Lies Told To Children: Pinocchio

The Security officer smiled. I will never forget that smile for as long as I live.
My parents rushed in and hugged me and told me I'd been so brave and so good and scored in what would've been the upper 5th percentile twenty years ago for the age where I started to object and not go along with it anymore, and explained about the whole concept of Civilization needing to test some kids now and then, to find out how well we were doing environment-wise and heredity-wise on people's kindness and resistance to conformity-pushed cruelty; and our little village was settling an important conditional prediction market from twenty years earlier, that had millions of labor-hours wagered on it; and that children growing up to be good people was a vital figure-of-merit for all of Civilization and lots of big policy decisions turned around it, which was why it had been worth specializing our village to do Science about that, and they hoped I understood all that and wouldn't tell the other children right away. There wasn't actually any such thing as Security, and if there ever was it would mean that it was time to overthrow the government immediately.
____
	I stood and listened to them explain themselves. They eventually got around to telling me I was getting paid 2 million labor hours for this, more than my parents were being paid, “because children are sapient beings too”. Those were their exact words.
	“The reds are adults! You’re being tested! If you don’t see me later it’s because they’ve imprisoned me and are doing horrible things to me!” No one interrupted me. The adults let me explain what happened to me in full, and then they confirmed it. They didn’t act surprised. I thought there was an 80% probability that I couldn’t actually spoil the experiment and that this was another test, but I didn’t want to risk it. Some of the experimenters tried to have a talk with me but I didn’t listen to them. They were too good at lying; they could probably trick me into doing or thinking almost anything. I told them I didn’t want to see or speak to my parents anymore, and asked them to put me with people who felt the same way about being an experimental subject that I do. I still don’t know if my parents cared about me in any way that I would consider meaningful. I hope they do, the price they paid for what they did to me is more real that way.
	“How can we figure out who would be a good match for you if you don’t tell us why you didn’t like the experiment?”
	“Just let me talk to the people who oppose the experiment the most strongly. Out of a billion people there must be someone.”

11
	My new parents claim to agree with me that the experiment is horrific and should never happen again and that the people responsible should pay some sort of price. They think that price should be a demotion. My innate sense of real and not real tells me there’s about a 10% chance they are who they say they are, with the remaining 90% being mostly made up of Governance Actors-scenarios. The story is that they were both a bit weird so they didn’t get heredity subsidies. But they had enough money and they wanted to spread their genes so they had a child, hoping he’d be weird like them. But he turned out to be a normal dath ilani. Regression to the mean remains a constant and all-pervasive problem, as ever. When convenient, I will behave such that my new parents will not regret adopting me, because I don’t want to punish them for helping me if they are what they say they are.
	I’m not going to school anymore, obviously. There would be no point even if I wanted to. Being inside a school now gives me intense stress reactions that would prevent me from learning anything. I can learn what I need to know by myself, if I want to.
	To reduce the opportunities for the conspiracy to manipulate and experiment on me, I have rejected my new parents entreaties for me to accept help from a Keeper. Or a non-Keeper mental health interventionist, for people who refuse to meet with Keepers “for one reason or another”. I do not want to be Kept. I do not want to be meddled with. I want them to be stopped. I want to know the truth. I want to be left alone.

12
	I’m told that the other kids are all fine. According to outward appearances, they and their parents are all greatly enjoying their money.
	I think I have a different relationship with money than others. I want to be a human and not a toy, and that’s not something I have figured out how to buy for any amount of money. The only expensive thing I’ve bought so far is soundproofing. I’m a screamer.
	On the other hand, maybe my relationship with money isn’t so different. I’ve heard people claim that money does not compensate for the pain of a soul-dead loved one in any measurable way. In my case I was the one whose soul was lost. There are people who think I’m being dramatic or insane. They have destroyed me, so there is no me who can stop them from thinking those things. I don’t exist. At least I have enough dignity not to deny that fact to myself. Unlike some non-people, maybe. They did something horrific to the real me and left his shadow to carry the weight. I would not have done the same to them. Not just because I don’t enjoy lying to people, but because I don’t exist.
	My new parents took me to a Governance Overthrow Festival. Supposedly the reason I’m not banned from taking part is because Governance banning people from taking part in the Festival would set a dangerous precedent. There were a lot of actors there, some more obvious than others. No opportunities for me, unsurprisingly. I plan on attending every year and taking from the experience what I can anyway.
	The Keepers and those who belong to them continue to ask me to give them my soul, even though they already have already taken it from me. I’d rather die. I’d rather they die too.

13
	They’re repeating the experiment. With higher payouts. And they’re going to do some subtle pre-experiment and mid-experiment analysis of the children to make sure they don’t react to being lied to their whole life like I did. I am 80% sure there will be subtle manipulation of their minds to make them more compliant, as well. They know what went wrong with me and they know how to fix it.
	Even if I knew where the experiment was, it’s too heavily guarded for me to disrupt it. A few articles get published in obscure newspapers by people who claim to object to the experiment. Against my better judgment, I write and publish an objection of my own. Almost everyone supports the experiment. From their perspective, what is one human life destroyed weighed against the opportunity to torture children for fun?
	They’ll never stop. Probably not even in the Future. If the Future is real, it will be an eternity of whatever will pass for adults preying on whatever will pass for children. I can’t even fully imagine it. Nor do I want to, I do in fact have enough to worry about. Maybe someday aliens will come along and end it all. I don’t actually want the entire human race to go extinct. Nobody sane could blame me if I did, but I don’t. I don’t know why I don’t. Human extinction is a thought that is objectively worse but subjectively less painful than the stuff I think about every day.
	My new parents claim to be worried about me.

14
	Stop treating children like toys. You’ve proven your superiority and your limitless power, just please stop treating children like toys.
	I had a stress reaction at the Governance Overthrow Festival. Someone tried to help me. She asked if I was an actor. I think she may have been a plant.
	I’ve been wondering about whether there was much child abuse in pre-history. Maybe the current era is some valley between larger amounts of child abuse in the past and unfathomably large amounts in the future. Maybe that’s the purpose of the screening, to create this era as a transition point. The old era couldn’t become the Future for some reason. They couldn’t figure out the technology. I realize that doesn’t make any sense but I’m committing it to memory anyway because my instincts are telling me it has a grain of truth in it.

15
	My old parents moved to a different city where they don’t let in people like me. And they had another child. A daughter this time. Even though given how I turned out they certainly didn’t get any heredity subsidies, they did receive enough money from the government for what they did to me to raise her. I wish I could protest outside their house or something. Although even if I could, it would probably get me exiled from Default. I really really don’t want to get exiled from Default.
	I think most people don’t really care about the experiment one way or the other. They just go along with it because it’s popular and it’s what the powerful people want them to support. It’s hard for me to conceive of, but maybe they’re just comfortable with being powerless and abused. Maybe they like it. Maybe I can find someone who will like being abused by me. Or, more likely, an actor who will pretend to like being abused by me to extract information from me that should be private.
	I don’t actually want to abuse some random person. It would probably bring up very strong painful associations, for one thing.

16
	For recreation, I play in a game group. I found a group of people with a preference for only small amounts of conversation on only non-weighty topics. That suits me, it gives them less opportunity to mind manipulate me. Of course, because it suits me so well, it increases the probability that it’s not real. Most of them are more intelligent and better at focusing than me. But I try harder and spend more time practicing. And there are games designed to be fun for people of disparate intellects to play together.
	Even though the group is a mix of different ages, it’s a little too much like school.
	A lot of weird people become reckless investors. Thinking about money is more than a little painful to me. I guess because of what happened. Or maybe what happened to me had the effect on me that it did because money isn’t medicine for me, unlike everyone else.
	If I had killed myself immediately after they dropped the act, would they have continued the experiment? Since they wouldn’t understand why I did it, they would have had to drop it right to be safe, right? I should have. Even if they managed to save my life, I could have just repeated “cancel the experiment” over and over and given them no other information. I think there are limits to what I can accomplish if I’m not willing to sacrifice my life. And that limit may be “anything at all worth counting”.
	Or I could have waited and then clawed out an actor’s eyes and then told them I was confused and that I didn’t understand what I was doing. That might have convinced them not to do it again. It would have been worth taking the chance.

17
	Now that I’m out of my new parents house, I send a letter and an email to my old parents every year on two different random days letting them know I still hate them. I don’t know if they ever reach their destination.

18
I think I have a different relationship with the idea of hiring a sex worker than most people. Apparently there are transparent self-administered interventions that can make me okay with doing that. I don’t really want to be okay with it, I want to be human.

19
	If all of Civilization is an experiment, then maybe I should try to find out where the experiment is being run from. Top candidates: Under all or some of the Domes, in a nature preserve somewhere people almost never go, under the ground. I don’t think they could be running it from the moon or another planet. I guess it depends on if space travel and sending messages between planets is as inconvenient as I’ve been led to believe.

20
	Supposedly the next experiment was completed. Supposedly none of the kids reacted like I did, even the ones that failed.
Some people can be happy being whatever powerful people want them to be. I can’t.

21
I will not go into the Quiet City. That would be a surrender to the violators.

22
It occurs to me that I might be granting them some sort of victory by suffering. I’m going to try building an imaginary second life for myself, highly detailed, and spend some reasonable portion of my time there.

23
I’ve been getting into cooking. I have enough dignity to know I’ll never be that good at it. I guess if I started a restaurant it wouldn’t need to make enough money for me to live on, strictly speaking. Would they let non-actors eat at my restaurant? Maybe they should do for types of cooking what they do for non-professional music genres.

24
My sister went missing. They claim that no surreptitious head remover was contacted. My new parents pretended to be sympathetic to her killer so they could see if I would admit that it was me. At which point presumably they would have turned me over to Governance. They actually tried that. They were willing to sacrifice our relationship just for the chance to do something nice for the people who treated me like property. Are they people, or are they just Governance tools? And they’re scared of me too. It hurt at first, but being feared is just not as bad as being laughed at. Being feared is communion. It’s two minds making contact. Being laughed at is lonely. Lonely is not the right word. I don’t know how to describe it.
	The initial court prediction market thinks there’s a 46% chance I’m guilty. Despite the fact that I was in a different city at the time, and that I’m neither intelligent enough nor competent enough to pull something like that off. Do they think I have some secret network of friends somewhere? I don’t know whether to take the 46 at face value or treat it as a signal of some kind. Maybe someone powerful just really hates me. I don’t know if that’s better than being their experiment animal or object of amusement. It feels more sincere at least, which is nice.
	I wonder if she’s actually even dead, or if Governance faked her disappearance and she’s living in a secret base somewhere. The case will continue to rise through the courts, but it’s unlikely that the percentages will rise enough to bring me above the guilt threshold.
	Assuming my sister’s supposed disappearance is all some Governance mindgame, I have no idea what its purpose might be.
	Maybe if they think I or someone who agrees with me might have killed her, their motivation to repeat the experiment again will decrease by some marginal amount. Assuming the people with power actually care about children dying, which is far from certain.
	They asked me to fill out a secret survey about whether I was responsible for calibration reasons. It’s utterly pointless in my case since I already know they’re willing to lie about anything. I thought about declining to either confirm or deny, but instead I answered with a denial.

25
I dreamed that I found my sister. I told her that our parents couldn’t be trusted and begged her to escape with me. I begged her so much and so intensely that I felt like my throat would break. When she finally answered me, her voice was not that of a little girl. Not a pleasant dream.

26
I wonder if I’d feel more like a human and less like a toy if I actually did kill my sister. Maybe that’s why they made her appear to disappear. To make me ask that question. Maybe they’re trying to make me into a killer. Just to show that they can make me into anything they want and not just the savior of a lie.

27
A man who lives a three-minute walk from my building sent me a letter of support regarding the theft of my childhood for no reason. I didn’t respond, but I did read it. Eleven days later he was supposedly badly injured in an Alien Invasion Rehearsal Festival and supposedly had to have reconstructive surgery on his face and vocal chords. Looking back over the letter, it seems like it may or may not have hidden messages I could tease out with a little bit of puzzle solving.
My tormentors are persistently insane, and insane in their persistence. What is it about me that makes me a target for these people? Is there no one else they can extract amusement from? Is it more fun to keep playing with the same toy over and over until it is worn by use into a shapeless lump?
If I want to defeat them I guess I should try to solve the puzzle and see what information about their way of operating I can extract from the solution. But I can’t scar myself further by involving myself with one of their games. I just can’t do it. I won’t torture myself for such an ephemeral benefit.

28
The man from the Alien Invasion Rehearsal Festival came to my door one day. I told him I didn’t want to speak to any tools of Governance and he laughed at me and told me he didn’t work for Governance and I screamed at him to leave, which he did.
I really hate being laughed at.

29
Why don’t I want the human race to go extinct? Honestly, why? Has the aversion to species annihilation been grafted onto my brain as a safety feature for the experiment that is my life? It’s surprising enough that they think I’m capable of killing someone and leaving no evidence, but do they really think I’m that dangerous?

30
It’s been said that that I am the way I am because I find it easier to be a victim. That my suffering is because I’m too lazy to try to get better. It’s not an accusation I can refute except with a self-experiment. I’m going to spend a year and a half letting go of the pain and resentment and just trying to be happy in some normal way that would be accepted by society.

31
I tried. I really tried. I actually shocked myself when I realized how hard I was trying. Even though every single new thing I did gave them a thousand chances to deceive and manipulate and violate me, I tried. I never once suspected that I was that desperate to be normal.
I know how to be friends with people who are very different from me, because those are the only people there are. Other people don’t have that problem, and they don’t like the idea of learning. I’m on the wrong side of an equilibrium. Every human coordinated to arrive at one meeting place, and I’m on Pluto with no space suit.

32
It’s one betrayal after another, densely packed, from here to the horizon.

33
Spent the year traveling, trying to find any hints of a possible secret base where the people who control everything live. Hopeless effort, and I hate spending the money, but it’s better than staying indoors. Dolphins are nice to spend time with, in small doses.
If my mind was healthier I would earn my own money and then donate the money that is painful to think about because of the circumstances in which I received it to an amoral supervillain. Or try to buy some important artifacts and then destroy them or something.
The truth is that I don’t really want to destroy any artifacts. I don’t know why. Inanimate objects are peaceful, I guess.

34
More traveling. The south pole is cold. I’m glad nobody who people might think I have reason to kill seems to have disappeared during the time periods I didn’t have an alibi. Perhaps surprisingly, I prefer screaming in my soundproofed room than in the middle of a nature. One time someone heard me when I thought there was no one around. He laughed a little when he realized I was okay.

35
I saw a supposed child walking with his supposed mother today. I almost screamed at them. I need to spend more time with my second life.

36
I don’t know how to get people to stop laughing at me. There is no one who I can be who will not be laughed at.

37
I tried to learn lucid dreaming to deal with the nightmares but the first night I tried I had a dream that made the old nightmares look like flowers. Something designed by someone who knows about all my most specific forms of suffering and spent time coming up with a poetic new formulation.
Dear probably-just-my-subconscious,
Message received. You win utterly. I’m backing off.

38
Some interesting things happened in my second life that fit together almost like a story, so I decided to write it down and edit it into a short piece of fiction. It could never be published, even if it was good, because the lessons it gives to the reader aren’t ones that the controllers happen to like, I don’t think. But supposedly I won’t be exiled from Default for posting my story anonymously on the Ill-Advised Consumer Goods section of the Internet, and in fact I wasn’t. 684 people read it, which I’m happy with. There aren’t that many people on the Ill-Advised Consumer Goods section after all. Some people started to discuss it and I almost read what they wrote but then I realized how stupid that would be and didn’t.

39
Someone wrote some secondary fiction based on my story. When I read the first paragraph, it gave me these intense sickening and headache-inducing chills. Mixed with fear. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt like that. Usually I just feel angry and dead. I’m grateful for the variety. But I didn’t force myself to read the whole thing.

40
Quite by accident, I discovered that my kitchen knives cannot cut human skin unless I apply a large amount of pressure. They look normal, and they cut meat and vegetables pretty much the same as they always have, but when I put them against my own skin they might as well be wooden blocks. Apparently Governance thinks I am on the verge of attacking someone. Even taking into account the warped minds of Governance, this seems pathological to me. Why not just put tracking devices in the handle and non-lethally subdue me if I ever leave the house with them? Does proving they’re smarter than me in ways that are as garish and complex as possible really mean that much to them? Did they make a large number of these knives for some other reason and then ended up with some left over? If some obsessed Governance fan were to attack me in my home, I expect that I would have a very difficult time defending myself with my fake kitchen knives, in which case I would probably die. And then they would laugh at the unexpected punchline.
Apparently I need to start being more proactive using my microscope on things.
Also, although I didn’t have high hopes, I did spend some time thinking if there was any way to destroy comedy itself. Impossible avenues of thought do sometimes lead to more practical realizations in other areas.

41
While hiking I met someone who claimed to have abducted and killed my sister. Supposedly it was quick and painless. She said she’s also responsible for a secret campaign of sabotage targeting industrial and transportation machinery that has claimed over 500 lives, some of them soul deaths. She told me the exact number of each category, but I didn’t retain the information. Also, she appeared to be a very attractive woman. Apparently she wasn’t worried about suspicion that might fall on her if people saw her not wearing faceblanders. I guess she could have had some convincing excuse prepared. She was young too. Or at least she looked young. She told me that she was obsessed with me and what happened to me and wanted me to live with her in her lair, safe from the all-pervasive influence of Governance. I guess subtlety wasn’t working for them, so they decided to go for flashiness instead. At least this latest ploy is somewhat entertaining as well as traumatic.
	I politely explained to her that I thought there was a higher than 90% chance she was an actor trying to test me or trap me or extract information from me and that I would not be playing along. The pointless omnipresent urge to try to claw out her eyes before she could block me was pleasantly weak in this case. I have tried to learn martial arts ever, but I’ve never taken an in-person class. So the likelihood that I could successfully injury her, even with the element of surprise, is less than 5%. Especially considering the greater than 70% likelihood that the martial arts I learned was a planted fake, intended to keep me weak.
	She tried to tell me that the potential benefits outweighed the potential risks. Subtle mind manipulation. Indirectly planting a seed. I politely apologized and said no. She told me about a shuttle crash she had planned that would come in four days so I’d know she wasn’t just making it all up. I thought about telling her that she didn’t need to go to the trouble on my account, but I thought better of it. Instead I told her that if this was an experiment to see if I’d prevent a shuttle crash, consider me to have given a result of neither positive nor negative for reasons of having seen through the experiment. She looked sincerely sad to hear me say that. Or maybe not. I did try a little bit to get good with micro-expressions, it seemed like a good skill to have. But I don’t really know. I have mixed feelings about faces.
	She left me a way to contact her. One codephrase for if I have been compromised, one for if I haven’t. Of all the indirect-devaluing I’ve ever received, the fact that they think I’m foolish enough to fall for this is… a nice change of pace, I guess. Empty and fun. The absence of pain.
	The shuttle crash arrived as scheduled. Although it could easily have been faked. In the newspapers they publish the number of wounded and dead, but they never say if there were any soul deaths. I think they want to see who takes the time to look that sort of thing up, so they can log those people in their surveillance database. Satisfying my curiosity was not worth the risk. My mind is my only private place. According to the newspaper, it was a pretty bad crash. I thought about going there to witness the crash live, or the immediate aftermath in person, but decided against it. If she was real, Governance might notice my presence there, and it could end up being a clue that could lead them back to her. But I still don’t think it’s likely at all she’s real.

42
	It occurs to me that maybe there are multiple organizations manipulating and deceiving me. The conspiracy that the actress works for might be separate from and unknown to the main one.
	If she’s real I hope she’s happy. That’s more than I’ve been able to say about anyone else before. She seemed really happy with herself. If she threatened to kill herself or go into early cryosuspension due to a broken heart I probably would have been forced to come with her to her lair to stop her. If I killed myself it would be the ultimate expression of their victory over me, so I guess I’d want to stop her from killing herself as well.

43
Something pretty awful happened in my second life but I got over it.

44
More traveling. Spent some time in the desert camping outside of Domes. And some time in the desert camping not outside of Domes. Traveling is nice  but the more places I visit the more it’s starting to make me feel like a kid again. Like the world’s just a terrarium and there are eyes with human intelligence watching me through the glass. I feel like everything’s fake all the time but the terrarium-feeling is different.

45
I’ve been experimenting with weird sleep schedules. It’s actually very fun.

46
There is nothing I can do to cause trouble that wouldn’t make me want to throw up and that would also not risk getting me kicked out of Default.

47
Spent some time studying computer engineering on a lark, even though I’m much too old to make any really substantial contributions. I didn’t get very far with it. Interesting stuff though. Kind of a weird field.

48
One thing I can agree with normal people about is that antinatalists are utterly incoherent. And mentally disabled in a metaphorical sense meant to insult the person targeted with the metaphor. The people who aren’t antinatalists but sympathize with them are baffling to me. The funny thing is that antinatalists might actually be correct in their thesis, but only because I’m correct in mine. I’m going to have to think about that.
I’d like to see some antinatalists throw a surprise celebration for someone whose significant other’s brain exploded.
Actually, that could be a story I could publish on the Ill-Advised Internet. I guess it would make more sense if the woman whose brain got exploded was pregnant. But it feels unnecessarily dark that way, even if it does make more sense.

49
Maybe there’s no such thing as antinatalists. Maybe they just made them up so they could be villains in stories. That would be kind of interesting/amusing. The nonexistent advocating on behalf of nonexistence. I like them more now.


50
I almost contacted her. I can’t believe I almost contacted her. Even though I know she’s not real. So maybe I really am as weak and foolish as they think.

51
The official statistics claim that 1.25% of people are so happy that they retire to early suspension with no serious physical health problems. Even reading some fiction and testimonials on the subject, that number seems preposterously high to me. I wanted to meet with some of them and try to talk them out of it. I really didn’t want to be laughed at, but I thought maybe their laughter would be different.
I went into the Quiet City and I managed to be put in touch with a woman who was going through the screening process. I just told her about myself, leaving out everything that Governance might not already know about me. She asked me some questions, most of which I didn’t answer due to aforementioned secrecy re: Governance. She told me that my story had been more helpful to her than any of the stuff she talked about with the Keeper, and that she was probably going to delay her cryo-suspension and try some more things based on ideas she’d gotten from my life story. Apparently Governance thinks that if I wasn’t successful talking someone out of early-suspension on my first try that I would have given up. Even though I should call myself fortunate that they are underestimating me by that much, it kind of hurts. “Hurts” is the wrong word. It doesn’t feel good.
Maybe they don’t think I’m the sort of person who would give up without really trying. Maybe they just think I have such a high opinion of myself that I wouldn’t think there’s anything unlikely about me being successful on my first attempt. I’m not sure how I feel about people thinking I have a comically high opinion of myself. I’ll have to think about that.
Or maybe she wasn’t an actor, just a woman lying to me for reasons of her own. Or maybe the Keepers are just extremely bad at their jobs, intentionally or otherwise, and that it’s actually very easy to talk someone out of it ending the first part of their life early. That seems like a difficult secret to keep. Maybe. Maybe lying to a whole planet is what’s actually very easy.

52
I was masturbating while thinking about the saboteur and I heard a woman’s laugh and I could tell they were mocking me for masturbating to a woman they created. I’m not intelligent but I know laughs. It was not the sort of laugh one makes when their friend has said something funny. It was the laugh of someone taking pleasure from the pain of another. And it left the impression of a prank being revealed, because of the fast tempo and the way it peaked at the beginning and then got softer and then peaked again at the middle, as different parts of the mind of the laugher caught up to the culmination of the joke, and then bounced against each other. I’ve only had two possible-auditory-hallucinations in my life and both of them were completely innocuous. And neither of them were in the past 24 years. I checked for a hidden speaker and didn’t find one, not that I could find something they didn’t want me to. Mocking me for that… I don’t even know what word I would use to describe that. It’s just not sensible.

53
I dreamed a mentally disturbed person came to kill me and I had to kill him in self defense while a surreptitious head remover watched. When I won I was so full of adrenaline and rage that I attacked the SHR. He had some sort of weapon that was meant to stun me, but it went right through me and the electricity from the weapon reacted with the pain and poison in my body and it made his head soft enough for me to crush with my bare hands like a piece of fruit. And then I took his weapons and they became part of my body and I went around killing people. I was halfway down the block when I realized I was dreaming, so I just sat there and waited for Exception Handling to come. They used this weapon that projected gas onto me that made me forget I was dreaming and then they took me down deep underground and buried me there. And all the way I was screaming at them at the top of my lungs that it was just a dream, but because of the gas I didn’t believe myself. And then something else happened underground before I woke up but I didn’t retain the information into the waking world.

54
I don’t think I feel the same way about abortions that everyone else does. But I get it, I guess. Maybe I’m just having a lifelong psychotic break and all the things I spend all day thinking about have only a fairly loose connection to the outside world.

55
Supposedly my last parent was cryopreserved today. The healthier one of each pair of parents chose to live out their healthspans and not get cryopreserved simultaneously. Good for them. Very dignified.

56
Someone went missing from my second life. His name was Milbal. He wasn’t one of the main characters but he wasn’t unimportant either. I’ve spent  12 days looking for him and I can’t find him. I didn’t know that was possible.

57
Most of the adults who were personally involved in my round of the experiment are probably cryopreserved by now. Assuming the cryopreservation thing isn’t just some lie they tell to adults to make them subdued and risk-averse. I’ve looked through the names of all the soul dead from then up till now and there’s no record of anyone who might have been involved with what happened to me among them. It wouldn’t have been much, but it would have been something.

58
In pre-writing times, when a proto-human killed a proto-human of a different family, the proto-human’s family would punish the first killer by killing him. Then the family of the first killer would attack the second family, and the cycle wouldn’t stop until every member of one family was dead.
Now we have Governance. Governance is too big and too impersonal to punish, so the cycles of killing and punishment are made into something neat and manageable. It’s so clean. Sterile.

59
The truth is that I’m just never going to be happy until the experiment is canceled and all the people who abused me are soul dead, and maybe not even then. And that’s never ever going to happen. I’m not even ever going to know for sure what happened to my sister, and I was actually very curious about that. She’s a background lore character in my second life. She’s the child mayor of a secretive city for children. There are no adults, and whenever one tries to enter the children turn into many species of animals and work together to defend their society. The city doesn’t figure into my second life that often because it doesn’t involve itself with outside affairs.

60
There are some things I wanted to try before doing what I’m going to do soon, but I don’t want to give any outside indication that I’m wrapping things up. Drugs from the Ill Advised Consumer Goods store, a Very Experienced Sex Worker, stuff like that. My in-case-of-souldeath-will says to donate the rest of the money they paid me for my childhood to nature reserves where humans almost never go.

61
	People say hatred takes too much energy but they’re wrong. I’m wrong about a lot of things, but I’m right about this. It’s not hatred that sucks the life out of you, it’s trying to be human every moment of every day for years and years. And I’m done. I don’t even want them to pay anymore that much, I just want an ending.
	I’m ready for souldeath or cryosuspension or whatever comes next. If the purpose of this experiment is to make me into a killer, then they have finally succeeded. If the purpose of this experiment is something else, then maybe they didn’t. If there is no purpose, then they win because they got away with it. Or maybe I win, because I’m strong enough to fight back, even though it’s hopeless. Even though I think what I’m about to do probably won’t shift anyone’s decision-making because it wouldn’t make sense to incentivize people to protest like this. Even though it will only give Governance an excuse to enact more cruelties and seize more power.
Maybe I’ll be able to pull this off. A prank that is as unpleasant to them as the one they pulled on me is to me. Maybe they know everything and I won’t actually manage to execute what I have planned. Or maybe some totally unforeseen third thing will happen.