Re: the empty and the console
Maybe it didn't matter who the glitch was. His identity could be unimportant, that was true. Maybe finding which pieces connected didn't matter. But, that wasn't true.
He could be a grounded thing that someone else had decided. He could be the pieces someone else executed and ran, the chunks that seemed to sort of match, the ideas that kind of connected. But he could also be something he built on his own, something he made. He could write the commands. He was already starting to. He could find something worth caring about in the people who saw one matched set of him. He could do that and still build something else.
didn't go back. Fragments of his chest were green and smart, were green and worn, were red, were black. He didn't recognize the stranger who cried into his shirt, who thought he was a friend, but he knew someone who might feel the same.
There was something. Was that feeling? Was that pain? "I don't know who you're talking to," he said, at last. He couldn't cry. What was there to cry for? How could he possibly know? He was gathering unease by the moment. His stomach turned over and he felt the discord of knowing something and not knowing it. He felt the cold wet pit of fear.
The window exploded into a hundred shards of glass. Gunfire. The snipers had found them.