missing pieces

strife

I am not a killer. Whatever they say I've done, well, I may have done it, but it doesn't represent who I am.

Yeah, I know. You'll have judged me long before you read these words. Just another desperate guy who crossed that line and got blood all over his hands. And anything I say will just be rationalization. Sophistry.

I'm not who you think I am. I know this because I barely know who I am.

The story, the story that people have been telling me so much, I've had to accept it as real, the story is that I did this to get my folks out of the Stacks. That mythical thing that everyone talks about, like a looming shadow. In this so-called republic of ours, that's where you go when they think you're a terrorist, and somehow, not being able to pay your debts has become equated with strapping on some anti-matter beads and trying to run into a colonial building, and vaporizing pretty much with everyone within a city block.

I don't work for anybody. There have been these messages…

I know I'm not the only one. You know Dark Archon. You've seen their so-called leader on TV, the visage of so-called Jack Magnus. I can tell you I've never met him, and have good reason to believe he doesn't exist. I don't know if the colonial government really thinks he exists, or if it's just part of their own psy-ops.

The thing that is troubling—the thing that has sent my world flying apart—is that I can't find my birth records. I can't find my parents' founder records. The people who are supposed to know me in Valle don't know me. The street I'm supposed to live on isn't where it's supposed to be, and the house that I was supposed to have lived in isn't either.

There is a memory of a girl…everything falls apart. They probably never happened either.

Now there is a possibility: that what I thought was real really is real, and what I've done has simply caused selective dramatic brain damage. They have a really old name for it. Fregoli syndrome. People and places who you've never seen before seem familiar. And then there are tons of conditions that cause people to confabulate. It is human nature, when faced with disparate pieces of information, to weave it together into a story.

I've told the story too many times that the people I have met think it's true. And they've told it back to me so many times that I think it's true.

In some philosophies, that's criterion enough for truth.

So I'm adrift, with blood on my hands, having wrought what I have wrought for reasons that probably aren't true.

God have mercy on us all.