I've had issues with past neighbors in my apartments, so I thought getting a house would mean better neighbor relationships. I was sorely mistaken... For context, I have Turner Syndrome, which is a condition that makes me appear like a teenage girl. This will come into play later.
I have a neighbor I'll call "C". I remember when I was looking at the house to buy it, I waved at her, and she snubbed me. At the time, I thought she just hadn't seen me. I probably should've taken the "hint" that she was going to bring me many headaches.
The first thing we wanted to do was replace the shared fence with three other houses. One neighbor was okay with it, the others not so much. C really flipped out at the idea of replacing the fence. Mind you, this fence is a wire mesh fence that's very rusted. We offered to pay for the entire thing. C refused. Then C ended up sending me and my husband a letter through her attorney with an attachment that said the fence had been bought by her, and we have no right to take it down. Our options were to build a fence that would encroach on our property, or do nothing. After a time, my husband and I dropped the plan to replace it.
Over the years, C has done really crappy, inconsiderate stuff such as her car or her friends' blocking our driveway or outright parking right on it, playing loud music in the backyard, throwing parties that go late into the night, revving her motorcycle for more than an hour including in the middle of the night once or twice, and so on. My other neighbors have exhibited similar behaviors as well, but C does all of the above and then some.
One thing C does that drives me nuts is that she'll approach me or my husband when we come outside to do work in the yard. She mostly does this just to talk down to me, nag at me over things she believes I am doing wrong, and giving her opinion on how "wrong" our marriage is because my husband looks normal and I do not. I've tried everything to get her to stop. I've politely declined to speak to her, doesn't deter her. I've worn ear plugs or headphones, she just taps me on my back until I give her attention or stands there talking and talking and talking. I've ignored her, same actions like when I wear the plugs/phones. I've impolitely told her to leave me alone, she makes this angry face at me then continues yakking. Nothing works to stop her, and I can't enjoy my house or my yard.
I've spoken to the police, and to a lawyer, and she's "done nothing wrong" so I can't put a restraining order on her despite having charted everything she's done down. Today I took the day off work to get some gardening done, and as soon as I step out the door, she comes barreling towards me. I went back inside, and she begins to knocking on my door. Let me tell you, she basically lives outside too, and is always, always in her yard doing something so she can easily see when I come and go.
I can't move out because I don't have enough money for it, and our house isn't worth as much as others in my area, or even the state as a whole. I feel stuck, and frustrated, and angry. C isn't the only neighbor I dislike, though she might be the worst, and definitely the one I am most uncomfortable dealing with. The onlysaving grace is that in the winter, she retreats into her house and barely comes out. But it can't be winter forever, and this year, I was dreading spring because of her...

I (25F) have been single for quite some time now and been on the dating scene recently.
I can’t talk about my attractiveness, but I ALWAYS get compliments when I’m out with my friends at bars, clubs, shopping centres, literally everywhere! I have a good fashion sense that most of my friends take my advice on what they need to wear. I’m not perfectly fit, but I have a nice body shape and I go to the gym regularly. I’m doing great in my career for my age as well.
However, I talk to guys for some weeks online; we call, face time, and text throughout those weeks until we meet, then they either ghost me, or I can sense how the conversation dies after we meet.
After we meet they tell me how great I am, and how I’m matching the vibes when we’re texting. But literally soon after that, they ghost or just the conversation fades.
I can’t help but take this personally 🙃 I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. I don’t know what I should be doing differently. Am I incapable of finding a good person? Or am I just not giving off good energy? I don’t know! I can’t stop my brain from overthinking and I can’t stop crying….

Hello! Hope your day is going well! I'm trying to kick off the week right! As you can see i don't create alot of posts, i mostly reply to stuff or DM people to chat. So on to why you're really here.
I'm 41,male watches 99% of people reading this so here and leave ,i live on the eastern USA, tend to be more a night person, LGTBQ+ friendly (even if not a member myself). I'm child free but love my furkids. I'm a extrovert with not terribly many people to talk to regularly.
My Interests - Gaming,D&D, reading, anime, the paranormal, beer,food, history, talking to new folks and generally connecting.
What I'm looking for- 18+ (obv), atleast a few common interests, a person able to hold a convo cause I'm not trying to be the only one holding things up lol, being willing to use Discord if we get along cause reddit app is a potato. People not annoyed by "emoting" in * * early 2000s style, cause honestly so much context and nuance is lost in cold hard text and i do it alot. Lastly if you're not feeling the convo or don't think I'm what you're looking for then just tell me. Ghosting a person makes you rude.
What gets you not answered by default- very short introductory DMs ("Hey' "hi" etc), a post history full of mostly sex posts(I'm sex positive and don't kink shame but from past experience, those kinda replies tend to be people hunting to sext or see my junk)
Bonus points- Willing to exchange pix to put face to personality if we get along!
Hope to hear from you!

i wrote this down in notes after i woke up and fell asleep i have therapy in like four hours but i’ve been up all night and i want to share this with someone the text sounds really dumb but i really don’t like horror games and i play them anyway his name was something (positive word i forgot) - awful and he had a face and RRALLY disney manerisms for some reason being druggged to death was labeled “egg” and being raped to death was bread the whole mechanic of the agme was he was kinda blind and if you were doing certain action he would get upset ans awitch into (negative adjective) - happy and it was basically a hlowing jar with yellow liquid in it normally he was blue and really early cgi disney i wasn dcared by the guy humself the ai was REALLY FUCKING GOOD and i kep whisperign to myself that it was just a game and then i realized i was dreaming so i could just wake myself up holl fuckjgn shit wr got off a big elevator i was set to me up wiht a ki d named saniel who i REALLY LIKED he was older and talljer than me hut he dird to egg after i fell asleep on this rollercoaster elevator thing i apparently remember from childhood somehow hiw head exploded for some reason though andni think me and daniel were really good friends it was probably why i was playing htis game FUCKIGN SACARY SUDUDHDE I HATE HORROGAMES IW A SSO FUCKFJBG CSAVRED the happy dude was s o fuuucking scary because he flailed around i remember the exact intro scene to him it was you had to like leave to ho to the bathroom alone (or something) so bad even though yoh weren’t supposed to and he introduces himself to all the kids in a room when you see him first he’s in a room with a big like punching bad saloon and he cants see you well (different enemy my brained consfused for him) and he swings around it with the disney manerisms while you hid in first person obsscuring yourself with the disneybshit and he went “Hey! How are ya! Didn’t seem to meet ya in the meeting room earlier, i’m Henry!” Henry - Awful and then he was make up skmething to get pissed at this was a flashback for some reason this entire roller coaster thing was somerhing someone regularly had to do as a kid ride a roller cosster down a hill and be gay about it and he turned into henry happy for somereason ue made up and text flsshed above me “If you’re chewing somethin’ (henry had a pistol and a bunch of platoon popups around the room) happy’s gonna mug ya” so i sprang down under like a pillow and hid i dont know if it worked and it was really fucking dumb but i woke up at that point he har the voice of my therapist he reminded me of him for some reason it was also like the uncle from meet the robinsons or robot friend guy from robots it fucking sucked man that was so fucking scary i’m kind of shaking

Hello! Hope your day is going well! I'm trying to kick off the week right! As you can see i don't create alot of posts, i mostly reply to stuff or DM people to chat. So on to why you're really here.
I'm 41,male watches 99% of people reading this so here and leave ,i live on the eastern USA, tend to be more a night person, LGTBQ+ friendly (even if not a member myself). I'm child free but love my furkids. I'm a extrovert with not terribly many people to talk to regularly.
My Interests - Gaming,D&D, reading, anime, the paranormal, beer,food, history, talking to new folks and generally connecting.
What I'm looking for- 18+ (obv), atleast a few common interests, a person able to hold a convo cause I'm not trying to be the only one holding things up lol, being willing to use Discord if we get along cause reddit app is a potato. People not annoyed by "emoting" in * * early 2000s style, cause honestly so much context and nuance is lost in cold hard text and i do it alot. Lastly if you're not feeling the convo or don't think I'm what you're looking for then just tell me. Ghosting a person makes you rude.
What gets you not answered by default- very short introductory DMs ("Hey' "hi" etc), a post history full of mostly sex posts(I'm sex positive and don't kink shame but from past experience, those kinda replies tend to be people hunting to sext or just see my junk)
Bonus points- Willing to exchange pix to put face to personality if we get along!
Hope to hear from you!

Three nights ago my wife had a big fight with our son, Charlie. Since then, Charlie hasn’t left his room. The argument was about Charlie’s grades and future, which my wife is sure he’s throwing away. Basically, she’s worried Charlie spends too much time playing Minecraft (“that stupid virtual block game,” as she calls it) and not enough time studying, interacting with real people or doing real things to prepare him for the real world.
Although I agree Charlie is a gamer, and his gaming choices are mostly limited to one game, many boys his age play video games, and at least his game of choice isn’t especially violent. It’s even quite creative. But when I tell this to my wife, she gets upset and insists that if Charlie likes building things, he should get his grades up and go to university to become an architect or an engineer. I say that maybe he’s learning to code. “He’s not coding. He’s playing,” my wife says. “He’s not learning anything.”
I’ve tried talking to Charlie through his locked door, but he doesn’t answer.
When I get up at night, I see light creeping from the space between the door and door frame, and hear the clicking and clacking of his keyboard.
When I knock, the clicking stops.

UPDATE

It’s now been five days, and as far as my wife and I can tell, Charlie hasn’t left his room even once. We suppose he must have bottled water in there and maybe some snacks, but we agree that what he’s doing isn’t healthy. At first, we suspected he may have been waiting for us to go to sleep before coming out, so I set up one of my game cameras in the hallway outside his door, but it hasn’t captured anything except some photos of us. He must be going to the bathroom inside there too. He’s not showering. He keeps his window—which looks out onto the backyard—closed, with the blinds down. I’ll set up another game camera outside, just in case he tries going out the window.

UPDATE

It’s now been a full week and my wife is really starting to freak out. She wants me to break down Charlie’s door. The game cameras still show nothing. The keyboard sounds continue, so at least we know he’s still alive. God, it feels weird to write that. I guess I’m not quite as worried as my wife, or I would be forcing the door. As it stands, I feel we need to respect Charlie’s independence and give him time. Teens are rebellious, and they definitely don’t like being told what to do. “His behaviour isn’t normal, even for a teenager,” my wife says. “Don’t you fucking see that?”
I guess I don’t—not yet.

UPDATE

The smell from Charlie’s room is starting to take over the hallway. It’s like a mix of old coffee, urine and eggs.

UPDATE

I gave in to my wife and forced the door—or at least tried to, because it seems Charlie has reinforced it somehow. It didn’t budge. Still nothing on the game cameras. Still flickering lights and clicking at night. There is the possibility of going in through the wall itself, which is just standard drywall, but I’m not desperate enough to try that. Like I’ve told my wife repeatedly, what am I going to do, smash the wall with a sledgehammer or an axe? It’s too Shining. Besides, what if Charlie’s by the wall? I don’t want to to smash him.

UPDATE

The outdoor game camera caught Charlie sneaking out the window! It was in the early morning when my wife and I were fast asleep. He was gone about half an hour, and the camera took another photo of him sneaking back in, holding what looked like a package of some kind. I know things aren’t back to normal, but nevertheless I feel somewhat relieved. And vindicated: I told my wife it would have been crazy to break through the wall.

UPDATE

It’s the night of the thirteenth day, and there are new sounds coming from Charlie’s room: whirring and rattling. They definitely sound mechanical.

UPDATE

Electronic music. Loud and all the fucking time. As if sleeping wasn’t hard enough for us, just with the nerves. My wife and I spent an hour sitting outside Charlie’s room and pounding on the door, hoping he’d answer. I think my wife is starting to break mentally. Her anger has transformed into despair. She has taken to apologizing to him and begging him to let us in.

UPDATE

Day 15. The outdoor game camera caught Charlie leaving again, but this time he returned with a package and a girl. I suppose if things were normal, I would be proud. But things are not normal and I have no idea what they’re up to. I don’t feel comfortable with a stranger’s kid locked up in a room inside my house. As for my wife, she’s been staying mostly in bed. She barely works anymore.

UPDATE

I can’t believe I didn’t think of this sooner. Early this morning, Charlie sent us an email. It was cryptic but at least it’s proof he’s still willing to communicate. The message said: “im almost done now so it wont be long.”

UPDATE

My wife knocked herself out with sleeping pills and I’m sitting in the living room, trying to watch late night television. It’s not working. The lack of sleep and constant barrage of thumping electronic music is driving me a little bonkers. Sometimes the music sounds like someone screaming. I don’t know if the whirring and grinding and buzzing are instruments or sound effects or real. Charlie isn’t answering my emails. I must have written a hundred to him by now. He’s been in his room with that girl for days.

UPDATE

I’ve decided. I’m going to cut power to the house and go in through the wall with a sledgehammer. If I make a fool of myself, so be it.

UPDATE

Charlie’s in the hospital.
My wife is staying with her parents for the time being.
I’m living in a motel because I can’t stand the thought of being in that house alone anymore.
Not after what I saw. Not after smashing through the drywall to see my only son with his fucking arm cut off. So much blood on the sheets. It reeked of piss and burnt flesh. And that girl, Clarice—some internet girlfriend of his—so ungodly pale, sitting at a desk, cutting into my son’s severed arm with an X-Acto knife.
The police haven’t identified any actual crime, but—
Charlie’s lucky to be alive despite what he so calmly tells me whenever he regains consciousness.
“I did it…”
“Don’t you see?”
“I created…”
“In real life, just like mom…”

UPDATE

Charlie’s words haunt me. I’ve no one to talk to but the psychologist, and she acts like a robot. I feel like I want to grieve but I don’t know for whom. Maybe for my entire life.
I feel this persistent, unbearable dread.
I can’t explain why.
A fear that something fundamental has been changed.
My wife still hasn’t been to see him. She says she can’t bear to see him like this.
“It’s just an arm,” I say. “He’s OK.”
“Do you understand that he cut off his own arm?” she says at me, like it’s an accusation. Like it’s my fault.
There’s just so much guilt.

UPDATE

Charlie’s still in the hospital, but he’s doing better. The doctors are more concerned about his mental state than his physical one. They think he’s shut away the memory of cutting off his own arm. Whenever they try to tell him he’s missing it, he shrugs it off. “Oh, that. That’s fine. I’ll get another.”
Every time I see Charlie, I want to ask him about the things he told me earlier.
But the doctors dissuade me. They say he’s still too fragile. They say it’s better not to force him to remember the trauma. They say there’s a chance he may never truly remember it, and maybe that’s for the best.
The one thing he constantly asks is to see Clarice.
The doctors veto that too.
I don’t like leaving the hospital because there’s something terrible about the world now. Something I don’t want to face.

UPDATE

Clarice called me. Out of the blue.
She wants to meet.
There’s something about that girl that makes me uneasy, to put it mildly. Maybe it’s her pale skin, almost like bleached paper. Or the way her body felt that night I finally went through the wall. Charlie felt solid. She felt like a bunch of old bandaids on Jell-O. The way she was sitting there, so carefully, methodically working the flesh of his arm...
“Charlie thinks it's time,” she said.
“Time for what?”
“For you to finally see. He wants you to be proud of him.”
How fucked is this: I’m meeting her at some old automotive plant. I don’t know if she even has parents. Maybe she’s a runaway. God only knows.
But God help me, I have to do this.

UPDATE

I hesitated to the last possible minute about whether to tell my wife about meeting Clarice—before finally deciding not to. I don’t know why. I want to say I don’t want to cause her any more stress. Her psyche is pretty destroyed as it is. But I also feel, somewhere deep down, that she simply wouldn’t understand.
So that means no one knows I’m out here right now.
I know that’s not smart, but I don’t care. I shouldn’t be afraid of a girl.
Yet here I am, sitting in my car, writing on my phone. The weather is threatening a storm somewhere far off. The factory looks ominous.
And I’m fucking terrified.

UPDATE

I don’t know how to begin to describe what happened: what I saw and did and what I had done to me. I’m back at the motel, and I keep making mistakes typing this on my laptop because my hands are refusing to obey, but I’m resisting the urge to take a drink because I want to be as clear as possible while writing this.
It’s fucking monumental.
Insane.
I met Clarice after wandering about the factory for a quarter of an hour that felt like so much longer. The rain had started, and the way the drops echoed in that place was unreal. Like drums inside my own head.
She called my name suddenly—
I saw her standing by an old, overgrown piece of machinery, beside three bulbous garbage bags. At least one was leaking.
She said she was happy I had come. She said Charlie was a genius.
A god.
She was wearing an old trench coat, and without warning she let it drop to the cracked cement floor.
She was naked.
I wanted to back away. I started telling her I was married and there was no fucking way I would—
“It’s not about that,” she said.
She wanted me to look: to come closer and look at her.
So I did.
I remembered how her body had felt in Charlie’s room, and now I saw why. Her pale skin was spiderwebbed with blue veins, a nearly imperceptible network in a repeating pattern. “Go ahead, touch me,” she said.
I pressed a finger against her flesh. It still felt off, but not as disgustingly creamy as it had then. She had solidified.
“Now press harder.”
I did.
She groaned—and my fingertip sank into her: or more accurately, slipped into one of the blue veins.
“Go on. Keep going until you hear a click.”
I pushed deeper inside. Until there it was: a click, followed by a loosening.
“Remove it.”
I wavered, my gaze meeting hers. “Don’t be afraid.”
Gently, I removed my fingers from within her while maintaining my grip on whatever it was I was holding:
A cube of flesh.
And in her body I saw a corresponding void.
“My God…”
As I inspected the cube, rotating it between my fingers, she removed a second from her body—another void appeared—then took the cube I had been holding, held it against the one she had removed, and I watched them fuse together.
“Blocks,” I whispered.
Still missing two small volumes of herself, she turned toward the garbage bags. “These are my parents,” she said, pointing at the three bags in turn, “and this is Barker, a homeless man I met at the shelter.”
“They are—”
I couldn’t finish the sentence. I didn’t know how to finish it.
She crouched and unfastened the bags.
Inside each: a stew of raw flesh cubes and multicoloured ooze, steaming—bubbling, frothing, popping; pulsing with what I imagined must be life.
“Watch.”
She took a few cubes from each bag, wiped them, then held them together in the palms of her hands along with the two fused cubes of herself. Like melted metal, they all melded together into one new thing: a fleshy disc with wisps of hair, half an eye and a bone jutting from one end. The half-eye twitched and the entirety secreted a kind of slime across Clarice’s bare hands. It was both horrible and awesome, as if humanity had been deconstructed—
“We can all become blocks,” Clarice said. “To make and remake as we see fit.”
But there was something about that disc.
About the twitching.
The slime.
Maybe this was possible. But it was not fucking right.
I backed away: from Clarice, from her oozing garbage bags and inhuman smile. “It’s merely science,” she said matter-of-factly. “A new science, of being and bodies and existence, and Charlie is the discoverer. He is the new Darwin!”
I started to run.
Her words chased after me: “Are you proud of him? Are you proud of your son?”
The layout of the factory confused me.
Where had I left the car?
“You thought he wouldn’t amount to anything in the real world, so he redefined it: he changed what it means to be alive. Soon he will be worshipped—”
Something hard collided with the side of my head, reducing me with dwindling consciousness to the floor—smack!—and I felt hands grabbing me and dragging me, three shapes of reeking flesh, and Clarice’s laugh, echoing throughout the unreality of the factory as the whirring and buzzing faded in and out and in...
I awoke alone.
Nude. Cold rain on my face.
I was still in the factory, but Clarice was gone. I felt a kind of transcendent solitude. Groggily, I got up—only to promptly collapse on rubbery legs. I crawled toward some derelict machinery and used my arms to stand. My arms were rubbery too, but eventually I managed it. There were tools on the machinery: a saw, pincers, knives. Lightning lit up the distant sky, and in its flash I saw delicate blue veins all across my forearms. Memory returned to me. Memory and fear: the dread sense of realization.
Now I'm back at the motel, typing on my laptop. Disbelieving my own words.
Yet there it is: on a melamine plate beside me: my own flesh cube.
And every time I think I’ve gone crazy, I run my fingertip over the corporeal void from where I removed it.
My body is still soft and flabby—unsettled—but I imagine I will solidify.
As a human, I am filled with a hideous trepidation for our future as a species. I don’t know what this means for us as people.
But, as a father—
I cannot help but feel a kind of pride.

Three nights ago my wife had a big fight with our son, Charlie. Since then, Charlie hasn’t left his room. The argument was about Charlie’s grades and future, which my wife is sure he’s throwing away. Basically, she’s worried Charlie spends too much time playing Minecraft (“that stupid virtual block game,” as she calls it) and not enough time studying, interacting with real people or doing real things to prepare him for the real world.
Although I agree Charlie is a gamer, and his gaming choices are mostly limited to one game, many boys his age play video games, and at least his game of choice isn’t especially violent. It’s even quite creative. But when I tell this to my wife, she gets upset and insists that if Charlie likes building things, he should get his grades up and go to university to become an architect or an engineer. I say that maybe he’s learning to code. “He’s not coding. He’s playing,” my wife says. “He’s not learning anything.”
I’ve tried talking to Charlie through his locked door, but he doesn’t answer.
When I get up at night, I see light creeping from the space between the door and door frame, and hear the clicking and clacking of his keyboard.
When I knock, the clicking stops.

UPDATE

It’s now been five days, and as far as my wife and I can tell, Charlie hasn’t left his room even once. We suppose he must have bottled water in there and maybe some snacks, but we agree that what he’s doing isn’t healthy. At first, we suspected he may have been waiting for us to go to sleep before coming out, so I set up one of my game cameras in the hallway outside his door, but it hasn’t captured anything except some photos of us. He must be going to the bathroom inside there too. He’s not showering. He keeps his window—which looks out onto the backyard—closed, with the blinds down. I’ll set up another game camera outside, just in case he tries going out the window.

UPDATE

It’s now been a full week and my wife is really starting to freak out. She wants me to break down Charlie’s door. The game cameras still show nothing. The keyboard sounds continue, so at least we know he’s still alive. God, it feels weird to write that. I guess I’m not quite as worried as my wife, or I would be forcing the door. As it stands, I feel we need to respect Charlie’s independence and give him time. Teens are rebellious, and they definitely don’t like being told what to do. “His behaviour isn’t normal, even for a teenager,” my wife says. “Don’t you fucking see that?”
I guess I don’t—not yet.

UPDATE

The smell from Charlie’s room is starting to take over the hallway. It’s like a mix of old coffee, urine and eggs.

UPDATE

I gave in to my wife and forced the door—or at least tried to, because it seems Charlie has reinforced it somehow. It didn’t budge. Still nothing on the game cameras. Still flickering lights and clicking at night. There is the possibility of going in through the wall itself, which is just standard drywall, but I’m not desperate enough to try that. Like I’ve told my wife repeatedly, what am I going to do, smash the wall with a sledgehammer or an axe? It’s too Shining. Besides, what if Charlie’s by the wall? I don’t want to to smash him.

UPDATE

The outdoor game camera caught Charlie sneaking out the window! It was in the early morning when my wife and I were fast asleep. He was gone about half an hour, and the camera took another photo of him sneaking back in, holding what looked like a package of some kind. I know things aren’t back to normal, but nevertheless I feel somewhat relieved. And vindicated: I told my wife it would have been crazy to break through the wall.

UPDATE

It’s the night of the thirteenth day, and there are new sounds coming from Charlie’s room: whirring and rattling. They definitely sound mechanical.

UPDATE

Electronic music. Loud and all the fucking time. As if sleeping wasn’t hard enough for us, just with the nerves. My wife and I spent an hour sitting outside Charlie’s room and pounding on the door, hoping he’d answer. I think my wife is starting to break mentally. Her anger has transformed into despair. She has taken to apologizing to him and begging him to let us in.

UPDATE

Day 15. The outdoor game camera caught Charlie leaving again, but this time he returned with a package and a girl. I suppose if things were normal, I would be proud. But things are not normal and I have no idea what they’re up to. I don’t feel comfortable with a stranger’s kid locked up in a room inside my house. As for my wife, she’s been staying mostly in bed. She barely works anymore.

UPDATE

I can’t believe I didn’t think of this sooner. Early this morning, Charlie sent us an email. It was cryptic but at least it’s proof he’s still willing to communicate. The message said: “im almost done now so it wont be long.”

UPDATE

My wife knocked herself out with sleeping pills and I’m sitting in the living room, trying to watch late night television. It’s not working. The lack of sleep and constant barrage of thumping electronic music is driving me a little bonkers. Sometimes the music sounds like someone screaming. I don’t know if the whirring and grinding and buzzing are instruments or sound effects or real. Charlie isn’t answering my emails. I must have written a hundred to him by now. He’s been in his room with that girl for days.

UPDATE

I’ve decided. I’m going to cut power to the house and go in through the wall with a sledgehammer. If I make a fool of myself, so be it.

UPDATE

Charlie’s in the hospital.
My wife is staying with her parents for the time being.
I’m living in a motel because I can’t stand the thought of being in that house alone anymore.
Not after what I saw. Not after smashing through the drywall to see my only son with his fucking arm cut off. So much blood on the sheets. It reeked of piss and burnt flesh. And that girl, Clarice—some internet girlfriend of his—so ungodly pale, sitting at a desk, cutting into my son’s severed arm with an X-Acto knife.
The police haven’t identified any actual crime, but—
Charlie’s lucky to be alive despite what he so calmly tells me whenever he regains consciousness.
“I did it…”
“Don’t you see?”
“I created…”
“In real life, just like mom…”

UPDATE

Charlie’s words haunt me. I’ve no one to talk to but the psychologist, and she acts like a robot. I feel like I want to grieve but I don’t know for whom. Maybe for my entire life.
I feel this persistent, unbearable dread.
I can’t explain why.
A fear that something fundamental has been changed.
My wife still hasn’t been to see him. She says she can’t bear to see him like this.
“It’s just an arm,” I say. “He’s OK.”
“Do you understand that he cut off his own arm?” she says at me, like it’s an accusation. Like it’s my fault.
There’s just so much guilt.

UPDATE

Charlie’s still in the hospital, but he’s doing better. The doctors are more concerned about his mental state than his physical one. They think he’s shut away the memory of cutting off his own arm. Whenever they try to tell him he’s missing it, he shrugs it off. “Oh, that. That’s fine. I’ll get another.”
Every time I see Charlie, I want to ask him about the things he told me earlier.
But the doctors dissuade me. They say he’s still too fragile. They say it’s better not to force him to remember the trauma. They say there’s a chance he may never truly remember it, and maybe that’s for the best.
The one thing he constantly asks is to see Clarice.
The doctors veto that too.
I don’t like leaving the hospital because there’s something terrible about the world now. Something I don’t want to face.

UPDATE

Clarice called me. Out of the blue.
She wants to meet.
There’s something about that girl that makes me uneasy, to put it mildly. Maybe it’s her pale skin, almost like bleached paper. Or the way her body felt that night I finally went through the wall. Charlie felt solid. She felt like a bunch of old bandaids on Jell-O. The way she was sitting there, so carefully, methodically working the flesh of his arm...
“Charlie thinks it's time,” she said.
“Time for what?”
“For you to finally see. He wants you to be proud of him.”
How fucked is this: I’m meeting her at some old automotive plant. I don’t know if she even has parents. Maybe she’s a runaway. God only knows.
But God help me, I have to do this.

UPDATE

I hesitated to the last possible minute about whether to tell my wife about meeting Clarice—before finally deciding not to. I don’t know why. I want to say I don’t want to cause her any more stress. Her psyche is pretty destroyed as it is. But I also feel, somewhere deep down, that she simply wouldn’t understand.
So that means no one knows I’m out here right now.
I know that’s not smart, but I don’t care. I shouldn’t be afraid of a girl.
Yet here I am, sitting in my car, writing on my phone. The weather is threatening a storm somewhere far off. The factory looks ominous.
And I’m fucking terrified.

UPDATE

I don’t know how to begin to describe what happened: what I saw and did and what I had done to me. I’m back at the motel, and I keep making mistakes typing this on my laptop because my hands are refusing to obey, but I’m resisting the urge to take a drink because I want to be as clear as possible while writing this.
It’s fucking monumental.
Insane.
I met Clarice after wandering about the factory for a quarter of an hour that felt like so much longer. The rain had started, and the way the drops echoed in that place was unreal. Like drums inside my own head.
She called my name suddenly—
I saw her standing by an old, overgrown piece of machinery, beside three bulbous garbage bags. At least one was leaking.
She said she was happy I had come. She said Charlie was a genius.
A god.
She was wearing an old trench coat, and without warning she let it drop to the cracked cement floor.
She was naked.
I wanted to back away. I started telling her I was married and there was no fucking way I would—
“It’s not about that,” she said.
She wanted me to look: to come closer and look at her.
So I did.
I remembered how her body had felt in Charlie’s room, and now I saw why. Her pale skin was spiderwebbed with blue veins, a nearly imperceptible network in a repeating pattern. “Go ahead, touch me,” she said.
I pressed a finger against her flesh. It still felt off, but not as disgustingly creamy as it had then. She had solidified.
“Now press harder.”
I did.
She groaned—and my fingertip sank into her: or more accurately, slipped into one of the blue veins.
“Go on. Keep going until you hear a click.”
I pushed deeper inside. Until there it was: a click, followed by a loosening.
“Remove it.”
I wavered, my gaze meeting hers. “Don’t be afraid.”
Gently, I removed my fingers from within her while maintaining my grip on whatever it was I was holding:
A cube of flesh.
And in her body I saw a corresponding void.
“My God…”
As I inspected the cube, rotating it between my fingers, she removed a second from her body—another void appeared—then took the cube I had been holding, held it against the one she had removed, and I watched them fuse together.
“Blocks,” I whispered.
Still missing two small volumes of herself, she turned toward the garbage bags. “These are my parents,” she said, pointing at the three bags in turn, “and this is Barker, a homeless man I met at the shelter.”
“They are—”
I couldn’t finish the sentence. I didn’t know how to finish it.
She crouched and unfastened the bags.
Inside each: a stew of raw flesh cubes and multicoloured ooze, steaming—bubbling, frothing, popping; pulsing with what I imagined must be life.
“Watch.”
She took a few cubes from each bag, wiped them, then held them together in the palms of her hands along with the two fused cubes of herself. Like melted metal, they all melded together into one new thing: a fleshy disc with wisps of hair, half an eye and a bone jutting from one end. The half-eye twitched and the entirety secreted a kind of slime across Clarice’s bare hands. It was both horrible and awesome, as if humanity had been deconstructed—
“We can all become blocks,” Clarice said. “To make and remake as we see fit.”
But there was something about that disc.
About the twitching.
The slime.
Maybe this was possible. But it was not fucking right.
I backed away: from Clarice, from her oozing garbage bags and inhuman smile. “It’s merely science,” she said matter-of-factly. “A new science, of being and bodies and existence, and Charlie is the discoverer. He is the new Darwin!”
I started to run.
Her words chased after me: “Are you proud of him? Are you proud of your son?”
The layout of the factory confused me.
Where had I left the car?
“You thought he wouldn’t amount to anything in the real world, so he redefined it: he changed what it means to be alive. Soon he will be worshipped—”
Something hard collided with the side of my head, reducing me with dwindling consciousness to the floor—smack!—and I felt hands grabbing me and dragging me, three shapes of reeking flesh, and Clarice’s laugh, echoing throughout the unreality of the factory as the whirring and buzzing faded in and out and in...
I awoke alone.
Nude. Cold rain on my face.
I was still in the factory, but Clarice was gone. I felt a kind of transcendent solitude. Groggily, I got up—only to promptly collapse on rubbery legs. I crawled toward some derelict machinery and used my arms to stand. My arms were rubbery too, but eventually I managed it. There were tools on the machinery: a saw, pincers, knives. Lightning lit up the distant sky, and in its flash I saw delicate blue veins all across my forearms. Memory returned to me. Memory and fear: the dread sense of realization.
Now I'm back at the motel, typing on my laptop. Disbelieving my own words.
Yet there it is: on a melamine plate beside me: my own flesh cube.
And every time I think I’ve gone crazy, I run my fingertip over the corporeal void from where I removed it.
My body is still soft and flabby—unsettled—but I imagine I will solidify.
As a human, I am filled with a hideous trepidation for our future as a species. I don’t know what this means for us as people.
But, as a father—
I cannot help but feel a kind of pride.

Three nights ago my wife had a big fight with our son, Charlie. Since then, Charlie hasn’t left his room. The argument was about Charlie’s grades and future, which my wife is sure he’s throwing away. Basically, she’s worried Charlie spends too much time playing Minecraft (“that stupid virtual block game,” as she calls it) and not enough time studying, interacting with real people or doing real things to prepare him for the real world.
Although I agree Charlie is a gamer, and his gaming choices are mostly limited to one game, many boys his age play video games, and at least his game of choice isn’t especially violent. It’s even quite creative. But when I tell this to my wife, she gets upset and insists that if Charlie likes building things, he should get his grades up and go to university to become an architect or an engineer. I say that maybe he’s learning to code. “He’s not coding. He’s playing,” my wife says. “He’s not learning anything.”
I’ve tried talking to Charlie through his locked door, but he doesn’t answer.
When I get up at night, I see light creeping from the space between the door and door frame, and hear the clicking and clacking of his keyboard.
When I knock, the clicking stops.

UPDATE

It’s now been five days, and as far as my wife and I can tell, Charlie hasn’t left his room even once. We suppose he must have bottled water in there and maybe some snacks, but we agree that what he’s doing isn’t healthy. At first, we suspected he may have been waiting for us to go to sleep before coming out, so I set up one of my game cameras in the hallway outside his door, but it hasn’t captured anything except some photos of us. He must be going to the bathroom inside there too. He’s not showering. He keeps his window—which looks out onto the backyard—closed, with the blinds down. I’ll set up another game camera outside, just in case he tries going out the window.

UPDATE

It’s now been a full week and my wife is really starting to freak out. She wants me to break down Charlie’s door. The game cameras still show nothing. The keyboard sounds continue, so at least we know he’s still alive. God, it feels weird to write that. I guess I’m not quite as worried as my wife, or I would be forcing the door. As it stands, I feel we need to respect Charlie’s independence and give him time. Teens are rebellious, and they definitely don’t like being told what to do. “His behaviour isn’t normal, even for a teenager,” my wife says. “Don’t you fucking see that?”
I guess I don’t—not yet.

UPDATE

The smell from Charlie’s room is starting to take over the hallway. It’s like a mix of old coffee, urine and eggs.

UPDATE

I gave in to my wife and forced the door—or at least tried to, because it seems Charlie has reinforced it somehow. It didn’t budge. Still nothing on the game cameras. Still flickering lights and clicking at night. There is the possibility of going in through the wall itself, which is just standard drywall, but I’m not desperate enough to try that. Like I’ve told my wife repeatedly, what am I going to do, smash the wall with a sledgehammer or an axe? It’s too Shining. Besides, what if Charlie’s by the wall? I don’t want to to smash him.

UPDATE

The outdoor game camera caught Charlie sneaking out the window! It was in the early morning when my wife and I were fast asleep. He was gone about half an hour, and the camera took another photo of him sneaking back in, holding what looked like a package of some kind. I know things aren’t back to normal, but nevertheless I feel somewhat relieved. And vindicated: I told my wife it would have been crazy to break through the wall.

UPDATE

It’s the night of the thirteenth day, and there are new sounds coming from Charlie’s room: whirring and rattling. They definitely sound mechanical.

UPDATE

Electronic music. Loud and all the fucking time. As if sleeping wasn’t hard enough for us, just with the nerves. My wife and I spent an hour sitting outside Charlie’s room and pounding on the door, hoping he’d answer. I think my wife is starting to break mentally. Her anger has transformed into despair. She has taken to apologizing to him and begging him to let us in.

UPDATE

Day 15. The outdoor game camera caught Charlie leaving again, but this time he returned with a package and a girl. I suppose if things were normal, I would be proud. But things are not normal and I have no idea what they’re up to. I don’t feel comfortable with a stranger’s kid locked up in a room inside my house. As for my wife, she’s been staying mostly in bed. She barely works anymore.

UPDATE

I can’t believe I didn’t think of this sooner. Early this morning, Charlie sent us an email. It was cryptic but at least it’s proof he’s still willing to communicate. The message said: “im almost done now so it wont be long.”

UPDATE

My wife knocked herself out with sleeping pills and I’m sitting in the living room, trying to watch late night television. It’s not working. The lack of sleep and constant barrage of thumping electronic music is driving me a little bonkers. Sometimes the music sounds like someone screaming. I don’t know if the whirring and grinding and buzzing are instruments or sound effects or real. Charlie isn’t answering my emails. I must have written a hundred to him by now. He’s been in his room with that girl for days.

UPDATE

I’ve decided. I’m going to cut power to the house and go in through the wall with a sledgehammer. If I make a fool of myself, so be it.

UPDATE

Charlie’s in the hospital.
My wife is staying with her parents for the time being.
I’m living in a motel because I can’t stand the thought of being in that house alone anymore.
Not after what I saw. Not after smashing through the drywall to see my only son with his fucking arm cut off. So much blood on the sheets. It reeked of piss and burnt flesh. And that girl, Clarice—some internet girlfriend of his—so ungodly pale, sitting at a desk, cutting into my son’s severed arm with an X-Acto knife.
The police haven’t identified any actual crime, but—
Charlie’s lucky to be alive despite what he so calmly tells me whenever he regains consciousness.
“I did it…”
“Don’t you see?”
“I created…”
“In real life, just like mom…”

UPDATE

Charlie’s words haunt me. I’ve no one to talk to but the psychologist, and she acts like a robot. I feel like I want to grieve but I don’t know for whom. Maybe for my entire life.
I feel this persistent, unbearable dread.
I can’t explain why.
A fear that something fundamental has been changed.
My wife still hasn’t been to see him. She says she can’t bear to see him like this.
“It’s just an arm,” I say. “He’s OK.”
“Do you understand that he cut off his own arm?” she says at me, like it’s an accusation. Like it’s my fault.
There’s just so much guilt.

UPDATE

Charlie’s still in the hospital, but he’s doing better. The doctors are more concerned about his mental state than his physical one. They think he’s shut away the memory of cutting off his own arm. Whenever they try to tell him he’s missing it, he shrugs it off. “Oh, that. That’s fine. I’ll get another.”
Every time I see Charlie, I want to ask him about the things he told me earlier.
But the doctors dissuade me. They say he’s still too fragile. They say it’s better not to force him to remember the trauma. They say there’s a chance he may never truly remember it, and maybe that’s for the best.
The one thing he constantly asks is to see Clarice.
The doctors veto that too.
I don’t like leaving the hospital because there’s something terrible about the world now. Something I don’t want to face.

UPDATE

Clarice called me. Out of the blue.
She wants to meet.
There’s something about that girl that makes me uneasy, to put it mildly. Maybe it’s her pale skin, almost like bleached paper. Or the way her body felt that night I finally went through the wall. Charlie felt solid. She felt like a bunch of old bandaids on Jell-O. The way she was sitting there, so carefully, methodically working the flesh of his arm...
“Charlie thinks it's time,” she said.
“Time for what?”
“For you to finally see. He wants you to be proud of him.”
How fucked is this: I’m meeting her at some old automotive plant. I don’t know if she even has parents. Maybe she’s a runaway. God only knows.
But God help me, I have to do this.

UPDATE

I hesitated to the last possible minute about whether to tell my wife about meeting Clarice—before finally deciding not to. I don’t know why. I want to say I don’t want to cause her any more stress. Her psyche is pretty destroyed as it is. But I also feel, somewhere deep down, that she simply wouldn’t understand.
So that means no one knows I’m out here right now.
I know that’s not smart, but I don’t care. I shouldn’t be afraid of a girl.
Yet here I am, sitting in my car, writing on my phone. The weather is threatening a storm somewhere far off. The factory looks ominous.
And I’m fucking terrified.

UPDATE

I don’t know how to begin to describe what happened: what I saw and did and what I had done to me. I’m back at the motel, and I keep making mistakes typing this on my laptop because my hands are refusing to obey, but I’m resisting the urge to take a drink because I want to be as clear as possible while writing this.
It’s fucking monumental.
Insane.
I met Clarice after wandering about the factory for a quarter of an hour that felt like so much longer. The rain had started, and the way the drops echoed in that place was unreal. Like drums inside my own head.
She called my name suddenly—
I saw her standing by an old, overgrown piece of machinery, beside three bulbous garbage bags. At least one was leaking.
She said she was happy I had come. She said Charlie was a genius.
A god.
She was wearing an old trench coat, and without warning she let it drop to the cracked cement floor.
She was naked.
I wanted to back away. I started telling her I was married and there was no fucking way I would—
“It’s not about that,” she said.
She wanted me to look: to come closer and look at her.
So I did.
I remembered how her body had felt in Charlie’s room, and now I saw why. Her pale skin was spiderwebbed with blue veins, a nearly imperceptible network in a repeating pattern. “Go ahead, touch me,” she said.
I pressed a finger against her flesh. It still felt off, but not as disgustingly creamy as it had then. She had solidified.
“Now press harder.”
I did.
She groaned—and my fingertip sank into her: or more accurately, slipped into one of the blue veins.
“Go on. Keep going until you hear a click.”
I pushed deeper inside. Until there it was: a click, followed by a loosening.
“Remove it.”
I wavered, my gaze meeting hers. “Don’t be afraid.”
Gently, I removed my fingers from within her while maintaining my grip on whatever it was I was holding:
A cube of flesh.
And in her body I saw a corresponding void.
“My God…”
As I inspected the cube, rotating it between my fingers, she removed a second from her body—another void appeared—then took the cube I had been holding, held it against the one she had removed, and I watched them fuse together.
“Blocks,” I whispered.
Still missing two small volumes of herself, she turned toward the garbage bags. “These are my parents,” she said, pointing at the three bags in turn, “and this is Barker, a homeless man I met at the shelter.”
“They are—”
I couldn’t finish the sentence. I didn’t know how to finish it.
She crouched and unfastened the bags.
Inside each: a stew of raw flesh cubes and multicoloured ooze, steaming—bubbling, frothing, popping; pulsing with what I imagined must be life.
“Watch.”
She took a few cubes from each bag, wiped them, then held them together in the palms of her hands along with the two fused cubes of herself. Like melted metal, they all melded together into one new thing: a fleshy disc with wisps of hair, half an eye and a bone jutting from one end. The half-eye twitched and the entirety secreted a kind of slime across Clarice’s bare hands. It was both horrible and awesome, as if humanity had been deconstructed—
“We can all become blocks,” Clarice said. “To make and remake as we see fit.”
But there was something about that disc.
About the twitching.
The slime.
Maybe this was possible. But it was not fucking right.
I backed away: from Clarice, from her oozing garbage bags and inhuman smile. “It’s merely science,” she said matter-of-factly. “A new science, of being and bodies and existence, and Charlie is the discoverer. He is the new Darwin!”
I started to run.
Her words chased after me: “Are you proud of him? Are you proud of your son?”
The layout of the factory confused me.
Where had I left the car?
“You thought he wouldn’t amount to anything in the real world, so he redefined it: he changed what it means to be alive. Soon he will be worshipped—”
Something hard collided with the side of my head, reducing me with dwindling consciousness to the floor—smack!—and I felt hands grabbing me and dragging me, three shapes of reeking flesh, and Clarice’s laugh, echoing throughout the unreality of the factory as the whirring and buzzing faded in and out and in...
I awoke alone.
Nude. Cold rain on my face.
I was still in the factory, but Clarice was gone. I felt a kind of transcendent solitude. Groggily, I got up—only to promptly collapse on rubbery legs. I crawled toward some derelict machinery and used my arms to stand. My arms were rubbery too, but eventually I managed it. There were tools on the machinery: a saw, pincers, knives. Lightning lit up the distant sky, and in its flash I saw delicate blue veins all across my forearms. Memory returned to me. Memory and fear: the dread sense of realization.
Now I'm back at the motel, typing on my laptop. Disbelieving my own words.
Yet there it is: on a melamine plate beside me: my own flesh cube.
And every time I think I’ve gone crazy, I run my fingertip over the corporeal void from where I removed it.
My body is still soft and flabby—unsettled—but I imagine I will solidify.
As a human, I am filled with a hideous trepidation for our future as a species. I don’t know what this means for us as people.
But, as a father—
I cannot help but feel a kind of pride.

Three nights ago my wife had a big fight with our son, Charlie. Since then, Charlie hasn’t left his room. The argument was about Charlie’s grades and future, which my wife is sure he’s throwing away. Basically, she’s worried Charlie spends too much time playing Minecraft (“that stupid virtual block game,” as she calls it) and not enough time studying, interacting with real people or doing real things to prepare him for the real world.
Although I agree Charlie is a gamer, and his gaming choices are mostly limited to one game, many boys his age play video games, and at least his game of choice isn’t especially violent. It’s even quite creative. But when I tell this to my wife, she gets upset and insists that if Charlie likes building things, he should get his grades up and go to university to become an architect or an engineer. I say that maybe he’s learning to code. “He’s not coding. He’s playing,” my wife says. “He’s not learning anything.”
I’ve tried talking to Charlie through his locked door, but he doesn’t answer.
When I get up at night, I see light creeping from the space between the door and door frame, and hear the clicking and clacking of his keyboard.
When I knock, the clicking stops.

UPDATE

It’s now been five days, and as far as my wife and I can tell, Charlie hasn’t left his room even once. We suppose he must have bottled water in there and maybe some snacks, but we agree that what he’s doing isn’t healthy. At first, we suspected he may have been waiting for us to go to sleep before coming out, so I set up one of my game cameras in the hallway outside his door, but it hasn’t captured anything except some photos of us. He must be going to the bathroom inside there too. He’s not showering. He keeps his window—which looks out onto the backyard—closed, with the blinds down. I’ll set up another game camera outside, just in case he tries going out the window.

UPDATE

It’s now been a full week and my wife is really starting to freak out. She wants me to break down Charlie’s door. The game cameras still show nothing. The keyboard sounds continue, so at least we know he’s still alive. God, it feels weird to write that. I guess I’m not quite as worried as my wife, or I would be forcing the door. As it stands, I feel we need to respect Charlie’s independence and give him time. Teens are rebellious, and they definitely don’t like being told what to do. “His behaviour isn’t normal, even for a teenager,” my wife says. “Don’t you fucking see that?”
I guess I don’t—not yet.

UPDATE

The smell from Charlie’s room is starting to take over the hallway. It’s like a mix of old coffee, urine and eggs.

UPDATE

I gave in to my wife and forced the door—or at least tried to, because it seems Charlie has reinforced it somehow. It didn’t budge. Still nothing on the game cameras. Still flickering lights and clicking at night. There is the possibility of going in through the wall itself, which is just standard drywall, but I’m not desperate enough to try that. Like I’ve told my wife repeatedly, what am I going to do, smash the wall with a sledgehammer or an axe? It’s too Shining. Besides, what if Charlie’s by the wall? I don’t want to to smash him.

UPDATE

The outdoor game camera caught Charlie sneaking out the window! It was in the early morning when my wife and I were fast asleep. He was gone about half an hour, and the camera took another photo of him sneaking back in, holding what looked like a package of some kind. I know things aren’t back to normal, but nevertheless I feel somewhat relieved. And vindicated: I told my wife it would have been crazy to break through the wall.

UPDATE

It’s the night of the thirteenth day, and there are new sounds coming from Charlie’s room: whirring and rattling. They definitely sound mechanical.

UPDATE

Electronic music. Loud and all the fucking time. As if sleeping wasn’t hard enough for us, just with the nerves. My wife and I spent an hour sitting outside Charlie’s room and pounding on the door, hoping he’d answer. I think my wife is starting to break mentally. Her anger has transformed into despair. She has taken to apologizing to him and begging him to let us in.

UPDATE

Day 15. The outdoor game camera caught Charlie leaving again, but this time he returned with a package and a girl. I suppose if things were normal, I would be proud. But things are not normal and I have no idea what they’re up to. I don’t feel comfortable with a stranger’s kid locked up in a room inside my house. As for my wife, she’s been staying mostly in bed. She barely works anymore.

UPDATE

I can’t believe I didn’t think of this sooner. Early this morning, Charlie sent us an email. It was cryptic but at least it’s proof he’s still willing to communicate. The message said: “im almost done now so it wont be long.”

UPDATE

My wife knocked herself out with sleeping pills and I’m sitting in the living room, trying to watch late night television. It’s not working. The lack of sleep and constant barrage of thumping electronic music is driving me a little bonkers. Sometimes the music sounds like someone screaming. I don’t know if the whirring and grinding and buzzing are instruments or sound effects or real. Charlie isn’t answering my emails. I must have written a hundred to him by now. He’s been in his room with that girl for days.

UPDATE

I’ve decided. I’m going to cut power to the house and go in through the wall with a sledgehammer. If I make a fool of myself, so be it.

UPDATE

Charlie’s in the hospital.
My wife is staying with her parents for the time being.
I’m living in a motel because I can’t stand the thought of being in that house alone anymore.
Not after what I saw. Not after smashing through the drywall to see my only son with his fucking arm cut off. So much blood on the sheets. It reeked of piss and burnt flesh. And that girl, Clarice—some internet girlfriend of his—so ungodly pale, sitting at a desk, cutting into my son’s severed arm with an X-Acto knife.
The police haven’t identified any actual crime, but—
Charlie’s lucky to be alive despite what he so calmly tells me whenever he regains consciousness.
“I did it…”
“Don’t you see?”
“I created…”
“In real life, just like mom…”

UPDATE

Charlie’s words haunt me. I’ve no one to talk to but the psychologist, and she acts like a robot. I feel like I want to grieve but I don’t know for whom. Maybe for my entire life.
I feel this persistent, unbearable dread.
I can’t explain why.
A fear that something fundamental has been changed.
My wife still hasn’t been to see him. She says she can’t bear to see him like this.
“It’s just an arm,” I say. “He’s OK.”
“Do you understand that he cut off his own arm?” she says at me, like it’s an accusation. Like it’s my fault.
There’s just so much guilt.

UPDATE

Charlie’s still in the hospital, but he’s doing better. The doctors are more concerned about his mental state than his physical one. They think he’s shut away the memory of cutting off his own arm. Whenever they try to tell him he’s missing it, he shrugs it off. “Oh, that. That’s fine. I’ll get another.”
Every time I see Charlie, I want to ask him about the things he told me earlier.
But the doctors dissuade me. They say he’s still too fragile. They say it’s better not to force him to remember the trauma. They say there’s a chance he may never truly remember it, and maybe that’s for the best.
The one thing he constantly asks is to see Clarice.
The doctors veto that too.
I don’t like leaving the hospital because there’s something terrible about the world now. Something I don’t want to face.

UPDATE

Clarice called me. Out of the blue.
She wants to meet.
There’s something about that girl that makes me uneasy, to put it mildly. Maybe it’s her pale skin, almost like bleached paper. Or the way her body felt that night I finally went through the wall. Charlie felt solid. She felt like a bunch of old bandaids on Jell-O. The way she was sitting there, so carefully, methodically working the flesh of his arm...
“Charlie thinks it's time,” she said.
“Time for what?”
“For you to finally see. He wants you to be proud of him.”
How fucked is this: I’m meeting her at some old automotive plant. I don’t know if she even has parents. Maybe she’s a runaway. God only knows.
But God help me, I have to do this.

UPDATE

I hesitated to the last possible minute about whether to tell my wife about meeting Clarice—before finally deciding not to. I don’t know why. I want to say I don’t want to cause her any more stress. Her psyche is pretty destroyed as it is. But I also feel, somewhere deep down, that she simply wouldn’t understand.
So that means no one knows I’m out here right now.
I know that’s not smart, but I don’t care. I shouldn’t be afraid of a girl.
Yet here I am, sitting in my car, writing on my phone. The weather is threatening a storm somewhere far off. The factory looks ominous.
And I’m fucking terrified.

UPDATE

I don’t know how to begin to describe what happened: what I saw and did and what I had done to me. I’m back at the motel, and I keep making mistakes typing this on my laptop because my hands are refusing to obey, but I’m resisting the urge to take a drink because I want to be as clear as possible while writing this.
It’s fucking monumental.
Insane.
I met Clarice after wandering about the factory for a quarter of an hour that felt like so much longer. The rain had started, and the way the drops echoed in that place was unreal. Like drums inside my own head.
She called my name suddenly—
I saw her standing by an old, overgrown piece of machinery, beside three bulbous garbage bags. At least one was leaking.
She said she was happy I had come. She said Charlie was a genius.
A god.
She was wearing an old trench coat, and without warning she let it drop to the cracked cement floor.
She was naked.
I wanted to back away. I started telling her I was married and there was no fucking way I would—
“It’s not about that,” she said.
She wanted me to look: to come closer and look at her.
So I did.
I remembered how her body had felt in Charlie’s room, and now I saw why. Her pale skin was spiderwebbed with blue veins, a nearly imperceptible network in a repeating pattern. “Go ahead, touch me,” she said.
I pressed a finger against her flesh. It still felt off, but not as disgustingly creamy as it had then. She had solidified.
“Now press harder.”
I did.
She groaned—and my fingertip sank into her: or more accurately, slipped into one of the blue veins.
“Go on. Keep going until you hear a click.”
I pushed deeper inside. Until there it was: a click, followed by a loosening.
“Remove it.”
I wavered, my gaze meeting hers. “Don’t be afraid.”
Gently, I removed my fingers from within her while maintaining my grip on whatever it was I was holding:
A cube of flesh.
And in her body I saw a corresponding void.
“My God…”
As I inspected the cube, rotating it between my fingers, she removed a second from her body—another void appeared—then took the cube I had been holding, held it against the one she had removed, and I watched them fuse together.
“Blocks,” I whispered.
Still missing two small volumes of herself, she turned toward the garbage bags. “These are my parents,” she said, pointing at the three bags in turn, “and this is Barker, a homeless man I met at the shelter.”
“They are—”
I couldn’t finish the sentence. I didn’t know how to finish it.
She crouched and unfastened the bags.
Inside each: a stew of raw flesh cubes and multicoloured ooze, steaming—bubbling, frothing, popping; pulsing with what I imagined must be life.
“Watch.”
She took a few cubes from each bag, wiped them, then held them together in the palms of her hands along with the two fused cubes of herself. Like melted metal, they all melded together into one new thing: a fleshy disc with wisps of hair, half an eye and a bone jutting from one end. The half-eye twitched and the entirety secreted a kind of slime across Clarice’s bare hands. It was both horrible and awesome, as if humanity had been deconstructed—
“We can all become blocks,” Clarice said. “To make and remake as we see fit.”
But there was something about that disc.
About the twitching.
The slime.
Maybe this was possible. But it was not fucking right.
I backed away: from Clarice, from her oozing garbage bags and inhuman smile. “It’s merely science,” she said matter-of-factly. “A new science, of being and bodies and existence, and Charlie is the discoverer. He is the new Darwin!”
I started to run.
Her words chased after me: “Are you proud of him? Are you proud of your son?”
The layout of the factory confused me.
Where had I left the car?
“You thought he wouldn’t amount to anything in the real world, so he redefined it: he changed what it means to be alive. Soon he will be worshipped—”
Something hard collided with the side of my head, reducing me with dwindling consciousness to the floor—smack!—and I felt hands grabbing me and dragging me, three shapes of reeking flesh, and Clarice’s laugh, echoing throughout the unreality of the factory as the whirring and buzzing faded in and out and in...
I awoke alone.
Nude. Cold rain on my face.
I was still in the factory, but Clarice was gone. I felt a kind of transcendent solitude. Groggily, I got up—only to promptly collapse on rubbery legs. I crawled toward some derelict machinery and used my arms to stand. My arms were rubbery too, but eventually I managed it. There were tools on the machinery: a saw, pincers, knives. Lightning lit up the distant sky, and in its flash I saw delicate blue veins all across my forearms. Memory returned to me. Memory and fear: the dread sense of realization.
Now I'm back at the motel, typing on my laptop. Disbelieving my own words.
Yet there it is: on a melamine plate beside me: my own flesh cube.
And every time I think I’ve gone crazy, I run my fingertip over the corporeal void from where I removed it.
My body is still soft and flabby—unsettled—but I imagine I will solidify.
As a human, I am filled with a hideous trepidation for our future as a species. I don’t know what this means for us as people.
But, as a father—
I cannot help but feel a kind of pride.

Three nights ago my wife had a big fight with our son, Charlie. Since then, Charlie hasn’t left his room. The argument was about Charlie’s grades and future, which my wife is sure he’s throwing away. Basically, she’s worried Charlie spends too much time playing Minecraft (“that stupid virtual block game,” as she calls it) and not enough time studying, interacting with real people or doing real things to prepare him for the real world.
Although I agree Charlie is a gamer, and his gaming choices are mostly limited to one game, many boys his age play video games, and at least his game of choice isn’t especially violent. It’s even quite creative. But when I tell this to my wife, she gets upset and insists that if Charlie likes building things, he should get his grades up and go to university to become an architect or an engineer. I say that maybe he’s learning to code. “He’s not coding. He’s playing,” my wife says. “He’s not learning anything.”
I’ve tried talking to Charlie through his locked door, but he doesn’t answer.
When I get up at night, I see light creeping from the space between the door and door frame, and hear the clicking and clacking of his keyboard.
When I knock, the clicking stops.

UPDATE

It’s now been five days, and as far as my wife and I can tell, Charlie hasn’t left his room even once. We suppose he must have bottled water in there and maybe some snacks, but we agree that what he’s doing isn’t healthy. At first, we suspected he may have been waiting for us to go to sleep before coming out, so I set up one of my game cameras in the hallway outside his door, but it hasn’t captured anything except some photos of us. He must be going to the bathroom inside there too. He’s not showering. He keeps his window—which looks out onto the backyard—closed, with the blinds down. I’ll set up another game camera outside, just in case he tries going out the window.

UPDATE

It’s now been a full week and my wife is really starting to freak out. She wants me to break down Charlie’s door. The game cameras still show nothing. The keyboard sounds continue, so at least we know he’s still alive. God, it feels weird to write that. I guess I’m not quite as worried as my wife, or I would be forcing the door. As it stands, I feel we need to respect Charlie’s independence and give him time. Teens are rebellious, and they definitely don’t like being told what to do. “His behaviour isn’t normal, even for a teenager,” my wife says. “Don’t you fucking see that?”
I guess I don’t—not yet.

UPDATE

The smell from Charlie’s room is starting to take over the hallway. It’s like a mix of old coffee, urine and eggs.

UPDATE

I gave in to my wife and forced the door—or at least tried to, because it seems Charlie has reinforced it somehow. It didn’t budge. Still nothing on the game cameras. Still flickering lights and clicking at night. There is the possibility of going in through the wall itself, which is just standard drywall, but I’m not desperate enough to try that. Like I’ve told my wife repeatedly, what am I going to do, smash the wall with a sledgehammer or an axe? It’s too Shining. Besides, what if Charlie’s by the wall? I don’t want to to smash him.

UPDATE

The outdoor game camera caught Charlie sneaking out the window! It was in the early morning when my wife and I were fast asleep. He was gone about half an hour, and the camera took another photo of him sneaking back in, holding what looked like a package of some kind. I know things aren’t back to normal, but nevertheless I feel somewhat relieved. And vindicated: I told my wife it would have been crazy to break through the wall.

UPDATE

It’s the night of the thirteenth day, and there are new sounds coming from Charlie’s room: whirring and rattling. They definitely sound mechanical.

UPDATE

Electronic music. Loud and all the fucking time. As if sleeping wasn’t hard enough for us, just with the nerves. My wife and I spent an hour sitting outside Charlie’s room and pounding on the door, hoping he’d answer. I think my wife is starting to break mentally. Her anger has transformed into despair. She has taken to apologizing to him and begging him to let us in.

UPDATE

Day 15. The outdoor game camera caught Charlie leaving again, but this time he returned with a package and a girl. I suppose if things were normal, I would be proud. But things are not normal and I have no idea what they’re up to. I don’t feel comfortable with a stranger’s kid locked up in a room inside my house. As for my wife, she’s been staying mostly in bed. She barely works anymore.

UPDATE

I can’t believe I didn’t think of this sooner. Early this morning, Charlie sent us an email. It was cryptic but at least it’s proof he’s still willing to communicate. The message said: “im almost done now so it wont be long.”

UPDATE

My wife knocked herself out with sleeping pills and I’m sitting in the living room, trying to watch late night television. It’s not working. The lack of sleep and constant barrage of thumping electronic music is driving me a little bonkers. Sometimes the music sounds like someone screaming. I don’t know if the whirring and grinding and buzzing are instruments or sound effects or real. Charlie isn’t answering my emails. I must have written a hundred to him by now. He’s been in his room with that girl for days.

UPDATE

I’ve decided. I’m going to cut power to the house and go in through the wall with a sledgehammer. If I make a fool of myself, so be it.

UPDATE

Charlie’s in the hospital.
My wife is staying with her parents for the time being.
I’m living in a motel because I can’t stand the thought of being in that house alone anymore.
Not after what I saw. Not after smashing through the drywall to see my only son with his fucking arm cut off. So much blood on the sheets. It reeked of piss and burnt flesh. And that girl, Clarice—some internet girlfriend of his—so ungodly pale, sitting at a desk, cutting into my son’s severed arm with an X-Acto knife.
The police haven’t identified any actual crime, but—
Charlie’s lucky to be alive despite what he so calmly tells me whenever he regains consciousness.
“I did it…”
“Don’t you see?”
“I created…”
“In real life, just like mom…”

UPDATE

Charlie’s words haunt me. I’ve no one to talk to but the psychologist, and she acts like a robot. I feel like I want to grieve but I don’t know for whom. Maybe for my entire life.
I feel this persistent, unbearable dread.
I can’t explain why.
A fear that something fundamental has been changed.
My wife still hasn’t been to see him. She says she can’t bear to see him like this.
“It’s just an arm,” I say. “He’s OK.”
“Do you understand that he cut off his own arm?” she says at me, like it’s an accusation. Like it’s my fault.
There’s just so much guilt.

UPDATE

Charlie’s still in the hospital, but he’s doing better. The doctors are more concerned about his mental state than his physical one. They think he’s shut away the memory of cutting off his own arm. Whenever they try to tell him he’s missing it, he shrugs it off. “Oh, that. That’s fine. I’ll get another.”
Every time I see Charlie, I want to ask him about the things he told me earlier.
But the doctors dissuade me. They say he’s still too fragile. They say it’s better not to force him to remember the trauma. They say there’s a chance he may never truly remember it, and maybe that’s for the best.
The one thing he constantly asks is to see Clarice.
The doctors veto that too.
I don’t like leaving the hospital because there’s something terrible about the world now. Something I don’t want to face.

UPDATE

Clarice called me. Out of the blue.
She wants to meet.
There’s something about that girl that makes me uneasy, to put it mildly. Maybe it’s her pale skin, almost like bleached paper. Or the way her body felt that night I finally went through the wall. Charlie felt solid. She felt like a bunch of old bandaids on Jell-O. The way she was sitting there, so carefully, methodically working the flesh of his arm...
“Charlie thinks it's time,” she said.
“Time for what?”
“For you to finally see. He wants you to be proud of him.”
How fucked is this: I’m meeting her at some old automotive plant. I don’t know if she even has parents. Maybe she’s a runaway. God only knows.
But God help me, I have to do this.

UPDATE

I hesitated to the last possible minute about whether to tell my wife about meeting Clarice—before finally deciding not to. I don’t know why. I want to say I don’t want to cause her any more stress. Her psyche is pretty destroyed as it is. But I also feel, somewhere deep down, that she simply wouldn’t understand.
So that means no one knows I’m out here right now.
I know that’s not smart, but I don’t care. I shouldn’t be afraid of a girl.
Yet here I am, sitting in my car, writing on my phone. The weather is threatening a storm somewhere far off. The factory looks ominous.
And I’m fucking terrified.

UPDATE

I don’t know how to begin to describe what happened: what I saw and did and what I had done to me. I’m back at the motel, and I keep making mistakes typing this on my laptop because my hands are refusing to obey, but I’m resisting the urge to take a drink because I want to be as clear as possible while writing this.
It’s fucking monumental.
Insane.
I met Clarice after wandering about the factory for a quarter of an hour that felt like so much longer. The rain had started, and the way the drops echoed in that place was unreal. Like drums inside my own head.
She called my name suddenly—
I saw her standing by an old, overgrown piece of machinery, beside three bulbous garbage bags. At least one was leaking.
She said she was happy I had come. She said Charlie was a genius.
A god.
She was wearing an old trench coat, and without warning she let it drop to the cracked cement floor.
She was naked.
I wanted to back away. I started telling her I was married and there was no fucking way I would—
“It’s not about that,” she said.
She wanted me to look: to come closer and look at her.
So I did.
I remembered how her body had felt in Charlie’s room, and now I saw why. Her pale skin was spiderwebbed with blue veins, a nearly imperceptible network in a repeating pattern. “Go ahead, touch me,” she said.
I pressed a finger against her flesh. It still felt off, but not as disgustingly creamy as it had then. She had solidified.
“Now press harder.”
I did.
She groaned—and my fingertip sank into her: or more accurately, slipped into one of the blue veins.
“Go on. Keep going until you hear a click.”
I pushed deeper inside. Until there it was: a click, followed by a loosening.
“Remove it.”
I wavered, my gaze meeting hers. “Don’t be afraid.”
Gently, I removed my fingers from within her while maintaining my grip on whatever it was I was holding:
A cube of flesh.
And in her body I saw a corresponding void.
“My God…”
As I inspected the cube, rotating it between my fingers, she removed a second from her body—another void appeared—then took the cube I had been holding, held it against the one she had removed, and I watched them fuse together.
“Blocks,” I whispered.
Still missing two small volumes of herself, she turned toward the garbage bags. “These are my parents,” she said, pointing at the three bags in turn, “and this is Barker, a homeless man I met at the shelter.”
“They are—”
I couldn’t finish the sentence. I didn’t know how to finish it.
She crouched and unfastened the bags.
Inside each: a stew of raw flesh cubes and multicoloured ooze, steaming—bubbling, frothing, popping; pulsing with what I imagined must be life.
“Watch.”
She took a few cubes from each bag, wiped them, then held them together in the palms of her hands along with the two fused cubes of herself. Like melted metal, they all melded together into one new thing: a fleshy disc with wisps of hair, half an eye and a bone jutting from one end. The half-eye twitched and the entirety secreted a kind of slime across Clarice’s bare hands. It was both horrible and awesome, as if humanity had been deconstructed—
“We can all become blocks,” Clarice said. “To make and remake as we see fit.”
But there was something about that disc.
About the twitching.
The slime.
Maybe this was possible. But it was not fucking right.
I backed away: from Clarice, from her oozing garbage bags and inhuman smile. “It’s merely science,” she said matter-of-factly. “A new science, of being and bodies and existence, and Charlie is the discoverer. He is the new Darwin!”
I started to run.
Her words chased after me: “Are you proud of him? Are you proud of your son?”
The layout of the factory confused me.
Where had I left the car?
“You thought he wouldn’t amount to anything in the real world, so he redefined it: he changed what it means to be alive. Soon he will be worshipped—”
Something hard collided with the side of my head, reducing me with dwindling consciousness to the floor—smack!—and I felt hands grabbing me and dragging me, three shapes of reeking flesh, and Clarice’s laugh, echoing throughout the unreality of the factory as the whirring and buzzing faded in and out and in...
I awoke alone.
Nude. Cold rain on my face.
I was still in the factory, but Clarice was gone. I felt a kind of transcendent solitude. Groggily, I got up—only to promptly collapse on rubbery legs. I crawled toward some derelict machinery and used my arms to stand. My arms were rubbery too, but eventually I managed it. There were tools on the machinery: a saw, pincers, knives. Lightning lit up the distant sky, and in its flash I saw delicate blue veins all across my forearms. Memory returned to me. Memory and fear: the dread sense of realization.
Now I'm back at the motel, typing on my laptop. Disbelieving my own words.
Yet there it is: on a melamine plate beside me: my own flesh cube.
And every time I think I’ve gone crazy, I run my fingertip over the corporeal void from where I removed it.
My body is still soft and flabby—unsettled—but I imagine I will solidify.
As a human, I am filled with a hideous trepidation for our future as a species. I don’t know what this means for us as people.
But, as a father—
I cannot help but feel a kind of pride.

Three nights ago my wife had a big fight with our son, Charlie. Since then, Charlie hasn’t left his room. The argument was about Charlie’s grades and future, which my wife is sure he’s throwing away. Basically, she’s worried Charlie spends too much time playing Minecraft (“that stupid virtual block game,” as she calls it) and not enough time studying, interacting with real people or doing real things to prepare him for the real world.
Although I agree Charlie is a gamer, and his gaming choices are mostly limited to one game, many boys his age play video games, and at least his game of choice isn’t especially violent. It’s even quite creative. But when I tell this to my wife, she gets upset and insists that if Charlie likes building things, he should get his grades up and go to university to become an architect or an engineer. I say that maybe he’s learning to code. “He’s not coding. He’s playing,” my wife says. “He’s not learning anything.”
I’ve tried talking to Charlie through his locked door, but he doesn’t answer.
When I get up at night, I see light creeping from the space between the door and door frame, and hear the clicking and clacking of his keyboard.
When I knock, the clicking stops.

UPDATE

It’s now been five days, and as far as my wife and I can tell, Charlie hasn’t left his room even once. We suppose he must have bottled water in there and maybe some snacks, but we agree that what he’s doing isn’t healthy. At first, we suspected he may have been waiting for us to go to sleep before coming out, so I set up one of my game cameras in the hallway outside his door, but it hasn’t captured anything except some photos of us. He must be going to the bathroom inside there too. He’s not showering. He keeps his window—which looks out onto the backyard—closed, with the blinds down. I’ll set up another game camera outside, just in case he tries going out the window.

UPDATE

It’s now been a full week and my wife is really starting to freak out. She wants me to break down Charlie’s door. The game cameras still show nothing. The keyboard sounds continue, so at least we know he’s still alive. God, it feels weird to write that. I guess I’m not quite as worried as my wife, or I would be forcing the door. As it stands, I feel we need to respect Charlie’s independence and give him time. Teens are rebellious, and they definitely don’t like being told what to do. “His behaviour isn’t normal, even for a teenager,” my wife says. “Don’t you fucking see that?”
I guess I don’t—not yet.

UPDATE

The smell from Charlie’s room is starting to take over the hallway. It’s like a mix of old coffee, urine and eggs.

UPDATE

I gave in to my wife and forced the door—or at least tried to, because it seems Charlie has reinforced it somehow. It didn’t budge. Still nothing on the game cameras. Still flickering lights and clicking at night. There is the possibility of going in through the wall itself, which is just standard drywall, but I’m not desperate enough to try that. Like I’ve told my wife repeatedly, what am I going to do, smash the wall with a sledgehammer or an axe? It’s too Shining. Besides, what if Charlie’s by the wall? I don’t want to to smash him.

UPDATE

The outdoor game camera caught Charlie sneaking out the window! It was in the early morning when my wife and I were fast asleep. He was gone about half an hour, and the camera took another photo of him sneaking back in, holding what looked like a package of some kind. I know things aren’t back to normal, but nevertheless I feel somewhat relieved. And vindicated: I told my wife it would have been crazy to break through the wall.

UPDATE

It’s the night of the thirteenth day, and there are new sounds coming from Charlie’s room: whirring and rattling. They definitely sound mechanical.

UPDATE

Electronic music. Loud and all the fucking time. As if sleeping wasn’t hard enough for us, just with the nerves. My wife and I spent an hour sitting outside Charlie’s room and pounding on the door, hoping he’d answer. I think my wife is starting to break mentally. Her anger has transformed into despair. She has taken to apologizing to him and begging him to let us in.

UPDATE

Day 15. The outdoor game camera caught Charlie leaving again, but this time he returned with a package and a girl. I suppose if things were normal, I would be proud. But things are not normal and I have no idea what they’re up to. I don’t feel comfortable with a stranger’s kid locked up in a room inside my house. As for my wife, she’s been staying mostly in bed. She barely works anymore.

UPDATE

I can’t believe I didn’t think of this sooner. Early this morning, Charlie sent us an email. It was cryptic but at least it’s proof he’s still willing to communicate. The message said: “im almost done now so it wont be long.”

UPDATE

My wife knocked herself out with sleeping pills and I’m sitting in the living room, trying to watch late night television. It’s not working. The lack of sleep and constant barrage of thumping electronic music is driving me a little bonkers. Sometimes the music sounds like someone screaming. I don’t know if the whirring and grinding and buzzing are instruments or sound effects or real. Charlie isn’t answering my emails. I must have written a hundred to him by now. He’s been in his room with that girl for days.

UPDATE

I’ve decided. I’m going to cut power to the house and go in through the wall with a sledgehammer. If I make a fool of myself, so be it.

UPDATE

Charlie’s in the hospital.
My wife is staying with her parents for the time being.
I’m living in a motel because I can’t stand the thought of being in that house alone anymore.
Not after what I saw. Not after smashing through the drywall to see my only son with his fucking arm cut off. So much blood on the sheets. It reeked of piss and burnt flesh. And that girl, Clarice—some internet girlfriend of his—so ungodly pale, sitting at a desk, cutting into my son’s severed arm with an X-Acto knife.
The police haven’t identified any actual crime, but—
Charlie’s lucky to be alive despite what he so calmly tells me whenever he regains consciousness.
“I did it…”
“Don’t you see?”
“I created…”
“In real life, just like mom…”

UPDATE

Charlie’s words haunt me. I’ve no one to talk to but the psychologist, and she acts like a robot. I feel like I want to grieve but I don’t know for whom. Maybe for my entire life.
I feel this persistent, unbearable dread.
I can’t explain why.
A fear that something fundamental has been changed.
My wife still hasn’t been to see him. She says she can’t bear to see him like this.
“It’s just an arm,” I say. “He’s OK.”
“Do you understand that he cut off his own arm?” she says at me, like it’s an accusation. Like it’s my fault.
There’s just so much guilt.

UPDATE

Charlie’s still in the hospital, but he’s doing better. The doctors are more concerned about his mental state than his physical one. They think he’s shut away the memory of cutting off his own arm. Whenever they try to tell him he’s missing it, he shrugs it off. “Oh, that. That’s fine. I’ll get another.”
Every time I see Charlie, I want to ask him about the things he told me earlier.
But the doctors dissuade me. They say he’s still too fragile. They say it’s better not to force him to remember the trauma. They say there’s a chance he may never truly remember it, and maybe that’s for the best.
The one thing he constantly asks is to see Clarice.
The doctors veto that too.
I don’t like leaving the hospital because there’s something terrible about the world now. Something I don’t want to face.

UPDATE

Clarice called me. Out of the blue.
She wants to meet.
There’s something about that girl that makes me uneasy, to put it mildly. Maybe it’s her pale skin, almost like bleached paper. Or the way her body felt that night I finally went through the wall. Charlie felt solid. She felt like a bunch of old bandaids on Jell-O. The way she was sitting there, so carefully, methodically working the flesh of his arm...
“Charlie thinks it's time,” she said.
“Time for what?”
“For you to finally see. He wants you to be proud of him.”
How fucked is this: I’m meeting her at some old automotive plant. I don’t know if she even has parents. Maybe she’s a runaway. God only knows.
But God help me, I have to do this.

UPDATE

I hesitated to the last possible minute about whether to tell my wife about meeting Clarice—before finally deciding not to. I don’t know why. I want to say I don’t want to cause her any more stress. Her psyche is pretty destroyed as it is. But I also feel, somewhere deep down, that she simply wouldn’t understand.
So that means no one knows I’m out here right now.
I know that’s not smart, but I don’t care. I shouldn’t be afraid of a girl.
Yet here I am, sitting in my car, writing on my phone. The weather is threatening a storm somewhere far off. The factory looks ominous.
And I’m fucking terrified.

UPDATE

I don’t know how to begin to describe what happened: what I saw and did and what I had done to me. I’m back at the motel, and I keep making mistakes typing this on my laptop because my hands are refusing to obey, but I’m resisting the urge to take a drink because I want to be as clear as possible while writing this.
It’s fucking monumental.
Insane.
I met Clarice after wandering about the factory for a quarter of an hour that felt like so much longer. The rain had started, and the way the drops echoed in that place was unreal. Like drums inside my own head.
She called my name suddenly—
I saw her standing by an old, overgrown piece of machinery, beside three bulbous garbage bags. At least one was leaking.
She said she was happy I had come. She said Charlie was a genius.
A god.
She was wearing an old trench coat, and without warning she let it drop to the cracked cement floor.
She was naked.
I wanted to back away. I started telling her I was married and there was no fucking way I would—
“It’s not about that,” she said.
She wanted me to look: to come closer and look at her.
So I did.
I remembered how her body had felt in Charlie’s room, and now I saw why. Her pale skin was spiderwebbed with blue veins, a nearly imperceptible network in a repeating pattern. “Go ahead, touch me,” she said.
I pressed a finger against her flesh. It still felt off, but not as disgustingly creamy as it had then. She had solidified.
“Now press harder.”
I did.
She groaned—and my fingertip sank into her: or more accurately, slipped into one of the blue veins.
“Go on. Keep going until you hear a click.”
I pushed deeper inside. Until there it was: a click, followed by a loosening.
“Remove it.”
I wavered, my gaze meeting hers. “Don’t be afraid.”
Gently, I removed my fingers from within her while maintaining my grip on whatever it was I was holding:
A cube of flesh.
And in her body I saw a corresponding void.
“My God…”
As I inspected the cube, rotating it between my fingers, she removed a second from her body—another void appeared—then took the cube I had been holding, held it against the one she had removed, and I watched them fuse together.
“Blocks,” I whispered.
Still missing two small volumes of herself, she turned toward the garbage bags. “These are my parents,” she said, pointing at the three bags in turn, “and this is Barker, a homeless man I met at the shelter.”
“They are—”
I couldn’t finish the sentence. I didn’t know how to finish it.
She crouched and unfastened the bags.
Inside each: a stew of raw flesh cubes and multicoloured ooze, steaming—bubbling, frothing, popping; pulsing with what I imagined must be life.
“Watch.”
She took a few cubes from each bag, wiped them, then held them together in the palms of her hands along with the two fused cubes of herself. Like melted metal, they all melded together into one new thing: a fleshy disc with wisps of hair, half an eye and a bone jutting from one end. The half-eye twitched and the entirety secreted a kind of slime across Clarice’s bare hands. It was both horrible and awesome, as if humanity had been deconstructed—
“We can all become blocks,” Clarice said. “To make and remake as we see fit.”
But there was something about that disc.
About the twitching.
The slime.
Maybe this was possible. But it was not fucking right.
I backed away: from Clarice, from her oozing garbage bags and inhuman smile. “It’s merely science,” she said matter-of-factly. “A new science, of being and bodies and existence, and Charlie is the discoverer. He is the new Darwin!”
I started to run.
Her words chased after me: “Are you proud of him? Are you proud of your son?”
The layout of the factory confused me.
Where had I left the car?
“You thought he wouldn’t amount to anything in the real world, so he redefined it: he changed what it means to be alive. Soon he will be worshipped—”
Something hard collided with the side of my head, reducing me with dwindling consciousness to the floor—smack!—and I felt hands grabbing me and dragging me, three shapes of reeking flesh, and Clarice’s laugh, echoing throughout the unreality of the factory as the whirring and buzzing faded in and out and in...
I awoke alone.
Nude. Cold rain on my face.
I was still in the factory, but Clarice was gone. I felt a kind of transcendent solitude. Groggily, I got up—only to promptly collapse on rubbery legs. I crawled toward some derelict machinery and used my arms to stand. My arms were rubbery too, but eventually I managed it. There were tools on the machinery: a saw, pincers, knives. Lightning lit up the distant sky, and in its flash I saw delicate blue veins all across my forearms. Memory returned to me. Memory and fear: the dread sense of realization.
Now I'm back at the motel, typing on my laptop. Disbelieving my own words.
Yet there it is: on a melamine plate beside me: my own flesh cube.
And every time I think I’ve gone crazy, I run my fingertip over the corporeal void from where I removed it.
My body is still soft and flabby—unsettled—but I imagine I will solidify.
As a human, I am filled with a hideous trepidation for our future as a species. I don’t know what this means for us as people.
But, as a father—
I cannot help but feel a kind of pride.

TW: death, including kids.
There have been three deaths that have hit me really hard in the last few months. I posted two months ago about how a kid on my daughter's hockey team drowned while they were at a tournament: https://www.reddit.com/daddit/s/xY2rjdfWnk. That was obviously very rough for everyone who knew him.
Last month, my friend who was also my first boss out of school died in his sleep in his early 60s. He'd had heart trouble for decades. We actually ended up working at the same company again, but he was in a different office and he wasn't coming in because of the risk of Covid, so we hadn't seen each other in a while.
And then on Saturday, my friend died of pancreatic cancer. He was my coworker for over a decade, and just the nicest and funniest guy you could imagine. He had a tough life: a Jewish refugee from the Soviet Union, who faced tons of discrimination there. He moved to Israel when he was 25 with his then-wife and mother-in-law. He got Thyroid cancer in his late 20s and lost his hearing in one ear. And his wife left him.
So he packed up and moved to the US (back before 9/11 when you could just show up on a tourist visa, I guess, and just start working. I never quite got those details.) He was dyslexic, but he worked really hard to become an engineer and work in his third language. He noticed I was speaking to a coworker in Spanish; he already knew I spoke French. He said "wow, you speak three languages." I said "so do you." He said "huh? Russian, Hebrew, what else?" Uh, English. "Oh no, I don't speak English."
A lot of people at work were really hard on him because they just assumed he was refusing to improve his English. But I noticed he was always transposing our product numbers, and he said that letters and numbers has always been flipping back and forth his whole life. I said he could potentially go see a doctor to see if there was a way to treat it. "What would he do? Cut off head?"
He remarried and he had two kids, who are now in their early 20s. He eventually got divorced a second time; he said his wife told him he was working too much. Which was definitely true, but he didn't know another way. His daughter did well in school, got a good job, and lived with a bunch of roommates in the city; he wanted my advice because he couldn't relate (ex-Soviets prize their own space after sharing a stove with seven other families.)
He got married again a few years ago. And then a little over a year ago, he told me he had pancreatic cancer. They caught it relatively early when they were looking for something else, but not so early that he didn't need chemo. We had a family friend who had it; he died within a week of diagnosis. I never wanted to look at the stats, but even when they catch it early enough that you can just do surgery, the five-year survival rate is really low.
I should mention that at this point, he had been working for me for five years. He said I was the only one who understood him. People had very little empathy for the impact dyslexia and hearing loss had on his life. I also knew he wanted to relax and enjoy life more; I made sure he could take as much vacation as he wanted for the last five years; he would still show up at our offices in other countries for a day or two on every trip.
He wanted to keep working the entire time he was undergoing treatment. He said it kept his mind off things. I worked it out with our GM that he would still get paid as a full-time, continue to get his stock grants, etc.
But the chemo and surgery didn't work. He started chemo again. He came to the office a few times. I took him to see our GM and we thanked him for his support. A few weeks ago, he said he had fluid in his stomach and was going into the hospital. We kept communicating and then I didn't hear from him for a week. I reached out to his wife and she said he was still in the hospital but wasn't online. He didn't want visitors, he'd be fine and I'd see him soon. I asked her to let him know I got in touch. A few days later, she let me know he had passed away. She texted at 4 am and I saw it when I woke up at 530 am to take my daughter to hockey. I feel so awful for his family; he's only ten years older than me, and I couldn't stop thinking about my daughter losing a parent ten years from now.
I would be a wreck no matter what, but there was something extra painful about having to deal with a bunch of HR stuff for him as well. Automated system bugging me about his missing weekly report. Logging in the system that he died so it would stop pinging me. Letting our HR rep know that he died. Letting our admin know that his family couldn't accept the flowers that we normally send, and having to find a place that would deliver a kosher food basket. Letting coworkers past and present know he died and sending out funeral info. Realizing how many people didn't know he was sick. I had organized a lunch for him not long after he was diagnosed; someone who had been visiting from outside the US sent a photo from lunch and said "I'm really glad I got to see him one last time." It never occurred to me at the time that it would be our last team lunch with him.
Years ago, one of our execs who had been a big supporter of his moved on to a new role. He said to me "who will take his shoe?" All I can think is, man, nobody's ever going to be able to take your shoe.

When we were only just friends, 3 years ago back when I was seventeen, I remember how honest and overt I was about me killing myself very soon. It took months in that early stage but she had helped me through it to where that feeling went away. I thought I got better and that it was all over.
But near the breakup id hear pangs over and over from her, don't kill yourself please don't kill yourself. Years later and she was still so scared I would kill myself if anything happened, no matter how much I told her the thought never crossed my mind again again and again. Suicide was gone from my mind. And I didn't understand, it was the last thing she told me directly before the breakup, before she had to get her mother to text my family all the reasons she believed the relationship wouldn't work, but more than anything telling them to stop me from killing myself if I did.
Days later she would come back to me asking to still be my friend. Filling her messages with for now's and we'll see's but I stopped messaging her after that.
And 3 days after that, she would come back, using my petname, asking that 'even if' we stop talking and 'even if' she didn't hear from me that I would be "safe". It made sense to me the only thing on her mind was her belief I'd kill myself, that before that she was just in the blindsiding phase and she was so scared I would kill myself instead of being willing to talk to me. Not how I felt or what I cared about, not anything in our relationship, only the guilt she thought she'd face if her leaving resulted in my death.
It was confirmation that no matter the memory, I could never be sure if she was with me out of love or for guilt. And so coldly that day I would tell her to stop messaging me, the last message I ever sent her, without even saying her name back.
And today I'm alive. Not once did I attempt, not once did it affect me enough to even hurt myself or go back to that state. So what were you so bothered about. What was all that for.

So I saw my dad's text messages with another woman cheating on my mom. I called him and confronted him but he is out of town as of now and he didn't really say much. I had his phones WhatsApp logged in on my phone which is how I got to know that he is cheating.
I cannot tell my mom because she suffers from severe depression and anxiety and has attempted suicide before when I was a kid and if she gets to know about this news I am pretty sure she will do something bad.
My parents always loved each other and rarely argued. I though my family was perfect and that I was so lucky to be born in this family. My mom only cares about me and my dad in her life. Now in a blink of an eye my life feels like it is ruined.
I want to know what should I do which is best for my mom as she is my whole world. I have to move out in a couple of months for my first job to another city and I cannot leave her alone if i tell her about this and I also do not want her to live a miserable life after all that she has wanted her whole life was to live peacefully with me and my dad.
I will be confronting my dad when he comes back tomorrow what should I say as all I want is to punch him in the face a person for whom I would have died. FML

I need a no bs hetero male opinion on this. Men do not approach me, why?
I won’t post face, you’ll have to take my word for it. But I’ve always been pretty. I’d say LA 7/10. My looks were never the focus of my insecurity (clearly I got other issues). My less biased credential is - on two separate occasions I’ve been ranked high on a spreadsheet/list (2/20ish in my after work soccer team and top 5 in my first job of around 80 women). Men have a natural inclination towards power rankings. Anyways.
My confidence has been shaken by several incidents that, if I didn’t know any better, I’d think were specially orchestrated by government ops to undermine me. They all derive from comparison, the thief of joy, to my friend.
Almost every single time we go out she gets approached. It’s happened 5 times in the past two months. Men come right up to her, ask for her number, and don’t interact with me AT ALL. Men of all shapes and sizes. I thought it was sweet at first, but now the invisibility is starting to chip away at my ego. It’s humiliating to just stand there and watch
She’s pretty obviously. But “prettier” in an objective sense? Probably not, though I wouldn’t say the gap is a big one. I feel horrible for thinking these things but it’s driving me nuts and I cannot figure it out.
She has a beautiful face and nice eyes, but she’s a bigger gal. Is that what men want? I’m skinny, maybe a little gangly. I also have angular, sharp features where hers are round and soft. But again, we’re both pretty, smiley girls with similar style. We laugh a lot. Maybe she’s a little bubblier than I am.
In our m/f friend groups, I’ve always been able to catch the interest of whoever I wanted. She has expressed insecurity and frustration with how they would seem to favor me. She was also ranked in the middle of the soccer team spreadsheet. Guess it’s my turn to feel like that and man it sucks
I’m probably just not as pretty as I think I am. Or men can pick up on the fact my soul is ugly and rotted enough to make a post like this about my dear friend, but logically I don’t think that’s what’s happening in the 5 seconds they have to choose between us on the street!!!!
Maybe you can feel my pathetic little girl insecurity seeping out and would like to tell me so.
I want you guys to tell me more about that little mental calculation you do in your head before going up to a woman, if it exists, please…

So, I'm about to turn 20, and about to go to university, I'm a girl, and I noticed that everyone, even girls my age look older, and even have deeper voices (I don't mean "deep" by masculine, but that they sound "adult"), I'm kind of unattractive, I'm short (158cm), have a high-pitched voice, and I'm thin (most clothes are bigger than me, so, I look small), particularly my face, I have a bad jaw and chin.
People usually think I am a middle schoole kid, I remember one when some people younger than me (who also looked older than me) laughed when I told them my age. I also noticed that I look very young, like 12 or even 11, it made me feel kind of insecure.
Is there anything I could do to improve and look olde adult? it's easier for guys since they can work out or grow facial hair, but I am female.

(If you know who Dias is, you probably have read Distortion Detective. If you don't, go and read it. Also includes LC and LoR spoilers, though I think you who clicked on this post should be already familiar with them) I don't know if I'm burning the kitchen with this but here's my reasonings: 1. In the Woods (The part which supports and rules out quite some theories) Here I quote Lion and Panther: Lion: "Ah~ If we’re being technical, what our master has planned apparently isn’t one of the City’s taboos. It’s just the kind of thing that… no one has ever dared to consider, you catch my drift?" Panther: "You managed to get a different head in so fast. Do people like you always come prepared?" From this, I deduce two traits that Pre-Limbus Dante would probably have: 1.1 High social status It was mentioned that Dante used to have a high calibewas sort of a bigwig, plus Vergilius somewhat views Dante as an equal (When he isn't angry) and Dias is definitely one who has influence in the city. Although we don't know what exactly she is, it is apparent that she's very, very rich and has great authority. Also, the fact that Dante doesn't carry a weapon should either mean they originally have special abilities and can fight without weapons, or they usually don't encounter fights, and I figure that Dias falls into the latter category. Panther's question of "Do people like you always come prepared?" could possibly imply that Dante was the kind of people that's reasonable to have a couple of survival equipment that cost a ton. The fact that the furries didn't capture Dante shows that Dante made their memories inaccessible, either by getting an expensive "lock" from J Corp, or maybe simply Dante's clockhead is immune to mental attack (Even Hong Lu can't do that, Dante must have an invaluable moonstone) , so I believe that Dante used to have a high social status. 1.2 Independent If Dante is a person with high status that belongs in some kind of organization, their disappearance would probably be discovered, and as someone with a high status there should be some investigation (It shouldn't be impossible to find a particular person in the city with all those technology) , but now we see nothing. Or maybe the organization knows what happened, but that's also not very possible since it would be hard to convince a organization that LCB and their higher-up establishes a contract that needs Dante to loss memory AND may put Dante in danger. Therefore, Dante should be some independent high status individual. However, I would rule out some possibilities here: ✗Color Fixer I don't think Dante would be a Color because 1. Don/Ryoshu would probably smell it out with their instincts 2. A Color should be able to get rid of the furries even if they're weakened/partial memory lost, since the power difference is exponential (like, weakened Sinners can still wield their weapons and kill one another at least) 3. Killing a Color wouldn't be something that "no one has ever dared to consider" since we know of the Vermillion Cross and the Roland bad ending in LoR, and also Argalia and Angelica... ✗The Head Although the Head also has astonishing efficiency (it took them the whole LC and LoR) , should Dante be a part of the Head, they would have some more roundabout speech in the woods, nor would Vergilius mention that Dante used to be only "sort of" a bigwig. ✗Lob. Corp. related For Ayin it's the same reason, the establisher of Lob. Corp. himself is definitely a bigwig (Not to mention that according to Carmen, Ayin is also in the Light) . The probability of being a manager of a fallen L Corp branch facility is also low because they either got buried (How could a manager without ego equipment break through the facility themselves?) or died because of depression (like the poor person in the concept incinerated Wonderlab) . Other important people are>! in the Outskirts, !!the Eyeball !!T Corp actually because of its tears!<) Narrowing down, this leaves us high grade lone fixers/workshop meisters (YuRia would instinctively feel bad about Faust's Hex Nail so not her) , distortions/evil human/non-city human (btw does a humanoid abno that's AI themed with human level intelligence break the Head's law?) , and also the rich. 2. Reason of Concealing Design-wise gloves and other things are used to reflect a person's personality eg it suits Sinclair being timid. (or they just don't want to have physical contact/ eg>! to show Gabriel's trauma is no longer Yesod's!<) But in this case, they're used to hide Dante's skin. (Poor Dante wearing so much clothes, must be hard to bear when it's hot eg facing Ardor Blossom Moth and other burn abnos) Dante's clothes are most likely to be provided by LCB due to the name Dante on it (Creepy that LCB knows their size of clothes) . Seeing the unique garments of each Sinner, we can know that the tailor behind LCB put a lot of thoughts in it (since everything is canon) , and a notable thing is that Dante and Sinclair are the only two sinners who has gloves. Gloves are provided for Dante by LCB──Why? It's not likely that sinners (Except Faust) would recognize Dante. Dante is usually being protected at the back, so the chance for an enemy to observe Dante's skin and recognize them at a close distance should also be low theoretically. (Seriously who could make the connection between a high-status individual you knew and an amnesiac with a clock-ticking head?) Vergilius probably already knew Dante's identity, and I don't think Dante has anything to do with Charon's past, so... I have a wild guess that the company is hiding Dante's identity from LCD: Ezra, Moses, etc. Since it seems that only the higher-ups of LCB actually know Dante's identity, (Judging by the attitude of LCCA in Canto3 and Caiman) and Ezra saying Dante really tick tocks like a clock using "They", so I guess the LCD doesn't know about Dante's past. Athough Moses and Ezra still listened to Dias the last time we saw them interact, after the events of Distortion Detective, I doubt that they would continue to be Dias' pawn (Although DD got cut, director Jihoon must have gotten some character realization arc for Moses/Ezra/Vespa,etc. up his sleeves prior to starting DD) . Therefore, they probably joined LCD of their own accord. This leads to a dilemma of either choosing Dias (money and power) or LCD (solving distortions) , so in order to get them both, Limbus company have to hide at least one of them to the other. Dias' skin color is not the most common among the high status individuals in the city (Her skin looks similar to Outis' but is probably much smoother since Dias has an extravagant life and seems not to age much. Dias didn't look like she's older than Moses but she is) . As someone who had known Dias for a long long time and were in so much pain because of her, Moses and Ezra probably had Dias' features carved in their mind. It shouldn't be hard for them to recognize Dias solely from hands or neck, and if this happened, LCD's reaction could cause Limbus Company's plans to fall apart, so it's reasonable for Limbus Company to cover Dante from head to toe, not letting an inch of skin to be seen. 3. PM things PM's not one who likes to throw main characters' important info out without any foreshadowing. Well for the other sinners we more or less know something from their source material, but among the main characters only Dante we know nothing about their past except they had a high status before (Other sinners at least have their description and CGs in TGS trailer, but for Dante we only know that their life wasn't going very well from the source material) . But even Roland slipped out tons of facts that a grade 9 fixer wouldn't know, along with the Pianist in the trailer, and the fact that his thing was quite directly related to WNDD which was caused by LC Angela... And so Dante should also have relations to the sequels in whatever way. But what do we have for Dante now? Demain and a to-be-drawn sheep, which is... more confusing than Binah maybe. So, I think PM would have some more foreshadowing that we didn't realise. Then where could that foreshadowing be? LC and LoR are pretty much ended with some people getting unbooked and releasing the Light, but I don't really think the Dante from Seven Association is LCB Dante since they said themselves the name "Dante" doesn't feel familiar. Iori is a Color, and nor do I think she will ask the furries to attack herself. Afterall, not many independent high status people were unbooked since the thing about invitations are that they cause ripple effect, from the Rats to ultimately Associations and more, so most guests have a relationship with one another here or there. Leviathan is written for Vergilius, and since Faust was there, it is hardly likely that Dante is the people that Vergilius has encountered. (Sadly Dante shouldn't be Garnet) Wonderlab was concept incinerated, so that leaves us with... Distortion Detective. What if, Jihoon stopped writing it indeed because they hope to make DD into a game and are busy developing LCB, but also because Jihoon realized that continuing DD will reveal one of the biggest mystery in LCB? 4. Mili We all know that Mili songs are composed of a ton information, so here are some lyrics of In Hell We Live, Lament: I walked down a path Leading to the past Stole from the tree's hands A regretter's friend -- the forbidden fruit Pretty sure that this part is about Dante. Here, the word "stole" implies that Dante is once again probably not Ayin himself, since Ayin was using Carmen's nervous system all along in LC. I bite off the skin Chewing on its tender flesh Quaff down its lukewarm pus You became the "me" who you despised We swallowed the time Let us rewind Not too sure, but this part should be either about all the Sinners or Dante themself. Either way, the "You became the 'me' who you despised" line in the middle could mean that Dante's past self won't like the way they're acting now (which is definitely something Dias would feel) 5. Dias and Limbus 5.1 Dias' Goal As shown in DD, Dias is probably someone who thinks anyone that is useless to her is trash and hate lowly beings. (She straight up ignored Vespa, only answering a “Mm.” apathetically because Moses asked her about Vespa) Her goal is to become the Head (and therefore helped LC takeover the old L Corp) and I believe that would be the reason why Dias would be interested in Limbus Company, but unfortunately ended up getting partially tricked by this shady company into becoming the manager. (Ya must be a coincidence that a bus went into the woods and picked up a random person) Limbus company could offer a dream-come-true opportunity if you sign the contract (At least that's what it seems to be) so maybe Dias first wanted to simply finance LCB, but in the end signed a contract instead so they could engrave the aspect (whatever that is) So, it would be reasonable to say that is why Dante would be so angry if they were Dias when they were almost killed by the furries, because she almost got closer to her goal of being the Head if she could finish engraving the aspect. Also, Dias would not be satisfied of being the higher-up of LCB. In order to become the Head HERSELF, she would want to and should need to have 100% control over everything (like she used to do with the Udjat) But now, LCB is not fully under her control (What if some sinners want to leave after fulfilling their wish? Like, Vergilius actually violated his contract) . Dias wouldn't allow this to happen, she wants nothing blocking her path. Since nothing happened, I can say that Dias isn't aware of this, and the reason to this lack of response could be because she became Dante. 5.2 Company Financing Limbus Company has plenty of capital and resources (They can afford to provide ammo for LCCB which consists of relatively disposable and weak units), so where did that money come from? Maybe Hong Lu's family was financing the company, but with realizations comes tragedies, aren't they afraid that what if one day they got involved and died? From Hong Lu's IDs we can know that his grandparents explicitly told him to work at places they want him to, (telling him "To see more of the City and learn how the world goes") but in LCB he didn't mention such a thing unlike his mirror world versions. Since his grandparents are very blatant with Hong Lu regarding their act of nepotism, I doubt that they would hide it to Hong Lu if they really were the financial source behind Limbus Company, so that shouldn't be the case. Also, Roland mentioned a "Jade" when he talked about the strongest fixers. This "Jade" could have relations to Hong Lu, thus it isn't impossible that the financial support comes from there. However, there could be a conflict of interest if another person with a near-Color level is also involved in Limbus Company aside from Vergilius, so that shouldn't be too probable. Honestly, it is completely reasonable for Dias to be the one who dared to finance a no-name company like Limbus, since she did the same thing before and financed Lob Corp in the Smoke War. A war requires astronomical amount of resources and capital, and they were fighting against an EXISTING Wing, which is probably quite rich considering it was the only energy supplier at that time. Yet still, Dias supported LC and they won. Dias probably did this because she thinks that releasing the Light can ultimately allow her to become the Head, but her plan was hijacked along with Ayin's because of LC Angela. Now with the Library releasing the Light, Dias could finally continue her plan. Limbus Company is a perfect opportunity so she seeks to involve in the company by backing up its finances, which led to an outcome that she didn't thought of. 6. Other Miscellaneous By the way, Dante's height is 176cm where Dias' is 171cm. That's close enough, and it makes sense that the few additional centimeters are because of the clockhead. What's more is that Dante and Dias both start with "D" (like whatever is going on with Carmen and Catherine) Conclusion: Indeed I could be wrong, but come on, really? Leaving poor Dias behind all these events? She had been waiting since the start of LC! It should be time for PM to give her some love and get her back on stage instead of pulling another new character out of mid-air... TLDR: Dante=Dias because -was probably rich/powerful -very different from current Dante -had some big goals -have something to do with the Light -LCD and Dias can't knowingly coexist -we're running out of characters to cope on And that's all for now, waiting for PM to drop more info in the upcoming chapters (PM fuel my brainrot plssss)

(my backstory cannot be summed up in a simple sentence, so this will be a long post, I apologize if it violates the rules, mods to reject if that’s the case, fully understandable.)
I’m (M) two weeks shy of 50 and have spent the last 21 years in a relationship with my significant other (F46), she had a boy aged 2 when we got involved, we had a son 2 years into our relationship. It has been a rocky road several times over the past 20 years but we have stuck it out.
She came from a history of both mental and physical trauma. At the time I did not know the full picture and the help she has gotten the past 4-5 years should have been given her 20 years ago, but at that time she simply was not susceptible to help (both her own statement/opinion and mine, and I believe this to be the case). She was the victim of sexual assault in her teens, and several other similar experiences into her early twenties. Along with a childhood in a somewhat dysfunctional family (easy to see that now in hindsight…) she was dealt a shitty hand that continued to cause repeated trauma over our years together, confirming her low self-worth and low self-esteem, repeating a vicious and toxic cycle.
Her backstory is one of being a kind and empathic soul, wanting the best for all. She is currently participating in a PTSD-trauma group that has brought a lot of old crap to the surface and also led her to questioning our relationship and my role in events that have happened.
Very early in our relationship I felt disrespected and to an extent violated as she would go out, drink to much and end up in shitty situations, some involving cheating (some physical, some emotional), some destroying friendships and overall adding to the pile of crap that at some point come crashing down.
My response has been to act mostly in fear and desperation to try and intervene and stop the worst case outcome – almost never to succeed. I have done some shitty stuff – read her messenger messages, monitored her bank account, geolocated her phone, followed her when out, called and been “nice” to ask her to come pick up, tried to play on her bad conscience, yanked her physically out of apartments on an afterparty, thrown her into the car as she was walking with some guy to his house (the other guy probably thought I was nuts) – jeezes, I once threatened some random guy in a hotel room over the phone that I had access to weapons (I didn’t, but I was desperate), called 911 and demanded she was taken to hospital as she was (in my opinion) suicidal and chugged a bunch of painkillers (both prescription and non-prescription), the list is long….
And every time we have patched things up in a way that has kept our relationship, but for me the distrust and fear has been lurking under the surface, especially when drinking.
We have had a very differing view on her relationship to alcohol. I have said on many occasions that she fits the bill for an alcoholic. This view for her is a huge trigger and cause of many arguments over the years. My view is that of an old colleague that worked as a psycologist treating PTSD-patients; “The worst trait of alcohol is that it helps…”. She can now agree that she has a non-healthy relationship to alcohol, but to give up something that give relief is a struggle. On an absurd level of logic I can understand this, but the net negative effect does not outweigh the positive on any level.
It's not that she needs alcohol, but more a case of not stopping when it feels good => drinks too much, shit happens. She is definitely two different people when sober and intoxicated, and a lot of stuff comes to the surface when she’s drinking that otherwise is kept under wraps. Also alcohol leads her to be self-destructive in the sense that she will often “sacrifice” herself and loved ones/friends over a stranger that she has met that “needs her help”.
At some level she knows this, and the remorse after things have gone bad is genuine and real, but in the heat of the moment it simply does not work to prevent the bad decision-making.
When all the pieces are on the floor I’ve been the one around to pick up the pieces and for the sake of our children, our parents and (probably) optics I have forgiven more than I probably should have and compromised on issues that has not been healthy to either of us – why you might ask? I don’t know – and over the past few days a lot of thoughts have been spinning in my head, revisiting my past and asking myself if I’m in fact a narcissist in this dynamic.
I know I have been acting in fear and desperation. I have seen her at her lowest of lows, I have been part of the recovery, I have forgiven (at least I think I have), but have I been doing this for my own twisted self-interest?...
I have been adamant on cutting out alcohol – still I have suggested to share a bottle of wine on a Friday night because I know she likes it, and there have been occasions where I know that if she’s in the mood, I might get lucky later.
I have been her ‘saviour’ in all of these occasions, swooping in and being the bigger person to her shitty behaviour, justifying it with sparing the children and our family, keeping her mental wellbeing, the stigma she will face if we break up, forgiven her escapades as long as she has come back and made all the promises and then the cycle repeats a while down the road.
After a confrontation this past week following a session in her PSTD-group, she is asking the question (and perhaps rightly so?) if I’ve been actively contributing and manipulating her by allowing for the regressions to continue in order to boost my own ego and maintain my role as the hero and bigger person – and I honestly don’t know that to think anymore….
I’ve googled narcissist so many times the past week that YouTube algorithms have picked up and I ended up seeing a 1h40m videopodcast with Dr Ramani Durvasula and afterwards I felt nacious…
I’ve found articles stating that trauma can in fact lead a person to act narcissistic as a defence mechanism, but I don’t know if that’s what I have been doing, or if the NPD-traits have been part of me all this time?...
Has it made me ‘feel good’ to be bigger person – in a twisted way yes, but not to the extent that I have schemed for it to repeat itself and put her in a shitty situation again. Or maybe I have, by not standing my ground on my demands, and passively allowing a new situation where I get to be her only option?
Thinking about my life before her I know that I have been both selfish and egocentric, sometimes even to the extent that I have done some bad choices, and I can easily point the finger to someone or something rather than taking full accountability for my own shortcomings…
I tested/qualified for Mensa membership once, and I know I have some of the typical traits for the high IQ-group – I get bored with trivial and menial tasks, I want to problem-solve and fix things, I want to learn new stuff, I tend to think that a lot of people are stupid and that my solutions/ideas/methods are better, and I can feel ‘superior’ in some settings – and it definitely has happened that these traits and side of my personality have come across in full force to my partner – both in situations where she has been intoxicated and objectively all over the place, and in day-to-day life when we do things together in a variety of settings – but I never thought of the cause of this kind of ‘superiority-complex’ to be NPD – but the shoe really seems to fit – and it scares the shit out of me.
Our relationship has in some way become my trauma, and reading the book she is using in her PTSD-group has really gotten me thinking about the last 15 years. The fact that I have been rational, logical and very likely – naïve - in my approach to handling various episode and thinking that ‘as long as….’ – then; I’ll be good. I got this. I’ll fix us. As she’s now getting to a point in her treatment that has her asking a lot of questions to her experiences I can certainly see why she is wondering if I have allowed this to happen, or even did it malignantly in order to keep her down, and put her in a position where I have been the only viable option – ‘since nobody else could possibly want me’.
I’m planning to get in touch with a professional therapist to get some clarity on this, but knowing that there is a potentially real chance of me having been an accelerant to causing harm to a person I care deeply about is not producing a lot of good right now.
Am I completely off my rocker?....

I've seen quite a few posts regarding getting caught in the act and thought I'd throw in my two cents worth. Dad, Daughter, and Dog The back screen door slammed shut as Kellie returned home from her evening jog. Her father Al sat in his easy chair behind his newspaper. That you, honey? Kellie snorted, It better be or there'll be trouble! Rex, her shepherd dog, made klik-klik noises on the linoleum with his nails. The two had been inseparable since he arrived in the house a tiny puppy. Can you come in the living room for a minute? Sure. She walked in lean and lithe, barely five feet tall, tiny breasts held in a sports bra and tank top, tight bottom in running shorts, her chestnut hair tied back in a pony tail. She had been an active child from the moment she could walk with ballet and gymnastic classes from her preschool years. Kellie had been only seven when her mother had died. That's when she took up running, although running to or running from, she was never quite sure. What is it, Dad? Al closed his newspaper, folded it, folded it again, and dropped it into his lap. He stared at it as he began. I wasn't sure how to say this until just now. He looked up into his daughter's eyes. I saw you go into the garage. Kellie froze unbreathing. She gripped the back of her father's chair to steady a light-headed swaying. What? Through the kitchen window. I saw you go into the garage a little while ago. While you were supposed to be out running. B-b-but I was out running! Her grip on the chair tightened. Maybe for twenty minutes. Then I saw you go into the garage. You didn't come out right away and I didn't know if something might be wrong, so I went out and looked in the window. You didn't even look up. You were too busy helping Rex gettin--. Kellie's knees gave out. She crumpled to the floor. Silent tears ran down her cheeks. Rex trotted over and licked her face. Honey, please don't cry. You're far too old to spank even if you were doing something wrong. He laid his hand atop her head. She slumped over to rest her cheek on the arm of the chair. Remember what I told you when your mother died? She nodded slightly. You said, 'you and me, pal.' I remember. That's right. And we have to be honest with each other, and trust each other, and love each other, no matter what. S-s-so you're not m-mad at me? She sniffled. Rex licked her nose. She gently pushed him away. No honey. I am *concerned*, which is a different thing. Why are you having sex with your dog out in the garage? She looked up smiling and weeping at the same time. Da-a-a-ad! she said as if he were telling the United States Congress that she still enjoyed playing with dolls and coloring books. Her cheeks reddened. Honesty and trust, remember? So, how long have you and Rex been... uh, fucking? He wasn't sure he should drop the F-Bomb into the conversation. He trusted that it felt right. Just a few months, ever since Barry and me broke up. Barry and I, he corrected without thinking. But why out in the garage? It's dirty and dank and I can't imagine it being much fun. She looked up at him wide-eyed. Honesty. And trust. She nodded. I thought I had to hide it because, you know, sex, um, fucking with animals, is so wrong. Having released her own F-Bomb in return seemed to remove tension from the air. It was all well and good to talk about open honest trust, but reluctance to use so-called bad words tended to dampen things. Wrong? I don't think so. You love Rex, and he loves you. If he didn't want to screw you I'm sure he would let you know, wouldn't he? He caressed her head, neck, and shoulder. If you don't mind my asking, who made the first move? Kellie giggled. He did. You know how horny he's always been. That night after Barry and me, and I, broke up, Rex came into my room and laid his head in my lap. He looked up at me with big eyes, like he knew how sad I was. He jumped up and started licking my face. I hugged him. I remember feeling his, um, his cock against me while I rubbed his back. He got down and I petted his head against my thigh for a minute when he suddenly started sniffing between my, around my pussy. I wasn't wearing any panties. When his tongue started licking me it all felt so good I couldn't shoo him away. I just sat there with my legs spread wide apart and let him do whatever he wanted. He licked me until I came. She sighed happily and laid a hand atop her father's on her shoulder. I think it was the best night's sleep I've ever had. The next night I thought I ought to return the favor so I tried to suck him. I really tried but Rex wouldn't cooperate. I tried to get his front paws propped on the bed while I sat on the floor under him. I tried coming at him from the side on all fours. Whenever he sat or laid down his cock seemed to shrink away. It was when I was on my hands and knees that Rex finally ran around behind me and licked me, then he hopped up onto my back, and I thought, 'Oh my God, he wants to fuck me!' and I knew I wanted to let him do it. He wrapped his front legs around me and I reached back to help him get his cock into my pussy. He thrust and humped and danced on his hind legs until I felt his hot cock slide into me. Mmm, it was so good! I don't know how long we kept at it. I came twice before Rex hopped off me. We didn't tie together that first time, though. I'd seen dogs in the street stuck together and I thought maybe I was bigger than a girl dog and he couldn't tie with me. She squeezed her father's hand in delight. Wrong! The second time we did it we tied and I thought I was in heaven. I just kept coming and coming! She looked up into her father's eyes and smiled. Oh Daddy, it's so good to be able to talk to somebody about this! Al bent down and kissed his daughter's forehead. Honesty, and trust, and somebody to talk to. That's why I'm here. That night Kellie came into the living room in her terrycloth bath robe, Rex as ever by her side. Getting ready for bed, honey? Sort of. Um, Dad, she began. He looked up. Her eyes sparkled and she had a saucy grin on her face. I was wondering, um, if you might want to watch me again. Watch you...OH! he said. He sucked in a quick breath and answered without hesitation, Yes, honey, I would. She grinned. She kept her eyes locked on her father's as she untied her robe, shrugged it off, and tossed it onto the couch. Well? She was naked, gloriously naked. Her tight little breasts were topped with small hard pink nipples placed unusually high. Her belly was flat. Her hips gently rounded. She kept her dark brown pubic bush cropped short, not shaved like so many girls. Al appreciated this. He didn't much care for shavers always thinking, who wanted to see a pussy that looked like it should have a diaper on it? Well? she repeated. He looked up from between her legs to her smiling face. You're beautiful, honey. Absolutely beautiful! Without conscious thought his right hand fell into his crotch and he began squeezing his hard cock through his pants. Kellie noticed what her father was doing. Her smile grew. You're not just saying that because you're my daddy? His eyes roamed up and down her body. He swallowed. I mean it. Honest. She glanced down at her father's busy hand. She bit her lower lip in delight before squatting down next to her dog. C'mon Rex, she whispered. She pushed her nose against his. She laid a hand on his neck. Rex licked her face twice before she opened her mouth to allow his long red tongue inside. Human and dog both whined softly in pleasure as they kissed. Kellie squatted with her thighs open, her pussy on display for her father as much as her own balance. After some eternal minutes she slid a hand down between her legs. She slid her fingertips up and down her pussy lips, teasing herself, teasing her father, wetting her fingers with her juices. She closed her mouth, turning her head away she touched his muzzle with her pussy-slick fingertips. Smell it, boy. Taste it. You want some more? Rex's tongue cleaned her fingers before he dropped his head down to nuzzle and lick her open pussy. Yes! That's it. Lick me, baby, lick me! Her father's eyes were glued to the activity between his daughter's thighs. His hand continued squeezing his hard cock through his pants. She studied his face. His lips were parted. His eyes were glazed. I've never seen a man masturbate before, Daddy. Take off your clothes for me. He stood quickly disrobing as if in a trance. Ooo! Your cock is beautiful! she cried when it popped into view. He seemed to come to. He looked into his daughter's eyes and smiled happily before he sat down again openly stroking his erection. Kellie reached between Rex's hind legs to grip his cock. He did a quick two-step dance. He stopped licking her pussy and tried to run around behind her. Are you ready to fuck me, Rex? she asked almost as much for her father's benefit as the dog's training. You want to fuck, yeah, fuck me now? She fell forward onto her knees and elbows with her ass raised high. She slapped her ass cheeks a couple of times. Get on. Get up! Time to fuck, Rex! Fuck! He understood those words, the insistent tone of desire in her voice, the heady smell of her sex, and the ache in his own. He lept onto her with his front legs wrapped around her waist as he humped his wet pink cock against her skin. His eager movements scored a hit after four tries, sending his bevel-tipped cock into the warm wet depths of her pussy as his thrusts began. That's it Max! Fuck me good! Yessss! Kellie wasn't accustomed to being quite so vocal with Rex. The fear of discovery was gone now. She found she enjoyed talking through her pleasure. God, baby, you're so...! Al croaked softly. His hand still stroked up and down his cock slowly and steadily. The head was becoming shiny. Slippery. His hand made little noises as he worked on himself. He looked at her face. She was staring at his hand on his cock. He knew she was watching him masturbate, something so intimate and personal he couldn't imagine anyone ever watching. Not even his wife, Kellie's mother, had ever seen him jack off. Of course he had never seen anyone fuck a dog, either. Daddy. Come here. Please. she gasped. I want. Your cock. Give me. Your cock! Suck! It! He stood of trembling legs to walk four steps before falling to his knees before her. He sat back on his heels. He scooted forward until the tip of his cock brushed her soft cheek. Kellie balanced on her elbows before gripping the base of his cock in one hand. She licked the head clean before engulfing it with her wet mouth. Al nearly screamed in delight. It had been a long time since anyone had blown him. His daughter was very good at it. He leaned back onto his hands. He gently began moving his hips to fuck her mouth. Kellie wrapped her arms around his waist, her little tits flattened against his thighs, her nipples like hot pebbles on his flesh. Al looked Rex in the eyes and winked at the dog as they shared the human bitch between them. It didn't take long before Al could feel the hot push growing in his belly. I'm gonna come, baby! Gonna come soon! She began sucking even harder, her head bobbing faster. She wanted him to come in her mouth. He could feel it building, building. Gonna! Come! Gonna...gonna! He fell back onto his elbows and thrust his hips up savagely to press his pubic hair against his daughter's lips as the first spurt of his orgasm exploded. She took it without a whimper before pulling her head back until only the tip of his cock was between her sucking lips then slamming her face down again, and again, and again, milking his cock with her mouth until he finally stopped. His body went slack for several minutes as he recovered. He watched her raise her head until his penis fell from her lips. She smiled with her eyes half closed She laid her head down on Al's lap for a minute moaning softly until the dog turned, standing quite still butt-to-butt, his cock now swollen tight inside her pussy. She breathed heavily through her open mouth. Oh! Com-ing! Touch! Me! Dad-dy! He caressed the back of her head, her neck, her shoulders. He reached down her spine as far as he could. He slid his hands beneath her to pull her hard nipples. Everywhere he touched her, she moaned and sighed happily, whispering, So good. So good. Coming. She remained tied to Rex for at least ten minutes before he pulled out and trotted off to lick himself. As soon as she was free, Kellie blindly crawled up her father's body. He worked his slightly stiff legs into a more natural position and together, father and daughter, they snuggled sweaty and satisfied with their life together. ...And They Lived Happily Ever After! Read more