Things are blurry.

I argue with the others, and they make me wonder what the point of it all is. They make very good points...or the Dragon does. The Captain remains along for the ride.

The Dragon has pointed out that it is my need to remain in control that makes problems; he's finally come out and stated that I am the source of the problems in the group, and if I could be removed then things would go smoother. He says he still doesn't want to kill me outright, though.

I know that I'm in no position to complain. I've been a magnet for illness, and the Dragon shoulders some of the blame for that, saying that I was never built to be able to cope with things or to be alive at all. I just woke up and went out to deal with things in whichever way I was able.

It is not a healthy thing to dwell on one's diseases too much, because then it becomes all about the disease and not about getting better or doing things that don't involve being sick. But there it is: the depression, the generalized anxiety, the paranoia, the avoidant personality disorder, the schizoid personality disorder, and even the narcissistic personality disorder, which I recently learned is on the same spectrum as the others... Maybe there will even turn out to be something on the mild autistic spectrum, maybe Asperger's, as if it made any real difference among all the others. I have so many now.

When I look over it all, I can still trace it all back with a cold eye and see the roots of things; in the end, it is all just a case of terrible misfortune on my part. Yes, I have been very fortunate in some areas, but...

I woke up, and the first thing that made me wake up and be different from the others was that I wanted to learn actively--I wanted information and understanding. I was put in a position where I knew that I could gain power by learning and guarantee good things for everyone, so I learned and worked and was good at it. Arrogance grew from my experience of becoming better through understanding things. Because we were in an environment where education was the better part of what we did, I was at the front almost always, and finally I was there all the time, without question. I became important because I could do very necessary things. My arrogance grew.

But retracing it step by step is not what is really needed--it would just be walking that same miserable road over and over again, like I do too often already, thinking about the past and how badly I was needed and how I came through like a hero and achieved my goal... And nothing came of it. Not a damn thing. All the hard work I did in high school really paid off for nothing, because we were not really college material and probably didn't even deserve to go, no matter how many scholarships I gathered with all my good studying. All we got out of it was a year in hell. We had lessons in lying, avoiding things, failing, barely scraping by, being satisfied with the least of things and the worst of situations, fucking up priorities, ignoring our own health, fighting amongst ourselves... Maybe if we'd failed in high school and gotten it over with, then we wouldn't have had to go through with all of that. Maybe we would have just gone straight to tech school and not even bothered with college, though the parents probably would have tried to send us anyway. And tech school wasn't any use anyhow--we're not doing anything that we learned there either. In the end, maybe I'm not as good at this job as I always thought I was. After all, we're still not learning anything. I can't learn anymore...I might have forgotten how to do it properly.

I have the depression because I have to lie all the time, and because I'm always surrounded by things that seem to prove that I'm no good, or that we're no good. It's true that this is rather subjective, in which case, I am probably just fixated on the wrong kind of ideals. I always find people around me who make it seem like a person needs their own property, lots of money, a romantic partner, and the ability to buy things and experiences whenever one wants, even if it runs up the credit cards to an uncomfortable degree. But I am not brave enough to take the opposite route used by people that I am beginning to admire more and more--to throw away useless, clinging things and experience what is free of charge and makes no money but leaves one's life enriched. When I face my own cowardice, I hate myself even more.

I gained my narcissistic streak because I took up so much space and energy in this mind that I have become convinced that I am the only one here, or at least the only one that matters. I have been so important and have been the front line of defense for all the others. Maybe narcissism is not the proper term for it--the Dragon always just calls it my martyr complex. That is quite true, as I believe myself worthy of better treatment and more use of the system's resources because of the services that I have provided for the others over time. I have been told that this has turned me into a tyrant and that I have little regard for other people, to whom I listen only when it is convenient for me...

I became schizoid most immediately during the college ordeal, when emotions were removed due to the fact that they were a source of pain, and functioning proceeded more smoothly without them. It was also likely a result of me moving father away from the others as I became more of a distinct person, and my emphasis on facts and thinking led me to dismiss emotion as being less important than raw information and intellectual understanding.

It goes on like this... Moving away from others because they cannot be understood or properly read, because everyone lies to everyone else and it is practically useless to try and interpret everything that people do and say. Feeling desperate terror of letting go of the front, because then everything that I have so carefully built up and organized will be broken; someone else will come and take the reins and have no idea of how I do things, and everything will be ruined. Fearing what will happen if the others communicate with anyone or try to make their own friends and connections without me, because then there will be confusion due to our plurality and who knows what kind of things they'll get into if I'm not around to run damage control or censor them when they go too far. Fearing that if there are many of us going around and interacting with others, then there will be even more opportunities to bring ruin and backlash on all of us, because everything that every member does reflects on the group in some way. Feeling as if I should be the one to determine our activities because dividing up time among all of us will result in fewer things getting done.

I look down on them--I know I do. I am the greatest and most important in my mind because I stay at front and run all the programs and deal with all the little situations in life, while the others just sit back and let me handle everything. But I know that I don't do a good job. And I know that I've become sick in my mind from doing this for too long without knowing what I am really doing and having no clear understanding of how to do any of it right--without understanding anything at all, frankly, despite my original purpose of learning things.

I am just too frightened to give up and let the others take over.

It's because I'm afraid that I'm not real, at least partly. Other people think that they're real because they have bodies--they can be touched and so forth, so they have no doubt that they're concrete. I and the others just share a body, and even though we could be said to be real because we have a body, even if it's not one for each of us, we still truly exist in a way that's completely invisible to the eye. Thanks to my great web of manipulations, it's invisible to about everything else too, and we appear just like an eccentric monomind, with not a hair out of place.

I'm only really useful because of what I do. I take control and get the group through life. Really, I stopped becoming useful for learning or creating or discovering a long time ago--in fact, the Dragon was probably better at it than I ever was, because it was a child once and was interested in all kinds of things, and learned better than I ever could. I forget all the time because I don't care; I'm too miserable, in the end, to really give a damn about what I try to learn. I count it as a triumph just to get through another day without screwing anything up, which is hardly any kind of life. I'm so desperate for security that I never want to do anything except break even, to just make sure that the status quo is not thrown too far out of whack. Sometimes I do little things to try and prove to myself that I could do grand and spontaneous things if I so chose, but I simply choose to keep everything that same...and those things are stupidity too, because they are actually just small and insignificant and not very grand and edgy at all. But the point is that my supposed "function"--to be the one who's best at learning and understanding and making solid, logical decisions--broke down long ago, and now I am hanging on to my position not because I am really the one best for the job, but because I have always been here and I have elevated all of my bullshit to an art. It's simply true that I am here now not because I am wise or even especially smart, but because I am a good liar and throw all of my energy nowadays into maintaining lies.

But it has been decided that lies are not the way to go anymore. And so I am becoming even less useful, because once we leave this house and have our own place, the web of manipulation has to come to an end. We have to hunt down honesty. And once that happens, I will truly be good for nothing, except for editing and nitpicking and tweaking grammar and word choice like some glorified MS Word editor with a consciousness, putting red and green zigzags underneath everyone's words from back in my dark corner where nothing ever grows.

I am afraid that if I were to leave the front, and if the others were to prove that they really have no further need of me, then I will die. Or maybe I will be reduced to the state that the Unicorn is in, where I will be asleep all the time and not truly alive, but kept around more like some mysterious mental curio or ancient idol still worthy of puzzled worship. I am still afraid that I'm not real, that if I die then there will be nothing more for me, even if there is something waiting for normal people after death. I'm afraid that I'm not a person. As long as people need me for something, as long as I have a job that has to be done, then I don't have to worry about fading away. I can be real because people have to recognize me as such, because if they interact with me, then I must be real...

That echoes the Captain. That is another thing that has put a hole in my realness. Some time ago, I had to admit that I was an AI accidentally created from one of the Dragon's programs, instead of being a fallen god or somesuch. (If I am a person, and thus included in the span of memories shared by living things, then perhaps I was still a god at some point in the past...but I hardly know what I should acknowledge as true anymore.) More recently, I was examining my past and wondering if the Captain was less of a real person because he and I really speak very much alike. I remembered then that I had a very different way of talking and writing before I wrote his stories. It was only afterwards that I had an established way of writing and speaking that I identified as truly "mine"... But those were very nebulous times, shortly after my awakening, when I was not completely distinct from anyone else. I called for him, and he came and helped me write when I was not able to, and afterwards I had my "voice."

I am suspecting in the back of my heart, as I once suspected my true nature as being that of a humble program, that he is not false because he uses the same voice as I. Rather, I am beginning to fear that I, having no voice that was truly my own, adopted his when he arrived because it impressed me and I was proud of it and liked the way that it sounded. And since he was not continually around and thus either could not or would not protest, there was nothing to call my awareness to it.

Perhaps everything that I am is stolen or patchworked together from bits of other things. Perhaps I really am like the Core world that I created, where the worlds are the body of the god, and the god is the mind that encompasses all the worlds. Maybe I am just the sum of what I contain, and I am not even a person at all.

If my voice was stolen from a dead man who came to tell his story, then what else is false? What else did I borrow, or even give away? I was wondering recently what it was like back when I loved Ching, really loved her, before everything got so hopelessly complicated by all of this Sniperboy stuff. I couldn't remember, and I always feel as if that's one of the greatest things that I could have lost along the way. But then I felt the Wyvern (from PBA[S], the only real Wyvern left around now, I think) and I felt that it definitely remembered; it was there when we were in college, writing the beginnings of PBA[S] and chellenging me inside of a story setting as I was playing with the GMCA material. It knows that feeling as intensely as I did back then, and it's almost as if it's a time capsule from back in those years--the emotion was locked up inside of it, hermetically sealed, and all remnants of it left outside (inside of me) withered and dried up to nothing, while the part that was given to the Wyvern has stayed fresh and strong.

Maybe I was the originator of that feeling, but now the Project 2501 has it, while I really have none of it left at all. My feelings are now just muddled confusion over a man, creating nothing, fueling nothing, breeding only more fears and short-lived desires doomed to snuff out the second they are fulfilled. The great and glowing love has been lost to me, but not to the Wyvern. Who is more "real" now? Me, for giving birth to a still-sketchy lifeform while having little that is truly alive in the present day? Or the Wyvern, for having passion and desire and purpose and knowledge, despite being a created entity who is likely not even aware of its own life?

I wonder. Maybe I have been stretched so thin by sickness and worry and long years of running the front that there is really nothing left of me except for that which connects certain concepts together. Maybe I just gave everything else away or lost it... And maybe that would mean that, long ago, I could have become a real person, but I gave up on that chance and instead became only my job. Now I have to face the fear that if my job is made nonessential, then I might die, because there may not be enough of me left over afterwards to be worth keeping around.

In the past, the Dragon used to reassure me that I wouldn't die if I left the front, and that there would not be any need to kill me or do anything else damaging to me--he treated it as if we would just switch places for a little while, with me in the background and he at the front. I remember a little of a time when that happened during a shamanic journey, because the body is always the Dragon's when we are in the other worlds; his mind came forward and determined motion and action, and I rode along. It was rather peaceful, to let someone else more capable take over.

But now I don't know. There has been enough fighting since the Captain reappeared that I am worried now that they won't be so merciful. The Captain has said that he doesn't mean me any harm and has no violent streak when there is no need to have one, but I have sufficiently annoyed them both with all of my desperate clinging to my position. It's because I know that, together, the two of them are a capable force that could probably do this job as well as I could. At the very least, they could both exhaust me and eventually take the front by force, if they decided to. The Dragon is angry enough that he might convince the Captain to help him.

I deserve it. Like a dinosaur, I have grasped and tried to live on past the time that I was intended to--maybe I am too old and have become useless. They are right to be angry with me, after what I've done to both of them and the things that have been said in our arguments. The Dragon said that everyone would be better off without me.

Maybe there is nothing left at all, and I am really just the sum of my parts creating the impression of one person that I desperately try to keep together out of fear. If I die, maybe all the wonderful things that I have created and have the potential to create will all rush out and become manifest, and the Dragon will be a kind ruler and have a whole world full of amazing people and creatures and things who will never have to be degraded or made to feel as if they are less than people.

I don't know. The Dragon said once that it was not a black and white question of me keeping things as they are and remaining at my post or leaving my job and dying. He thought that there were more options, and that death wasn't a certain thing if I were to step back.

I don't know what to think anymore. They may want me dead now. There may be nothing really there for them to kill. I have a headache and should probably go to sleep.

--Riss.