The world exists once again in its typically bleary, incandescent glow, and Min slowly finds herself sitting in an old, wooden chair in a dingy, run-down apartment. The blinds are drawn (but when aren’t they?), and the only light in the room comes from a flickering table lamp (wasn’t that replaced?) on the desk casting eerie shadows throughout the space. Crumpled papers, decaying food-trash, and empty alcohol bottles line the floor, and there are a number of old newspapers scattered around. This is her apartment, somehow. Min knows it’s her apartment, even if it isn’t the way she remembers it (she can’t ever remember making changes to her apartment, can she?). She knows that something feels... off. Wrong, somehow. Min shivers a bit, feeling chills roll down her spine, although she can’t pinpoint why.
Cautiously, Min stands up and walks over to a legible-looking newspaper (didn’t she subscribe only in this last week?). There’s a disgusting crunch beneath her feet (when did that get there?), and she yelps and jumps back as sickly cockroaches flee from her path. A shattered 3.5" floppy disc catches the flickering light at her feet, and she knows what she’s done (or does she?). Aini is missing, Aini is gone, Aini is dead despite everyone’s best efforts to find him, and here she’s just destroyed the only relic she has of his music, the only thing she had left of her brother. She curses to herself, seemingly brushing it off (as best as she can) despite it deeply hurting her, as she steps over to pick up one of the newspapers.
“Twenty Dead in USS Elysium Crash, Technical Engineer Min Leoi Failed Fixing Routine Ship Issue,” reads the headline. Min chokes back her overwhelming guilt as she tries to make sense of this. Did that happen? No, it didn’t, it couldn’t have, but... Deep down, she knows it could have. The crew trusts her, right? Right. The crew trusts her. They were just goofing around when they implied otherwise. (Did they imply otherwise? Min thinks to herself. Was that real? Or was that me imagining that that happened?)
The shadows on the walls whisper, mocking the failure in an unfamiliar tongue. It’s a small, quiet, hushed circus of whispers at first, and her ears fall deaf to its meaning. She exhales the breath she didn’t know she was holding, and the voices’ muddy incomprehensibility becomes lucid, clearer than her future. Join us, they plead her in the language she still doesn’t understand. We missed you. It’s been so long.
Taking a deep breath, Min shakes her head and tries to calm herself down. Christ, this room is filled with mold. Was that there before? How long has it been since she cleaned? She swears she remembers cleaning yesterday, so what happened? Her eyes dart around the room that’s blind to her presence. From the corners of her eyes, she spots the shattered floppy sinking into the black-tar floor. Did the disc move? Was it even there before...?
No, they will not win this time, she thinks. She needs to ground herself in reality. Pushing the thought back, she squats down to pick up a nearby paper. “Leoi Family Disowns Min as a Failure,” serves the newspaper alongside a splitting headache, and there’s an accompanying picture of her family, oozing with disappointment. They wouldn’t, would they...?
She flinches and looks away — was there just a screech of tires outside? The movement of Aini’s dead-ink eyes staring back at her from the corner of the paper, the corner of her mind, makes her throat tighten. She looks back as soon as she sees the voids bleeding into the rest of the paper, and he is gone from the photo once more. The entire paper itself is blank now, just a crumbling scroll of plastic-coated garbage in her hands. This is too much, she thinks to herself, dropping the paper and looking for the chair again. She needs to sit down.
Looking left and right, the chair is not there. She spots another sudden movement and snaps to the source: the chair sinking into the ceiling, tangled in and losing the battle against record scratches and broken promises. The whispers pinned to the boundaries of the universe, meanwhile, see this as their chance, and they grow louder, more insistent. Their language uses syntax made of television static, acid rain, and thrice-used bile; the more they speak in giggled dances and rapid-fire chemical-burns, the harder Min finds it to focus on anything else. They communicate with her by reminding her of the taste and smell of krokodil, that rancid smell of gasoline, matchbox-igniter phosphorus, made-for-a-quick-buck medicine, and paint thinner.
Have I ever tried krokodil before? she has to stop to ask herself. That was just another dream — another nightmare, wasn’t it? Her heart-rate is naught but a screech of tinnitus at this point. She shivers in place as rain falls from the ceiling once more, lightning striking the window and catching fire on her blinds. She wipes her eyes of the rainfall again, and the fire is gone, though the heat still remains. Was it raining at all just now?
Min realizes that at some point she’s fallen down and quivers to her feet once more. She can’t just sit around and do nothing; she needs to find something to ground her anxiety. Panic, guilt, and sadness writhe through her body like phantom maggots eating away at her flesh as she desperately picks up another newspaper, then another, then another. “Min Leoi Fails Rehab for Addictions. Min Leoi Fails to Nurse Husband back from Death. Min Leoi Fails to find Significant Other. Min Leoi Fails to Make Anything of Her Life.”
Failure. Failure. Failure. You can’t do anything right. You’re worthless. You only make things worse. The whispers are a cacophonous chimera now, subtitled with high-pitched laughs as the shadows on the walls flicker and mosh to a fever pitch, moving in impossible ways across the room. Overwhelmed, she topples over again, clutching her right shoulder as the voices cackle with an emotion that doesn’t exist — or does it, and was she just a naïve dumbass this whole time? She feels the pressure of a thousand needles jabbing her, but as she looks, nothing is there. Empty comforts and false acceptance have eaten away at her flesh; blood shining like dish-soap and bone carved from ecstasy and ancestral shame disapprovingly stare back at her. She wants to cry, she wants to vomit, she just wants to stop feeling this way, so she curls into a fetal position and sobs, but no tears come out.
She opens her eyes and can’t close them any more. The papers aren’t helping. She fumbles in her pockets, reaching past a sea of emptiness and lifetimes of music in the key of failure to find her last remaining lucky charm, a photo locket. Her fingers quake as she tries and fails to open the clasp, and she eventually pries it open as her short, quick breaths begin to reap her consciousness. A picture of her son smiling brightly forsakes her, and his smile fades as his lips move to form words: “Min Leoi fails as a mother, losing her son.”
She screams. She screams and wails and quakes as her mind grows numb, but no sound comes out. Min abruptly stands to attention, the guilt and shame becoming overwhelming, as she violently fishes in her desk on autopilot, ripping a revolver out from a drawer. Mind and body no longer in sync, she feels the dull, blurred sensation of it being moved to her temple, and without hesitation, her finger squeezes the trigger...
...click.
Another failure.
Dilating the scope of the small world, the laughter and shadows become more and more hysterical with glee over her failure, and Min collapses once more, sinking into the black-tar floor out of apathetic desperation as the light-bulb burns out and she is taken prisoner by the dark, waking world once more.