※ “People expect honesty to look familiar; they rarely recognize it when it arrives in an unfamiliar shape.”

  Next came novels—thick ones, thin ones, some worn by a thousand hands. Fiction bored me. It drifted, indulged, tried too hard to make me feel. I prefer things that remain what they are: manuals, treatises, systems that do not change because the author wishes them to. People do. I’ve never trusted that.

  The shrink noticed. He watched me read, searching my face for a crack, a fracture—some sign the stories had reached me. They didn’t. I observe. I catalogue. Empathy, for me, is a chilled thing: a distant lens through which people become patterns instead of persons. I feel—just not the way he expects.

  Sometimes, when he thinks I’m not looking, he studies me the way people study a complicated diagram: hopeful, frustrated, certain the meaning is there if only he could rotate the right mental axis.

  He never does.

  The sessions had no structure. They bled into one another—fragments, glances, questions left hanging in stale air. Sometimes he spoke at length, weaving interpretations he hoped would draw me out. Sometimes he waited, and I waited longer. Sometimes he brought another book and set it between us like an offering.

  He wants to know who I am.

  But if he wants to know, he will have to learn to see what isn’t given.

  And that, perhaps, is where the real work begins.

  He returned the next morning, carrying under his arm a set of folders swollen with paper. They still refused to let anything electronic into the room. Instead, he placed another block of paper on the table and slid it toward me with a little too much ceremony, as though paper itself were therapeutic.

  “We should talk today,” Dr. Hale said, smoothing the same tie he had smoothed the day before. The gesture was supposed to look confident, but his fingers hesitated—just for a heartbeat—like someone bracing for a predictable failure.

  “Perhaps we can clarify your motives.”

  I touched the edge of the paper lightly with one finger, as though testing the weight of his expectations.

  “Motives,” I repeated, letting the word stretch. “It presupposes intention beyond simple causality. I’m not sure that applies here.”

  He blinked, momentarily thrown, then tried to recover by returning to safer ground.

  “Let’s start with the intrusion. The one involving the federal environmental network.”

  I drew a line on the page, deliberately slow and unwavering, bisecting the blankness with satisfying geometry.

  “They weren’t doing anything,” I said.

  He tilted his head slightly, the way people do when they believe they are being attentive.

  “Who wasn’t doing anything?”

  “Everyone,” I replied, and let the implication rest between us. “The projections were stagnating. The decision frameworks were inert. It was an entire structure designed to observe its own dysfunction without ever correcting it.”

  He scribbled rapidly. I watched the movement of his pen, fascinated by how often people write down conclusions that are the opposite of what they’ve just heard.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  “You seem angry,” he tried.

  “No,” I said. “Anger is inefficient.”

  “Frustrated, then?”

  “Not exactly. Frustration implies expectation. I had none.”

  “Then why act?”

  I let my gaze rest on him long enough to make him uncomfortable, then said with absolute calm,

  “Because the alternative was tedium.”

  He hesitated, not knowing whether to treat the word as metaphor or diagnosis.

  ◇◆◇

  He returned later with a bundle of printouts, the pages soft from excessive handling. He held one up between two fingers, the way a schoolteacher might display a misbehaving student’s essay.

  “I reviewed your history,” he said. “Specifically, your expulsions from various… MMOs.”

  I nodded in acknowledgment.

  “Yes. Massively multiplayer online games. Though ‘massive’ is a charitable exaggeration in several cases.”

  He adjusted his glasses, pretending expertise. “It says you were removed from multiple servers.”

  “Correct.”

  “Why?”

  “Bugs.”

  His face brightened with the false confidence of someone who believes they’d grasped a concept.

  “You introduced bugs?”

  “No.”

  “You spread bugs?”

  “No.”

  “You… became a bug?”

  I looked up at him slowly, letting a small silence sharpen the moment.

  “I’m afraid I don’t even know how to dignify that with an interpretation.”

  He flushed. “I meant you behaved in ways that disrupted the game environment.”

  “Yes. That part is accurate.”

  “And why would you do such a thing?”

  I considered answering with clinical precision—stack underflows, unbounded variables, inconsistent state resolution—but he wouldn’t have the frame for it.

  “Because the integrity of the system was compromised,” I said instead, “and I was curious how it would collapse.”

  He swallowed, uncertain whether that counted as pathology.

  ◇◆◇

  The next session, he came armed with more printouts, most of them covered in yellow highlights like warning stripes.

  “It says here you caused a server rollback,” he read.

  “Yes.”

  “And here, you ‘weaponized healing overflows.’”

  “Mm.”

  “And according to this incident report, you accidentally turned a tutorial boss into a level-scaled world threat—”

  “Not accidentally.”

  He looked up sharply. “You… meant to?”

  “It was an emergent behavior,” I said, “but not an unintended one.”

  He wrote several lines, his pen carving furrows into the paper.

  “Do you feel remorse?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “No victims.”

  “But the game world—”

  I lifted an eyebrow. He aborted the sentence.

  ◇◆◇

  One afternoon, he asked, almost tentatively, if I understood the consequences of my actions.

  “You locked me in a room,” I said. “That is a consequence.”

  His pen froze.

  He tried to recover. “We’re not trying to punish you. We’re trying to help.”

  I offered him a small, distant smile.

  “You keep using that word.”

  “What word?”

  “Help.”

  He looked strangely undone by that.