he ever gave. He can remember them, of course; you know you're smart, so your bro must be smart too.
In your fantasy, he makes things with you. You aren't interested in directing or creating things the way he is, but you like making things, and you think he must like them too.
He spars with you. He teaches you the techniques you've tried to emulate from blurry footage and the government records you and Roxy hacked into.
Sometimes, you almost believe it's real.
-
TT: Roxy.
TG: hey dirk
TG: wassuuuuup
TT: I have a question for you.
TG: ohhh?
TT: Do you ever feel
TT: different.
TG: ?????
TG: isnt that normal lol
TT: Not like that.
TT: Like sometimes you're not you.
TT: Like you're someone else.
TG: not rly
TG: i think lol
TG: youre being even more opaueq than usual loll
TG: *opauque
TG: *opqaue
TG: *opaque
TT: Don't worry about it.
TT: It was just a hypothetical anyway.
-
You look in the mirror, and someone who isn't you looks back.
He looks like you. He makes the same expressions as you, and when you lower your shades, his eyes are the same as yours.
He could probably pass for you. The realization makes you feel sick.
-
You burn your hands for the hundredth time. It's a stupid mistake.
You put your hands in water and think-hear yourself promise not to do this shit again.
It's not your thought. It's not your voice. As soon as you think that, though, you can feel someone shake their head.
You form your hands into fists and—
-
You hear your bro's voice in your mind, and you shake your head until it goes away.
You feel like you're going insane.
-
You trawl the depths of the internet. Abandoned forums, imageboards, tiny websites set up by paranoid geniuses. You've always felt a certain sort of kinship with the people who used to live here.
There are suggestions there, off the wall and strange. You spend long nights reading them.
How to capture your brain as it is now, and store that code somewhere else. There are obvious mistakes in the suggestions, but you think you know how to fix them.
You lay in bed and imagine your mind empty of the presence. It is a foreign concept.
-
TT: Hello, Dirk.