Entry 07. Computers aren’t sentimental entities
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The artwork is "Piano Colorful Drawing" by 123rfStockPhotos (link).

+ + +

The fourth floor of the 「 Tower Library」 was a place that nobody ever went to.

While it was not explicitly off limits, there was an unspoken rule among all the server staff.

It was like a graveyard.

It was not polite to disturb the resting place of the dead.

The items in the room laid untouched, and they had not been moved since its former inhabitant had passed on.

The location was practically a time capsule. There were half-open bags of chips, half-written sheets of lyrics, and half-finished composition projects strewn all across the floor. On the table, there was a portable instant boiler that was full of lukewarm water — long since cooled down from the sizzling state it might have been months ago. A laptop still sat on top of a grand piano, its screensaver still perpetually bouncing around at a constant velocity.

Left alone, it was likely to stay in this state for the rest of eternity.

+ + +

Kiu was standing in this room.

She had not noticed it before, but the sound repeater1Repeater: More commonly known as a "looper"; a device occasionally used by solo musicians to record a melody and then play it on repeat. By continually layering recorded melodies, it is possible to form a one-man ensemble. Example. connected to the stereo box had never been shut off. A red light continued to blink steadily at a regular frequency, and it was still recording the audio from the acoustic guitar it was linked to, despite the fact that no one had used this room in a long time.

It was not possible to waste electricity in virtual reality, but Kiu felt the compelling urge to turn off the device. It was not quite obsessive-compulsive disorder, but anyone would be bothered if a sound recording device was running for weeks in an empty room. These feelings were entirely natural.

She halfway limped to the instrument and bent over to push the 「STOP」 button.

Afterwards, she straightened up. She was prepared to leave and shut off the lights.

But she hesitated for a moment.

Against her better judgement, Kiu moved her finger slightly over to the 「PLAY」 button and pressed down.

"..."

However, after a few minutes, Kiu could only laugh bitterly at her own folly.

Of course there would be nothing but silence.

A repeater wasn't designed to record a melody longer than a few minutes.

The machine had been running for weeks, so it was natural that it would overwrite its own recordings. Computers aren't sentimental entities. Any music that had been stored on the device was long gone, replaced with the tune of emptiness that was a song of its own regard.

 

Negative space.

 

Kiu tried to pretend she wasn't shaken in the slightest. She ended up limping over to the piano, while a gruesome wince gradually developed on her face.

She shut the laptop that sat on top of the soundboard. Slowly, she sank to her knees.

There wasn't any point in letting the screensaver continue running.

+ + +

Honestly, Kiu wasn't sure why she had come here.

The black-haired girl laid curled up on the floor, now tangled underneath a thin blanket. There was a floor length mirror on the far wall across from her. The reflection displayed a mess of black hair and white covers, scrunched tightly in an unnatural position. From the appearance alone, it was unclear what she was doing.

Not a single sound or utterance escaped from her pale lips. The room was totally silent.

There was only the rise and fall of her chest, which heaved at a slightly quickened pace.

Faint beads of sweat glistened on her forehead.

Her eyes were tightly shut.

+ + +

By this point, Kiu knew she was probably stressed.

It couldn't have been anything else.

Ordinarily, Kiu was bad at identifying her own feelings. Growing up, Kiu hadn't exactly been the type of person to talk about her emotions. It simply never crossed her mind to do so.

She wasn't entirely sure if it was genetic, but Kiu had known multiple extended family members who were rather apathetic in this regard. Sociopathy was considered a mental illness by some psychologists, and it was characterized by a severe lack of emotions and empathy. Incidentally, Kiu had a maternal uncle in Venezuela who apparently got caught as a serial killer and was executed on death row. Her grandmother had been a famous surgeon who was extremely skilled and stoic, and she often claimed that she simply never felt a single emotion in her entire life. There were multiple members of the Xi family who were incredibly twisted and frankly just defective in some way or another.

It was a bit unbelievable, and Kiu might have questioned the family urban legend if not for the fact that she was fairly positive that she experienced a similar (albeit, not quite identical) condition herself.

To put it bluntly, she simply just had no idea what "sadness" or "stress" was supposed to feel like in the first place.

As far as Kiu could tell, her brain was still functioning.

She could still think and do math.

She could say the alphabet forwards and backwards.

She didn't have any issue powering through the mountain of homework assignments that piled up every day, as well as the handful of stuff she did for her mom's company and their shared investment portfolio. Kiu still managed to finish them all on time, and she always had plenty of energy to do more. It felt effortless to her, and Kiu still had room to dedicate towards hobbies, although sometimes she was a little sleep-deprived. 

Honestly, Kiu thought that she felt normal, at least mentally.

+ + +

Weirdly, her body didn't seem to think the same way.

Kiu had learned a long time ago that her body tended to respond to "stress" long before there was any reaction in her brain.

For instance, currently Kiu had an enormous cramp her in abdomen. It was crippling and debilitating, and she felt somewhat like her guts were splitting in half. Not even the nerve-blocking sensory suppressors from the virtual reality console could totally mask the pain, and it often felt like Kiu couldn't even move in this kind of state. The energy would get sucked out of her muscles, she would sweat and shiver uncontrollably, and then her legs would give out completely from underneath her.

This frequently tended to happen when she had a major assignment or critical deadline in real life.

It always started with just feeling a bit jittery and perhaps over-caffeinated. Later her hands would get clammy and she would feel inexplicably cold even if the heater was blasting at the highest setting in the room.

The cramps would come all of a sudden, and it was very annoying.

She hated it most when it happened outside, because a few times people had called an ambulance even though Kiu had insisted it was entirely unnecessary.

Kiu had seen a doctor for it before, and apparently the diagnosis was merely "stress ulcers."

They had told her it was exceedingly unusual for a seventeen-year-old to already have stress ulcers at this age, and it had been compounded by the fact that Kiu hadn't even realized that she had ever been stressed in the first place. For that matter, she didn't know what "stress" was supposed to feel like. The doctor had measured a serum cortisol (stress hormone) level, and apparently the value exceeded the upper limit of the test. Apparently, the high cortisol levels were capable of wearing the stomach lining thin, which resulted in ulcers.

She had been sent home with instructions to take a medication that reduced the acidity of her stomach, as well as encouragement to find "lifestyle-interventions" for stress reduction.

Which was... somewhat unhelpful?

It didn't quite change the fact she couldn't tell when she was stressed to begin with.

Kiu curled tighter into a ball, thinking to herself that she really wanted her body to feel better.

When she felt better, at least she could go to go back to working on that 12-page research paper that was due for her dual-enrollment class tomorrow.

+ + +

Still on the floor, Kiu struggled to scroll through the contact list on her PD, even as the waves of cramps continued to surge relentlessly through her body.

Her eyes were a little fuzzy and she couldn't really see that clearly. There were lights on the edge of her peripheral vision, and her ears sort of felt like they had popped as if she was at high-altitude on an airplane.

She wondered if she should maybe call her mom, but she quickly decided against it.

It was a weekday, and her mom would still be really busy at the office right now.

She didn't really want to bother her mom with such a trivial thing.

Kiu paused momentarily with the scrolling when the screen came to @Vesrian731. 

She suddenly felt her chest fill with complicated feelings she didn't understand.

+ + +

After all, this room on the fourth floor used to be his space.

The guy had been an extraordinarily talented young musician, and Kiu had found it incredibly relaxing to listen to him tap away on the ebony keyboard late into the night. Ves always used to say that "it wasn't good enough" — and then scratch an improvisation or composition entirely — but Kiu almost always thought it sounded nice regardless of what kind of creation he came up with.

The acoustics of the 「 Tower Library」 had been designed such that the sounds on fourth floor could project to almost anywhere in the entire building.

Why had she banned him again?

At the present moment, Kiu couldn't remember anymore.

She also couldn't remember what his music sounded like either.

And it really hurt right now.

 

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