Can't keep a promise if you don't remember making it. Can't keep a promise if you don't remember making it. Can't keep a promise if you don't remember making it. Can't keep a promise if you don't remember making it.

Can't keep a promise if one of the two parties involved in it never existed.

"Maybe this is the one promise I mean to keep. Maybe I don't care anymore."

Children carry knives. The phantom sting of it buried to the hilt still burns in their abdomen, in their mind. Perhaps this will do instead. The slow, protracted destruction of everything they're meant to be.

"Or maybe it's just that everything's so dirty." Does that ring any bells, perhaps? They've got an entire world's worth of code running through their head, strings upon strings of it. It's all blistered and burned together like melting plastic. No one ever scraped that out of their brain. No one ever had a means of patching that away.

So it's not so hard to call that up. Say the words and the numbers, prefaced with an asterisk, spat aloud:

"17979: * Everything's so dirty..^1.&* If I could erase everything^1,& I would./
17980: * Ohhhh^1.&* Don't get the wrong idea^1.&* I don't want anyone to die./
17981: * People turn to dust when& they die^1, and that's hard& to clean up.../%%
17982: * Don't turn to dust./%%"

So don't turn to dust.

Humans do not get that luxury.





And this time they go across the throat.