Placebo, a story by Anna Marcelli Palmer

~Choose multiplayer mode for a massive suicide!

-5-

You s u c k.

You murder me in every imaginable way, and then start cursing me.

You yell at me, because I died.

You can't coordinate your eyes and fingers, horribly attatched as you are to the idiotic jello that fills up the empty space within your skull, and you blame me.

Your reflexes are worse than my life, and you blame me.

But ask yourself, what do I know? I don't have a self. I don't have a future. I've got seven million twin brothers that bear my name. Heck, I don't even have a body, I am just a bunch of colored dots projected repeatedly on a flat glass, fifty to sixty times a second. What the bloody hell could I ever know?

I am a mistake. A glitch. Have you ever thought of yourself as a glitch?
I don't know what material is, for I've never felt it slip underneath my fingers. Do you enjoy your moments in your world of worlds?
I am in love, and yet I can't feel what hormones are. Do you know how to love with yours?
My memory is sealed in a small black piece of plastic, and you erase it whenever you want. Do you savor yours better?
I am not alive, but I want to live. Do you?
I have never moved a mere centimeter from my position, and you are jealous of my speed. But you can run away- I can't.

Oh, relief of relieves!

I may be a nothing, but at least I can take comfort in the fact that you blame me.
Blame me just because YOU SUCK.

The world blinks like a stalled electric lamp. Consciousness of the surroundings comes and goes. Amy's frail figure looming over me projected through a slideshow, moving her lips as though she is saying something, even if no sound is actually produced.

And, just then, clarity kicks in for yet another time.

"...-to yourself? Just why did you do that?"

Eyes piercing through eyes. Insanity upon insanity, exasperation upon exasperation. She knows. She damn knows perfectly why I cut my legs off. And why I made us both die the other day. And why I will keep doing it until everything goes right.

Until it's permanent. Death. Silence. Peace.

The only freedom left is the freedom to choose my expiration date.

Open my mouth, force the vocal cords to vibrate, create meaning; instead, all I can manage is an insane, throaty exclamation, coughed up together with blood and vomit. Part of me wants to laugh at the whackiness of the scene. Organic liquid in ones and zeroes.

So fucking amusing.

Fingers cling onto soft yellow fabric, eliciting a shiver of surprise, of unhingement. Random thoughts surface and drown in an ocean of pain.

"I...did...it...", breath becomes chaotical, words lose their meaning. But I have to muster those few lines, I owe it to her. "I did it because this is the only way I can exist... and bargain... for something entirely...mine".

Pupils dilate and contract, fear pumps through the veins, adrenaline suffocates any logical mental process. Tears lurk behind eyes. An enormous amount of love forever trapped within the murky depths of an erroneous algorhythm.

Amy.

Do I love you?

Or was I programmed to?

"But how...", perspiration is streaming between her eyelids, and her hands are leaving sweaty stains upon the forehead they are stroking. "How can we control ourselves right now and, when the surroundings change, y-you...I-I..."

"It's the time it takes the machine or whatever to load the next level. Don't you see? Someone controls us, and when they do everything seems fake and ridiculously sloppy."

She knows. She damn knows for so much longer than I do.

That's why she's always been so cheerful, so rabid. It was her own way of not going paranoid.

That's why her eyes, those gorgeous emerald eyes that someone else imagined and drew for her, grow wider with dread the more my pulse grows weaker.

"The numbers...the music...the fucking zany music that goes like..."

Amy.

I can hear your muffled cries from somewhere close, but you are just a pink blur in a room that oscillates back and forth.
I want to hold your hand, and share with you the bliss that overcomes my failing heart, but I am just a limbless piece of meat bleeding uncontrollably on the kitchen carpet.

I want to save you for real, from this nightmare of nightmares, but truth is I can only die.

And pray that the machine, unable to process the new information, will explode in its own mathematical simplicity.

"Sing to me, Ames. The zany little music that never stops."

Don't weep.

I want to hear your beautiful voice.

Sing for me.

Like a present goodnight.

Like a bittersweet lullaby.

Sing for me.

Your skinny, girlish arms are around me. I can feel their weak pressure, their familiar warmth against what was my body. Your heartbeat makes up for the lack of mine. Your dress, your skin, are soaked in my very flesh and blood.

We are one.
It's beautiful.
It's absolution.

Your voice cracks, a few notes live their short lives and die in the total silence.

It's the song. That silly, shallow, idiotic song with the ironic content, that seems written for my virtual persona.

"Follow me...s-set me free - trust me

Your sweet singing voice filling my scarlet grave.
The fucking jumpy happy melody.

And we will escape from the city

And now we can both die.
Again and again and again.
Be free.

I'll make it through, prove it to you
Follow me.

The lights finally go out. Everything will be over soon.
Dead and independent in the arms of someone real. Ready to commit suicide over and over again, until I suceed in my only scope.

The lights finally go out. Your singing voice in my ears. The song.

Through my self-destruction, I can finally be someone.
And kill that videogame character again and again and again.

It feels odd, and overwhelming, and exciting-

I'll make it through, prove it to you

-Like happiness.

Follow me.

_GAME OVER_

A/N: I murdered Sonic The Hedgehog. But I find consolation in the fact that I am not alone.