Anomie.01

Characters/Origin: Bel (Year Zero/The Alters)

Local Network World: 0333

Date/s: 31/08/2026

Her bed was warm. All…rumpled blankets and clean, unsorted laundry punctuated with plushes and haphazardly strewn items she hadn’t bothered to put in their right place. It felt like a metaphor for self. Something that was approximately comfortable - if chaotic - to inhabit, but…probably broadly unacceptable from the outside in. Defined by executive dysfunction and laziness. Intermittently cohabited by other versions of herself.

The fundamental problem she had, she suspected, was that mental health was something almost entirely defined by social incapacity. By how functional you were not. And the social world was inherently flattening, right? It stripped away nuance of self as a necessary cost of being known by people who didn’t have the capacity - or the time, energy, desire - to genuinely know you. Bel routinely wondered how much crazier she’d have to be for someone - whether a professional or just…a concerned friend, potentially - to tell her what the fuck was wrong with her. Because it had to be something. Functionally, she was able to move through the world with an…approximate lack of friction. Even post-transition (which had surprised her), she could do the job, have the conversations, handle the minimum requirements for being perceived as…a baseline human? But something was clearly wrong. Clearly. From the inside out, something was clearly wrong. And she’d done the therapy, she’d done the self-excavation work, and it all came back to the same things: trauma, and regret, and ‘manageable’ symptoms of a bunch of things she wished felt as manageable as they, apparently, externally appeared to be. But all of the euphemisms and metaphors core to her writing applied to her in the literal: topmost layer of a corpse-pile of dead past selves, surrounded by Alternate selves...refractions of 'her' through what wasn’t or what could have been; echoes of the past, dragging her out of linear chronology and into a meshwork of disorganised bubbles of sharp, soft, and resonant moments arranged according to no apparent ordering system.

How crazy? What was the metric? How outwardly insane would she have to get before the cracks, and split seams, and damage became…legible to the world, the way it was to her? Before someone would tell her what was wrong with her?

She suspected there wasn’t a good answer to that question. Largely because she only spent…well, a limited amount of time as identifiably ‘herself’. And yeah, that was the ‘flattening’ problem of the social world, she supposed; that people loved definitions that parsed, and sums that resolved, but…people in general, they weren’t those. Which was something she sort of guessed was…necessary? Simply from a place of capacity? You couldn’t hold other people’s complexity in full, so you generalised, right? As a matter of course, you had to reduce people to archetypes and roles and relative selves, interpret them through socio-psychological lenses, and as recursions of past patterns. You had to - there wasn’t a judgement attached to the observation - but still…it did sort of inherently mean that your ability to be known was, consistently, functionally un-gestalt. Which…she suspected…would have been…less painful if you had a cohesive, confident, singular sense of self. If you looked at yourself and saw…one. Rather than a kind of a quorum. Overlapping, inter-bleeding emotional landscapes of self. Sometimes solid enough to invoke individuality beyond you. More often, curled into you like scared children. Craving a sort of annihilation via reabsorption into singularity. Which she couldn’t help with. She wished she could, but…she didn’t have control of these things. Her brain wasn’t a tool she leveraged, it was a world she moved through. Just like them. It wasn’t her fault she was…approximately better at it. It didn’t mean she had any more ability to help them than the world outside had to help her.

She had this…thought. That maybe, if she named it outright - claimed it - it would dissipate. Or solidify into something she could actually manage? But that wasn’t really how these things worked, was it? It was tempting to view psychology like Tetris, like…you get a cohesive enough ‘row’ of self-insight, and the problem just…blinks out of being? But in her experience, it was more like dirty laundry. You add more to the hamper and all you get is a fuller hamper that’s more work to wade through. Eventually. Executive function permitting. Assuming other parts of you didn’t have other, less day-to-day-functional plans.

No. It was fine. It was all just fiction. She liked sci-fi concepts that did cool metaphor-stuff, and that was that. She was just…depressed and stupid, probably. If it was really a problem, she wouldn’t be able to hold things together the way she managed to, surely? The strain did feel like it was building, but that was probably just her being melodramatic. She did that. Melodrama, that is. Very ‘her’. Very ‘Bel’.

She glanced at her phone. Set a timer. She had a good twenty minutes before she needed to actively start getting ready for work. May as well sleep a little more.

“Right, so…” Bel muttered to herself, slowly making her way along the Main Street of West End. She had ended up over-sleeping her alarm by about twenty minutes over the twenty minutes she’d allowed; rushing to throw on whatever vaguely worked. She’d settled for stockings and a jean skirt; a button up, slightly-too-tight blouse over a slightly-too-loose cardigan. Bare minimum stuff. Then she’d left the house, and…what the fuck?

The Main Street was a place that, on the quietest of days, at the quietest of times, was flooded with sensory input. Traffic sounds…distant arguments. Laughter. Movement. Bustling restaurants, leafy Cafes, and crowded footpaths. Those…very specific thrift stores that were designed to look mildly rundown while charging department store prices. The ‘cool’ tattoo places. Gentrified as fuck, but…never not lively. So the stillness was jarring, to say the least. The thing about unexpected sensory absence was…the mind couldn’t exactly process it. It didn’t take long to start hallucinating. Nothing extreme; mostly just over-processing sound and movement. Displacing focus to the peripheries, and flinching at mundane diegesis. Bel started to hum something. She wasn’t sure what. Just…white noise to soothe the Nothing.

She couldn’t imagine what could have happened. Well…she could, but…not so quickly. And normally she had a sense for these things. But she couldn't feel what might have happened? And yet...something clearly had. It looked like a Seven-world, but…without the chaotic scars to evidence how it got to that point. Just...a complete and total lack of people. Somewhere a ways away she could heard a crow insistently cawing. Maybe it was bothered, too. Trying to fill the absence. Bel made a snap decision about going to work. Or rather...not. Because clearly that would be an insane thing to do, right? More insane than she felt like she could realistically afford to be, at least, given the situation. She looked around for a scooter. Found one. Tapped the app on her phone and took off.

The entire ride to Southbank was equally, eerily deserted. Only the sound of the scooters electric motor whirring…the occasional squawk of a nearby bird, of the crunch of gravel under Bel’s tires interrupted the quiet. She'd had this vague idea about going in the direction of the Helios Foundation building. Nothing specific, just...it did tend to be the locus of this sort of un-grounded bullshit.

She passed the silent train station, slowing instinctually as if expecting traffic as she curved towards Grey Street. Nothing. But she braked hard as she reached the parklands, squinting into the distance at the series of tall, wooden structures, partially obscured behind the bougainvillea-lined walkways.

Bel slowly, warily began making her way towards the unfamiliar series of standalone installations. As she got closer, she could see they extended further; just a series of big, rough, wooden poles and planks, lashed together with coarse rope. Sparse first, and equidistant from one another, but…densifying into a small forest of them as she drew closer towards where parkland met riverside. Hundreds, maybe…hulking ‘X’ shapes. As she approached the closest one, she tentatively ran the pads of her fingers across the dense, splintering wood, feeling the resistance of it. There was more rope, further up on the beams, seemingly nailed into the wood, hanging off in tapering loops. It looked…stained, the pale brown rope soaked through with patches of red-brown. She started to reach for one of the upper ropes, but her brain caught up to her body and she stopped. Arm outstretched, she watched her hand slowly shaking, suspended in mid air.

“What the fuck, right?” She heard from behind her. Hand still shaking, she slowly forced herself to turn to face the voice.

“Kade?” Bel murmured.

“Huh.” ‘Kade’ cocked her head to the side, arms folding slowly across her chest, left eyebrow raising in uncanny tandem with the left edge of her lips…revealing just the barest hint of white. “That’s interesting. That’s who you see when you look at me?”

Bel had no rational explanation for the feeling that, almost the millisecond the word left its mouth, hijacked her nervous system, simultaneously slamming down the accelerator and forcing it into high gear. Bel could feel her body reacting…wrong. Her face, hot. Her legs, shaking. Her hands, unable to hold at her sides. She felt like a current was being run through her. She turned. She ran.