The Black Hole of My Unconscious

“So, what did you see? In your dreams, I mean. Yesterday was no ordinary nightmare. I’ve never seen you look so… troubled and hurt. You should have seen your face yesterday, after I woke you. Your eyes looked lost, like you didn’t know where you were or who you were, and the way you spoke to me… You sounded like you hadn’t slept in weeks.” A look of concern grew across Lailah’s face. Her blue eyes could never hide the sincerity in her voice, no matter how hard she tried to flatten her girlish cadence. “I promise you can tell me.”

Millee stared into her cup, ripples forming in the tea with each nervous tap of her finger. Her reflection stared back at her when the liquid settled again, emerald irises as green as the grass she used to love back on Earth, rosy lips as natural as the clear polish on her nails. She wasn’t usually one for expressing her feelings or expounding upon the things that bothered her, no matter how serious it might have seemed at the time, but something about today was different. There was a genuine pit that had formed in her stomach; she felt sick, like she subconsciously knew something wasn’t quite right… But what?

“There was a room, like the office my parents used to use back on Earth. I’d forgotten about it for years, and I don’t really know why it resurfaced now of all times, but it was the room where… they died.” She wiggled her toes off the edge of the bed, the warmth of the tea bleeding through the paper cup and into her hands. “A mirror too, but when I looked in it, I didn’t even recognize myself and, at times, I think I was you…”

“You think or you know?” The voice from the previous night had returned.

She spilled the tea over her lap, the searing liquid etching burns into her thighs in the same spiraling pattern as the campfire flames from her childhood, the memory she still wasn’t sure was hers. She jumped from her seat on the bed only to immediately slip on the spilled tea as she landed hard on her tailbone. A deep ache coursed through her bones like an all-consuming fire—white-hot and painfully obvious. She winced, biting her tongue in an effort not to scream obscenities at the top of her lungs in pain—not that it would have mattered. The impact had expelled the air from her lungs, leaving her breathless and writhing on the floor, hunched over, gasping for breath. The entire space felt warped, like the walls were closing in, trying to crush her lungs like dry leaves in the fall.

Without thinking, she reached an arm out, pulling a hoodie she’d draped over the foot of her bed down and over the spill, watching as the white cotton turned a sickening shade of crimson. The tea was brown—she’d taken a sip earlier, and it was the same chocolatey color when she’d gazed upon her reflection. Never, at any point, was it red. Panicked, she whipped her head around… just to face Lailah mere inches from her face… but it wasn’t Lailah. It had her face, but it wasn’t her.

“Look at those burns on your thighs,” the thing before her said. “Don’t they remind you of the wounds you carved into your mind the days after you arrived on LLS1? When you finally broke down and admitted fault for the atrocity of your sins?” it taunted. Its eyes were no longer the pristine emeralds that were Lailah’s—they were now a subtle shade of red, glowing in the shadow that had been cast over Millee. “When they found you in you home that night, covered in blood, why do you think they decided to chip you then?”

“You— You’re not Lailah, and I don’t have to answer your stupid questions—! I don’t know what you are, or why you’ve been tormenting me, but I’m not going to play this game anymore!” she exclaimed through struggling breaths. “I will not let you twist my memories and unconscious thoughts into some kind of weaponized… weaponized—”

“Weaponized what, Millee? The proof is in the hoodie you threw over the tea, the same one you wore that night, stained red with their blood. They were martyrs, and you slaughtered them like the pigs you claim the Committee, the government—whatever excuse you think you can manage—would have done regardless,” it said. “You don’t get to choose the innocence and purity of the color white—that doesn’t belong to you.”

“SHUT UP!” Millee screamed. She swiped at the air in front of her, just grazing the cheek of the monster that had taken Lailah’s form—the monster that had chosen to weaponize her mind against her. “I destroyed that chip last night—! This shouldn’t still be possible! I know the Committee is watching me, reading my thoughts… They were,” she whimpered, “so why are you still tormenting me with her face?!”

“If calling me the monster that you believe I am helps you cope, the monster your mind is telling you I am because it refuses to accept the truth, then call me a monster, by all means, but you should know this.” It lowered itself onto all fours as it crawled toward her, nipping her ear with its soft lips as its whispers tickled the inner canal. “We are one and the same. I am you, and you are me.”

Millee tightened her fist, nails digging into her palms. “Don’t speak to me like you’re my best friend, trying to incriminate me for something no one can prove that I did,” she threatened. “It’s not going to work, not on me. Not this time.” She snubbed her nose at whatever the thing was before her, though she knew it was a lie—she was deathly terrified of what she truly couldn’t remember. “Take her face off before you ever speak to me like that…”

The monster tilted its head, like it was confused by her words. “Her face?”

It paused for a moment, almost machine-like: no rhythmic motion from the rise and fall of a human breath, its face was as blank as a painter’s canvas, its mouth was as stiff as a poker players’, and there was no mental tick—no outward expression of inner thought anywhere in its expressions.

“Ah. I see what the issue is. I must have forgotten to change after our little chat yesterday, unlike you humans who lie to each other under the guise of virtue-signaling and a fake ‘moral code’ you so cling to. Oh, you know, all of the double-meanings and half-truths that pour from your mouths like the tea you spilled earlier. How do you know your supposed ‘best friend’ didn’t poison the tea you drank or your morning coffee after only a few hours of sleep? How can you trust anything you think you know?”

“Because I trust she wouldn’t do something like that!”

“Is that right? And what is trust to you? Does trust have to mean something is true, that the things we expect to hear are positive affirmations of our innermost desires? What happens when…” The monster trailed off, an elongated smirk crossing the face it stole from Lailah. “What happens when the ego can no longer mediate the human id or superego? What if this entire conversation is some twisted fantasy you’ve conjured up because your reality-control can no longer mediate the things you fear most, every little thought that has ever crossed your mind?”

“What are you talking about? If I could control my own reality, don’t you think I would have done that a long time ago? I’m not some inhuman amalgamation! Some artificial creation! You act as if my id has lost control of the rest of my psyche, that it’s acting on its own accord, that I’m not even me.”

“So you don’t remember how your heart used to pound against your chest with pure ecstasy-driven excitement at the things you thought you could control? Twenty-one was a big year for you. In fact, you might say it was the beginning of your derailment, when you first thought you could just manipulate the world around you to do whatever you desired.”

“My derailment…?” The words echoed through her mind for a moment before her face turned a shade of white that rivaled snow. “O-of course twenty-one was a big year! That’s when I got my job here and officially became a c-citizen of LLS1,” she stammered. “There’s nothing more to it! If you’re insinuating that I’ve been living a lie, that I’m at fault for what’s happening right now…”

The monster grabbed her jaw, turning her head around to re-capture her attention. “How are you going to lie to yourself like that? I’m right here, you know?” it said, examining every inch of her face. “We share the same mind, after all. I know what lurks behind the veil you think you’ve cast. This face doesn’t bother you because that girl is your ‘best friend.’ It bothers you because you because she is everything your id desires, and you know taking advantage of her felt good. Don’t you enjoy your job? The way she buys your morning drink every day? The way—”

“What are you trying to say? That you’re my id gone rogue? That I have no control over my own desires? That I desire to take advantage of people for my own gain? How can you say that something so despicable is what I desire? What brings me pleasure?” She fired question after question, adamant she wasn’t the lie the thing before her was making her out to be. “If you’re so certain you know what kind of trauma I’ve locked away, then why not use that against me? Why not go even deeper if your intent is to break me,” she said through pinched cheeks. “Do it if you’re so convin—”

A sudden growing ache tore into her stomach, mild at first until it grew stronger, changing from a dull cramp to an abrupt, stabbing pain—the same pain from the previous night. She stared the monster in the eyes, unable to comprehend the devilish grin that spread across its face as it relinquished control of her jaw. Slowly, she lowered her gaze to her lower abdomen where she laid her eyes upon the hilt of a small knife now stuck inside her flesh. She wrapped her hands, shaking, around the hilt, preparing to remove it, but she couldn't summon the strength. A bloody pool expanded out from under her position on the floor, the source the crimson river that flowed from the new puncture wound.

“See that? You bleed because you’re an imperfect creation, made to take the fall for the failure you were always bound to be.”

She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, hoping that, somehow, some way, the nightmare her reality had become would just end already—she was nearing her breaking point. What would happen if she reached it? She could already feel her grip on reality slipping like she was caught inside a fever-dream… but the infection that had spawned the fever was winning. Reality was slowly fading into unreality—something that both existed yet never existed to begin with.