By the morning, Bunny had left as silently as she entered. Leaving Leo with me, of course. He’s wrapping his tail around my ankle again. I should probably look up how to take care of a cat.

I sleepily hobbled to my PC and booted it up. I’m currently running Arch Linux on decade old hardware. It’s fine. I could do better, but it’s fine. I open Midori and search “please how to take care of cat?” on DuckDuckGo. Litter boxes, scratching posts, forbidden surfaces. I think it’s okay if Leo stays here, he’s been polite. I like the litter box idea, though. There’s a pet store a couple blocks from my house, so I’ll pick one up along with some food and pet shampoo and little bow ties and stuff. The necessities. I threw on a dark hoodie and the first pair of pants I found lying in my room and headed out.

It was a boring trip, I’m not going to waste our time describing it. Leo looks happy with his food, and he understands the litter box concept, I think. I’ve been keeping my eyes on him. He’s a smart little guy. Already getting all up in things he shouldn’t, like the curtains and cabinets. He doesn’t seem to like hanging out in my room, though.

I can’t blame him, it’s really messy. I never really clean up because I have no idea where to put all my things. I don’t have a dresser, so my clothes are thrown all around wherever. I’d put them in my closet, but it’s full of spare electrical parts.

I’m really into Arduinos, it’s one of my only hobbies. They’re little circuit boards that you can plug things into. They sell them really cheap, and you can make them do so much! I make all kinds of things with them, like... Uh.

Okay, I don’t really know what I make with them. I have kits full of circuit boards and lights and microcontrollers and fans and displays and sensors and motors and everything else you could imagine. But... even if I start building with an idea in my head, I always seem to just end up connecting them at random. I can’t explain it, really.

There’s one here, plugged into the wall. It has a small fan blowing on it, presumably to keep it from overheating. It has a 7-bit display that spells characters, sometimes. I know I was the one who set it up and programmed it and everything, but I have no idea what it’s doing. I don’t remember how it decides which characters to display on its tiny screen. I don’t remember how it decides when to show them. I don’t remember when the hell I made it at all. But still, I don’t want to unplug it. Electricity’s cheap, it looks kinda cool, and what if it’s important?

There are dozens of these mysterious boards around my room. One of them I actually tied into the controls of my overhead light. Every once in a while, it’ll flip the light by itself. Again, I don’t remember why, or what controls it. It just ended up that way. I don’t know what to tell you. Having motivation without purpose is a weird state to be in.

If you stopped thinking right now, would you still move and do things? Could you breathe, watch Antiques Roadshow, file your taxes? Could your heart even beat? It depends on how you define “thinking”. Thoughts are one way to take an action, but not the only way. You make decisions all the time without spending a single thought on them. When you bump your hip into the table and say “ouch”, you probably didn’t do it for any particular goal. You didn’t roll it around in your head, weighing the pros and cons of your choice. You didn’t think, you did. And did is what I do. I don’t know what I’m doing when building my machines, but maybe I shouldn’t have to, right?

There is a flaw in this mentality, though. Well, you know, there’s a few. The obvious one is that most of the time I don’t really benefit from any of the contraptions I make. Sometimes they’re even annoying, like the scary lightswitch thing I mentioned. I don’t care about that, though. Purpose is secondary to me, exploration primary. But even then, I might not be exploring well with my method.

When I was telling her about my weird hobby, Rose introduced me to the idea of reality tunneling. The concept is pretty simple. Us humans aren’t very good at being unpredictable. When in the same situation, they make the same choices. We form habits and do the same thing over and over, never changing. We go to the same stores, the same websites, and talk to the same people. Day-in, day-out. It’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do, of course, but your reality becomes a tunnel. Only a specific palette of scenarios and stimulus will be a part of your existence. It, theoretically, could affect you down to the base level of your brain. Maybe, due to the choices you’ve made over and over, the neurons in your mind have you locked in an endless loop. You’ll only ever be able to experience what you’ve trained your brain to accept. Having a brain that can think about itself is a good thing, those self-referential pathways through your grey matter is what keeps you alive. But too little new stimulus, and the recursive loops of neurons in your head might coil too tightly together—blocking out anything unfamiliar as if it didn’t exist at all.

It’s hard to escape this so-called reality tunnel by yourself, someone (or something) has to push you out of it by force. That’s what Rose says she’s been trying to do for me, lately. It’s part of the reason why she sends me so many fucked-up “research essays”. She says she has faith in my brainlessly designed machines, and that if I expand my reality to include more stimulus, my machines will do more. Possibly more than my current reality would allow them to. It all sounds kind of dumb, but I don’t really have anything better to do.

I’m out of school, I work part-time at a grocery store to afford necessities, and live in the house my uncle owned before he died. He left me and my two cousins houses in his will. He owned a lot of land, but no one really knows how he got it. He gave us the deeds though, and I think it would be better to accept the blessing and just not question it.

I’m not really working towards anything in my life. I make enough to live, and that’s good. I just live in a bubble, maybe a tunnel. Nothing new happens by itself, and I’m not making it happen, either. I think it would be nice to step outside myself for a change, feeling what it’s like inside someone else’s world. Someone who’s life is painted in the palette of colors I never picked for myself. But that’s a little worrying, too. It’s not like I’m having a bad time here. Tragedy happens, but it’s rare. I don’t want to be arrogant and give that up. But I can’t help feeling like I need a purpose in life, you know?

Later, I was lying on the couch, not doing anything, when I felt a vibration under the cushion. I reached in and pulled out a phone. It’s not mine. It’s an old iPhone something, and the screen is horribly cracked. I turned it on and there were huge lines of green pixels from its blunt trauma. One missed call, one unread text. This is probably Bunny’s phone.

Just for the hell of it, I swiped up. There was no security or anything, so it just let me in. Her background is just a shade of grey-ish blue, and her apps are all the stock installs. Okay, I know I shouldn’t look at her text, but I’m going to. It’s totally an invasion of privacy, I know, but I’m too bored not to look. Besides, I think walking into someone else’s house without any warning is by far the bigger offence. (I’ll say that to myself, but even if she hadn’t done that I’d still probably look.)

Oh, huh.

It’s from Rose. Both the call and the text. I didn’t know they knew each other.

The message just says “the bar on 17th street at 8 (pm)”.

I guess they’re hanging out. Looks like Rose types to Bunny slightly differently than she types to me.

I knew it was wrong, but I opened the full text history. If I had thought about it first, I probably wouldn’t have done it. I would have respected their privacy and acknowledged this as being rightfully off-limits. But once again—I wasn’t thinking, I was doing.

So I looked.

The previous 17 texts in their history were all Rose sending Bunny pairs of names and addresses, with no context.

No responses from her, either.

They were all names I didn’t recognize, but the addresses were all close by.

What the hell does all this mean?

I think that was when the walls of my tunnel started to crack.

Mina