I poured out a bowl of non name brand cinnamon square cereal, then the milk. Like a sane person.

  It was cheaper, and I preferred the taste over the ‘real’ thing anyway.

  What do I do in a day?

  Whatever really. I didn’t have any college classes today, they were useless anyway since I installed Linux when I was like… 12, and we’ve been inseparable since. I was only really getting a degree so I could get a steady and good paying job. But that was looking more and more unlikely in today's climate.

  Then what do I do with this free time?

  I tilt my head in thought and go back to my room, sitting down on my bed while I booted up my laptop, going onto a piracy site and scrolling through the options. Eventually landing on some old anime with nearly a hundred episodes called ‘Hajime no Ipo’, but it lost my interest after the third episode when I finished my breakfast.

  Putting the bowl on a window ledge, along with three of its siblings. Finished with my meal, I opened up an operating system on my laptop, starting some bug fixing for a website I was supposed to do yesterday, but hadn’t even started.

  Why do I do that?

  I think I've been going through a depressive spiral, leading me to do nothing, which, since I’m a freelancer, meant no money. Which then led to me not being able to afford adderall for my ADHD, and without that, when I got out of my funk, my executive function didn’t follow.

  I looked over the code they gave me, it was an easy fix. Part of the code was copy pasted incorrectly from somewhere else, a line cutting off halfway. And by a miracle, it still worked until it didn’t for some reason. So I just found the source and properly copied it.

  And sent the results back, an automated message asking me to fill out a form about what the issue was and how to prevent it in the future.

  I lied on it, of course, and-

  Why would I lie on it?

  Why not? The people that see these aren’t actual programmers. If they're hiring freelancers, especially for something like this means they got no one in house doing this stuff. The people who do see these are the big wigs that have no idea how this works. So they’ll just think it’s lazy and cut off a revenue stream for whoever they hired to do this. And this is understandable, I’ve made the same mistake a dozen times before.

  Isn’t it lazy?

  True, but 70% of coding is just copying and pasting things; no need to create a solution when one already exists. And plus, you need to actually know what to look for and know how to implement it. Wait, why was I thinking to myself like that?

  I looked around the room, and in the corner of my eye, I saw a weird material I had never seen before. It looked like a mixture between gleaming porcelain and worn wood, in the shape of-.

  Oh, it’s probably nothing.

  …Yeah.

  I returned my attention to my lap top, doom scrolling as time passed by me in a blur, only being broken out when I got a notification from my phone telling me the pay for the commission had come through. After seeing it, I stretched out, groaning, and went limp when I finished, staring at the orange peel ceiling above me.

  After maybe a couple of minutes of staring at the orange peel ceiling, I got up and turned on my PC. Playing Stellaris for a couple hours, grinning as I finally got the achievement ‘Big Red Button’ for destroying the entire galaxy. But the dopamine of finishing the year long task quickly faded, leaving me feeling… nothing again, and it felt so much worse than before for some reason now.

  Why did this start?

  Probably because of my brother.

  Yeah, that was… something, wasn’t it.

  I leaned back in my chair, looking up at the popcorn ceiling, and stared at it for a while. Then I stood up, looking for something to do.

  My brother, my brother, my brother…

  I took the bowl I had put on my night stand and placed it in the sink, not bothering to wash it, pacing around the house, looking for something to do. But I couldn’t find anything that could push through my absolute inability to care about anything.

  My brother, my brother, my brother…

  Why was I thinking about my brother? I haven’t seen him in a year…

  I still cared about him, though.

  I paced around in circles, my eyes landing on the bowl I had put in the sink, washed. I stopped in my tracks, putting my hands over my eyes as I let out a sigh.

  Saying, “What are you and what are you doing to-”

  Hmm, what was I doing?

  Oh, right, I was going to see my brother.

  I was outside an airport, feeling my body shake as I stormed out, being escorted by security.

  What! Oh, hell no!

  I open my eyes, and I’m in my room, watching Serial Experiments Lain on my laptop for the third time. The clock in the corner indicated it was 5 am, having been up all night again. My mind scolding me since I had a couple of lectures one after the other and only a few hours away. So I took the time to intensely regret my decision.

  Well, not really, Lain’s my favorite show. I know one of the professors has a couple of affairs going on with her students, so if worst comes to worst, I can just use blackmail to get her to smudge grades a bit. But that was a nuclear option… meh, might just do it for fun. Now that I thought about it, a weirdly large amount of teachers in my life had affairs.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Why is Serial Experiment Lain your- my favorite show again?

  Hmm… I don’t know, the entire thing doesn’t even make sense to me in the first place. Hell, if somebody asked me for the plot, I couldn’t even give a coherent answer about the first episode.

  Couldn’t I just ask somebody else about the show, discuss it online?

  Maybe, but I think I prefer this way.

  Wouldn’t I enjoy the show more if I knew?

  I don’t think so. There’s magic in the unknown and confusing; you can make up whatever you want about it. And that usually tends to be your favorite thing, and nobody else's.

  Wouldn’t it be better if I were to live a harsh reality than a happy lie?

  No.

  Why?

  I blinked, and I was in the office of the therapist I was recommended after my mother died.

  The lie may be false, but it’s happy. And a truth… a truth is…

  I blinked, and I was sitting on an uncomfortable airport bench, looking around for someone. Then I was back in the therapist's office.

  “So why do you think you’re here today?” the middle-aged, tall, and wiry white man asked.

  “You were recommended to me.”

  “By who?”

  “...My brother.”

  “Why do you think he recommended me?”

  “Because you're good or something,” I picked at a loose thread in my shirt, “He said he had you for a couple years when his dog died.”

  The therapist looked up in thought, “I think I remember him, they looked like you, but I can’t put a name to them. Oh, uh, dirty blond hair, green eyes, and a couple of inches taller than you. And his name started with a B.”

  “Boe,” I supplied.

  “Yes, that’s it. Boe Davidson. He was quite a delight.”

  I smiled a bit, “Yeah, always is.”

  I was in the airport when I saw a muscular man, a whole head taller than me, looking around, and I walked up to him.

  “You know,” I said, “I’m surprised you didn’t put it together earlier; most people think we’re identical twins when they see us together.”

  “I’ve never had the best eyesight, -12 in both eyes, even good glasses don’t always cut it.”

  I suck in air between my teeth, “Sorry man.”

  “Ah, don’t worry, Jacob,” My brother waves off.

  “She dumped you, just like that?”

  “Sorry, I don’t want to talk about that,” I said to my therapist, their shirt a different color than before.

  Must be a different day.

  “That’s alright, is there anything you do want to talk about?”

  “My great uncle.”

  “What about him?” Boe asks

  “Are you still wasting time on him?”

  “What else could I do…” I said to my therapist, clenching my jaw and hands as they asked another God damn question.

  “I understand you have no obligation to do so, but that is your brother's choice.”

  “And it’s such a fucking stupid choice!”

  “And why do you think that?” Both my Therapist and Brother ask.

  “What’s not stupid about wasting your life away on taking care of some old racist shit that never gave a flying fuck about anyone else but himself.”

  “Because no one else does! We can’t all be lazy geniuses living off the work we occasionally feel is up to our standards!” my brother snarled.

  “Oh, and wasting away what little life you have to take care of a man that gave you a black eye for ‘talking back’ when you were 9. And gave me a matching one because I asked to be called Jacob and not Jake! Yeah, that’s so so much better.”

  “Somebody has to.”

  “No, we don't, because nobody even wants him around!”

  “Mom did!”

  “Mom’s dead, just throw this cross away for Christ's sake!”

  “Well, I don’t think anyone deserves to die alone in a pile of their own shit because they can’t stand up or even move their own wheelchair!”

  “Then have fun living doing nothing for the rest of your life.”

  “Oh, I have nothing? I know for a fact I am the only person you talk to regularly. It was like that back home, and it’ll be like that for the rest of your life. You’re just a sad,

  pathetic person, so tell me this. What do you think you’ll have when you don’t have me!”

  “I think it’d be like being torn in half,” I answered my therapist, “It wasn’t like that when my mother died, but I think it’d be like that with Boe.”

  “And why do you think that?”

  “Honestly… I don’t know where I end and he starts. It's… It’s like we're like two programs running on the same language, sure, we’re different in what we do, but it all comes from the same source.”

  “And what is that source, the, uhh, programming language as you put it?” I heard my therapist say with another voice overtop his, it was faint, but definitely there.

  I sat there thinking for a moment.

  “Our Parents, I guess,” I said.

  I don’t know.

  I thought.

  Come on, there has to be something in me. A center, a core.

  Oh… I know what that is.

  What is it?

  I’m sitting on a couch with my brother next to me, both of us furiously smashing the buttons on our Xbox controllers, playing one of the super smash bros I didn’t remember the name of. The screen was a blur as my brother demolished me, my character falling off the ledge into the void, the next screen indicating what place we got.

  It was early in the morning on a school night, before even our parents woke up. We did this a lot so we could get some time together. But it started more fights than it did any sort of healthy bonding, but I never really remembered that, except for the funny ones.

  No, this isn’t a core, this is just a memory.

  This isn’t the end.

  Then the scene switched to another one where I had to help take my Great Uncle's catheter out. A memory I quickly decide to walk past, a million more trying to take its place, but one surges forward, passing the rest.

  A simple, messy bedroom, my bedroom. The bowl I ate my cereal out of on top of the clothing drawer that I didn’t actually use. And the ceiling was a smooth and flat porcelain. Then I saw my desk covered in cups and cans, three monitors somehow fitting on the things.

  I walked over to it and booted up my pc, the screen blaring a blinding white light, but I didn’t blink. Then one of the screens bulged outwards, a sphere emerging from it and floating in front of me. I glanced around the room, finding the bowl on the window ledge.

  So, that’s it… Finally.

  “You know,” I said, “This is really sloppy work, Fifth of the Mist. I thought you’d be better.”

  What?!

  I felt the mind fog start enveloping me, but before it consumed me, I tapped into my skill Royal Will through the core, using the domain to attack Fifth of the Mist.