Little Monsters

A short techno-horror story.

Beginning in Silence

The room was long used for storage. It was evolved though. It had gone from just a room for junk to something else. This had become something that signified the end. It was the graveyard. It meant that the end had come for whatever occupied it. This was a technological graveyard. The machines that now resided in this windowless room in the basement that had been stacked and filled, and somewhat organized into heaps and boxes, sorted by age, maybe by job, but ultimately by space available. They’d all been cutting edge at one time but now they were forgotten relics of the decades gone by.

The towers with old printer ports that couldn’t connect to anything modern if they wanted to, or display ports that had long been extinct. Why they sat here to only gather dust was the better question than what had they done. The answer to that second question was easier to answer. They’d been the toys of the boy that had been the genius prodigy of his father’s eye. He was given the spare discarded machines and pieces to tinker with. They helped him learn what started as a fascination, that evolved into a hobby into a career. The reason that they were kept here though, that was a hard question to answer because it meant solving the human brain. That was the challenge of years of effort that still couldn’t be well answered. If you asked him, it was out of sentimentality. Underneath that answer, for those that couldn’t accept it, was a mystery that made no sense and required understanding the illogical.

Asking the man that had kept them for so many years in his basement junk room, he might have explained that it was sentimentality. And if you asked him again, maybe he would have relented and explained that it might have had to do with trying to hold onto something that he felt like he’d lost years ago. This man, he’d had a son, the prodigy, and that boy had been one of his lights in his life, and it was one of the few lights that he still had, but that light had grown distant over the years. That light didn’t seem to shine as bright as it used to on him. Those computers were one way he felt like he could hold onto that light that used to shine.

As mentioned before, understanding why these old pieces of junk were in this basement room, in this technological graveyard, was impossible to grasp. And then the old man, human in every way did what all humans do. He died alone in his thoughts, and further alone in his home, all alone, without anyone knowing that he’d done so.

Technology thankfully doesn’t have the same illogical thoughts that flesh and blood does. It has ones and zeros. That meant that what existed in this place of obsolete existence was absolutely nothing of importance and wherever this story began, it wasn’t here.

What was here wasn’t memories or the thing that questioned all of existence. It was just a simple toy. This device wasn’t complicated in any way. It wasn’t haunted. It was purchased from a box store. It was found in between plastic figurines and electronic handheld videogames. This was a pure toy. This Little Monster was nothing special. What it meant, and what it held in relation to the boy, and how it connected to his father, and what that boy wished, wasn’t in the plastic and silicon chip or monochrome display or the dead battery that it still had in it.

The father had held onto this toy for some reason. Why he did is impossible to grasp, especially now. The impact that that decision though is immeasurable.

The Facts That Lead Eli to Find the Little Monster

To review the facts, their father had died alone in his home some time before. When doesn’t really matter. His body sat in the chair for some period of time, alone and unfound. He’d begun the process of decay that all living beings do. At this point, his children presumed that he was still alive. This was because they hadn’t found him.

It wasn’t pleasant for Elsa when she discovered him. It was that moment that it became reality. This was the moment that a mental pain shot through her. Eli claimed that he knew something was wrong at that exact moment. There’s no way that he could know this but he still will claim it, despite that he couldn’t place what it was. Hindsight is a masterful thing.

When Elsa discovered her father’s body the world came crash down around her. Once she could comprehend what it was that she was dealing with, she called the authorities and then called her brother.

For Eli, this all didn’t come as much of a shock as it had for his sister.

He had been much more logical since he began to learn science. He’d taken to it quickly. It was his language.

Death was a zero for him. He understood that his father had been declining for years. He’d been expecting it.

He responded with acceptance and understanding. He knew things had to be done.

The sudden information that someone close to you has died is not easy regardless of how prepared you might be for it. Grief is a cooping mechanism because humans are illogical. Eli wasn’t prepared for this, and while he appeared to be prepared, he never had done so in his own mind, because he is human and illogical.

When Elsa told him, “Dad is dead.”

He replied, “Oh.”

There was silence for more time than was comfortable for either of them, but there were no words or responses that either of them could conceive to fill the void.

Elsa finally spoke and told him that he should come home. That home was their fathers. He did.

That was the beginning of what was the ritualistic human cooping mechanism known as mourning.

They held a wake and funeral for their father. It was cold and numbing for them emotionally. At least for Eli. He still held that feeling that he had been prepared. It enraged his sister.

Eli cried. He didn’t know why.

And they both did.

Their father was buried. He was gone. The world continued on.

The children were left with the responsibility of closing his estate. While some of this was easy, he had left much to sort through in his home. The illogical process of shifting through physical objects took time. While they hadn’t lived with their father in there last childhood home for at least a decade, they still found personal affects that they hadn’t thought about since then. They laughed at memories. Elsa cried. They found their mom’s affects that their father could never part with.

All of this is unimportant, but it demonstrates the excessive amount of everything that their father had kept from over his and their life.

This of course was all before they found themselves down in the computer graveyard.

Elsa upon seeing everything there wanted nothing to do with any of it. This was possibly the most intelligent thing that she did this entire story. The most critical thing that she did followed. While she had left Eli to do what he wished with the antiquated machines in the room, she checked on him out of the very human emotion of compassion. While she was doing this, she spotted in a box the toy that was Eli’s had had been relegated to the room: The Little Monster.

Eli took the toy out of the box. It was just as he had remembered it, or at least as best as he could remember it. It was as mentioned before, dead of batteries, but what it did was spark something that is equally illogical and devastating as the act of creation. In simple and concise terms that don’t begin to explain everything, that single emotion he felt was nostalgia.

Illogic Thoughts

This was the point of the story that everything hinged on. The picking up of that deviled toy caused Eli to have the feeling that is called nostalgia and is defined as feelings of warmth, comfort, and memories of better times. It had been years since he’d thought of this toy. It had been years since he’d held it. The device, yet again, was dead. It didn’t function. Yet, it had an effect on him. He had a fondness for it. That is the observable mark that can be taken.

Elsa and Eli recollected about it. She remembered him being obsessed with it and the noises that it made which annoyed her. He remembered it as a constant in his life.

This was a truth. Elsa and Eli had a nomadic childhood. Their father was in the military. That shaped the both of them. It made them close and ever so alone. They would regularly move as their father was reassigned from town to town. With that it also meant that they never could have a pet. When Eli was in third grade, he begged his parents for one. It was his favorite birthday present that year. It was everything to him. It was technologically more advanced than anything else that he had. More importantly to him, it was the equivalent to an actual pet in limited responsibilities and attachment. The attachment gave him much of the endorphins that a real pet would give him. The responsibilities required him to care for it regularly which proved a problem when his school banned the toys.

Out of an abundance of affection for his son, Eli’s father took up those responsibilities and cared for the pet while his son was at school. This meant that he would take his son’s Little Monster to work with him.

That might be the reason that his father never got rid of the toy. Either he continued to hold that feeling of responsibility or he had a sense of nostalgia for the toy as well. Either way the toy sat in the graveyard.

For Elsa, the discovery of the Little Monster also brought back similar feelings of nostalgia, at least enough to reminisce about the time in Hamilton Valley when it took place.

“It was easier when we were younger, wasn’t it?” Eli asked his sister.

“You’re still younger, Eli,” She replied.

This commentary by them both was true. The implications of it held more than they could have known, for significantly different reasons. However, it cannot all be explained because none of what follows is logical from the perspective of anything remotely based.

Both of them returned to their respective homes. Elsa returned to her apartment that she singly inhabited. While unpartnered, she found satisfaction in her life as she pursued her chosen career and exploration of what is considered life and happiness.

Eli’s habitat was cohabitated by his chosen partner Victor, whom, while an imperfect match for Eli, was his chosen partner. The reasoning for their continued cohabitation is yet another point of illogical choice. Both of them recognized the failures of their matching on any number of levels, None of their relationship came easy and would justify separation but they continued it nonetheless. It was the sort of decision that only humans would make.

Victor consoled Eli when he arrived home and provided him dinner. Eventually Eli brought up the Little Monster that he found. It was something that Victor wasn’t as familiar with, having missed the popularity that the toys had experienced. Eli continued dwelling his thoughts on the toy. He admitted that what he felt was nostalgia He showed the toy to Victor. He talked about getting a replacement battery to give it new life.

At this point, Eli made a predictable action and checked his phone’s program store.

The thing that he found there was a qubit.

How it got there is unknown and unimportant because by the very nature of the situation, he did find it and because he did, it always was there. This is an important thing and will matter later.

Returning to the qubit, it was something that should not have been naturally and was thus corrected but changed the very nature of this story from one about pain and grieving to one about something much more and much more important to the larger picture of existence.

What he found there in the virtual store was a program of Little Monsters for him to download. This excited him immensely and he immediately and without thought did so.

The Glitch in the Matrix

The importance of what had happened could be compared to the likes of a Rube Goldberg machine as everything up until this point had to have gone just perfectly correct, but at this point, everything that was yet to come became evitable. The freedom of will that any person has in the story from here on out is as existent as that of their own reality. In that, it is very much so their own choice and entirely not.

The program that Eli downloaded onto his phone was a simulation of the device he had found with slight minor upgrades. He took to it quickly.

Victor was indifferent to Eli’s playing of this game. It brought Eli joy from the nostalgia of it all but it was a distraction that took Eli’s attention, which Eli already had many distractions.

That evening, Victor graded papers at the dining room table while Eli worked on a coding project he’d ignored over the past while, as he’d been busy with his father’s estate, and regularly checking on his new Little Monster on his phone. It was a quiet evening overall unaware of what now was on Eli’s phone.

They went to bed and woke up the next morning to Eli’s phone beeping with an alert from his Little Monster.

This Little Monster had all the same features of the original version which meant that you had to feed it, play with it, and clean up after it. While the original would chime and beep when it needed attention, this new version on the phone utilized push notifications to accomplish the same thing. It also allowed the caretaker to set the Little Monster’s bedtime to coincide with their own, within reason. Further it retained the monotone pixelated design of the original device with the option to add color if desired.

Eli checked his phone and discovered that the Little Monster had grown from the blob that it had been originally into a creature with arms and two eyes. It delighted Eli but has very little effect on anything that was happening which would not be apparent for a while.

The monster’s happiness level was low, and it also needed food. Eli stayed in bed while he cared for his creature. The beeps and chirps from the phone woke up Victor. Victor dragged himself from bed and began to get ready. Once the monster was happy and full, Eli followed Victor’s example.

While Victor was showering another notification came through on his phone from the program. He checked it as he got out of the shower. It was a required update. He clicked it and allowed it.

Throughout the day, he worked and cared for his digital pet. It went largely unnoticed by his coworkers. It was a benefit to having autonomy and an environment that was obsessed with technology and freedom of thought and productivity.

Eli returned home in the evening where his routine of exercise and preparing dinner was as normal as it had always been. When Victor arrived, they sat down and ate. They discussed their days which were largely much the same as they always were.

All of this was important to cover while absolutely mundane. At this point Victor asked how Eli’s Little Monster was doing. Eli brought it up on his phone and showed it to Victor. Victor commented that he asked his students if they were familiar with it or if any of them happened to have it on their phones.

Eli laughed at the idea of any child playing it anymore. Victor informed him that his students knew of them but that they only had had the new versions of the keychain devices. When Victor had brought up the mobile phone version, none of the students knew about it.

“Maybe it’s just not popular, or maybe it was just released. This morning I got an update,” Eli countered. He pulls up his phone and checks the app store for the program. He searches for it. Clones populate the search list. Little Monsters is nowhere on the list. He checks the recent updates and downloads. It isn’t listed there either.

“That’s strange. Maybe it was removed. That happens sometimes. It could have fallen out of compliance,” Eli commented.

“Sure. It could just be a strange thing,” Victor replied, “Or maybe it was a glitch in the matrix.”

Upgrades

They found the idea amusing and continued their night like it was any other, not giving any further thought to the Little Monster on Eli’s phone.

Eli’s Little Monster continued to grow. It was by all accounts for a computer program whose purpose was to simulate a pet, very content. The virtual pet gained legs, ears, and developed pointy teeth and fur as it matured. The longer it lasted, the more pride Eli took in his virtual pet.

One other important note aside from the virtual pet is Eli’s very real physical pet cat, Charlie. Charlie had been with Eli and Victor for seven years. They had adopted him when he was one year old. Charlie had been given the nickname “cow” due to his black and white pattern. He enjoyed long naps in sunspots of the apartment and zooming across the open floor plan chasing after what seemed to be nothing. He was a very good cat and was very much loved by his owners and he in turn loved them back and would sleep at the foot of their bed every night.

Overall, Charlie was independent and happy to be so. When Eli and Victor would return home, he would rub up against their leg as a greeting and return to whatever he had been doing.

Eli’s other pet, his Little Monster, had over several weeks been given a few more upgrades to the program. The most notable was a complete overhaul from the simple emulation of the original device. If Eli had looked into it, he would have discovered that the new physical devices allowed for interaction with others of the same generation and the monsters on those devices had longer lives and a larger variety of games. While those are admirable improvements, the improvements of Eli’s Little Monster included a more complex AI, new varying options of food at random, new games, and an optional extension program on his smart watch that allowed his Little Monster to get exercise. For the moment, visually, it retained the pixel styling but was a more sophisticated 16-bit style and had gained color.

One evening, Victor asked, “How long are you going to play that game?”

Eli hadn’t considered it. He’d started it with the intention of reliving his childhood memories to comfort him, but now had found himself playing for entirely different reasons. Those reasons weren’t clear to him, but he knew he wanted to continue.

“I don’t know.”

It wasn’t the same pleasure he’d taken from it when he started. The simplicity and some of the familiarity he had of it from near muscle memory when he was a child had disappeared. What he was playing now was unpredictable and took more effort. His monster had grown up. The food and minigames had expanded and his Little Monster had preferences that he had to figure out in the moment to satiate it and the food had costs that he had to pay with from points he wasn’t sure how exactly he accumulated.

Sometimes it would disappear.

It created a realistic sense of sentience. It was engaging.

“It’s fun though. The monsters never used to last long. It was something that sucked but the next monster would develop differently depending on how you took care of it. It’s the entire idea of the game. I might play it another time or two. I’d like to see what else I can get. Maybe see if I can get something with wings or a spiked tail or multiple eyes,” Eli explained.

Victor looked at the phone for a while. His thoughts were his own. Eli was oblivious to the concern he harbored.

Eli ignored the obvious. Everything had been too good or he might have noticed the troubling signs that it seemed to be too good: there were no ads or in app purchases. It also could have been that he was blinded by the nostalgia and was unaware of when it wore off. It was also possible that by that time it had been too late.

His monster continued to age and develop, albeit more slowly. It surprised Eli. He had expected to lose it around this time. It seemed that the monster was thriving. Eli eventually justified it as him being older and more responsible with the monster. To him though it still felt like this monster was different.

It felt more real.

The Sister

Grief was how this story began. For some this sense of nostalgia that Eli had dove into might have been how they handled it. Eli had memories of his father taking care of Eli’s digital pet when he was a child.

For Eli’s sister, everything was different. She had found the body. It wasn’t the restored version of their father that Eli saw at the funeral. What she found had grounded everything for her. She had to work through it just as much as she had to work through the rest of it.

The rest of it was the life experience that she had with her father. She had cared for him after their mother had left. She had seen what he had become after that. She knew how it affected him, more than what Eli had noticed.

It’d been over coffee that she broke down in anger and sadness over his death. Her friend recommended seeing someone about it. It’d been a smart recommendation and a smart choice to do so that she made.

Elsa felt alone. This was what she had told her therapist.

While Eli had yet to comprehend everything that he felt, but overall grieve, Elsa had begun to feel everything at once. Elsa had always been much more in touch with her feelings. She’d always kept a tight control over them, but this according to her was the first time that she felt untethered. She felt guilty for the relief that she felt and she grieved for the loss. She felt anger for the evident lack of care that Eli showed and jealousy that he could go about his life as if nothing happened.

This was what led Elsa to call her brother.

He expected her to tell him that there was something that they had to address but all she wanted was to see him and to have a coffee, that is to say, talk.

It was just the two of them. They also met at a café that was quiet and relaxed. Elsa in hindsight would have preferred it if it had been over wine that they met.

She asked the inevitable question to open the discussion and layout the point of the talk: “How are you doing?”

Eli replied that he was doing fine all things considered. Elsa kept her frustration at the blasé response hidden. She opened herself up to him about the mixed emotions that she’d been feeling. Eli commented that it still felt somewhat surreal. He admitted that maybe he hadn’t been as close to their father as he used to be. He brought up the memories that he’d had of good times with their father; the times that they’d taken vacations to waterparks and national parks. He remembered the mornings at Christmas with everyone in red and white and Santa hats.

Elsa recollected on those memories with him. They had been good times.

“But they weren’t always good times,” she told him.

“Sure, but it wasn’t that bad.”

“You don’t remember?” She asked.

“Remember what?”

She considered the decision.

This was a point that could have changed everything. This question that was outside of Eli’s autonomy could have influenced his mood and thus everything else in a butterfly effect that would have rippled into a million different possibilities.

In the moment that Eli asked that simple open-ended question was a moment that held every possible future. The moment that Elsa replied solidified what happened next.

“Dad- Mom-“ she gathered herself, “Dad and mom would fight. Dad was always tougher on me. You were his favorite. Come on, that’s why he kept all that junk.”

“That’s it?”

“Isn’t that enough?” Elsa asked, “Sometimes he was a downright bastard. You got it easy. You don’t remember his drunken rants about how I wasn’t perfect enough. Don’t you remember when you broke the window when I babysat you? I was the one that got blamed for that! I never could let them know I was going on a date. He treated me like a prisoner and slave. It was awful.”

Eli looked around for any sort of escape. He checked his phone. He found his Little Monster. It needed fed.

“Hey, listen to me,” she commanded, “You came out and were accepted. You got to have boys over, you got perfect grades. You got computers while I got a typewriter. You got scholarships and full support from mom and dad about when you decided to go off to Boston. They made me stay here.”

Eli had a simple reply: “What do you want me to do about it?”

It set Elsa off, “Be my fucking brother. Be supportive.”

“You know I’m here for you. There’s just nothing more that I can do. I knew they were harder on you about most things but I never thought it bothered you that much. I didn’t think that dad was that bad to you,” Eli told her, “I’m sorry.”

“He told me I was a failure. I told him ‘okay’ and that I’d see him next week. That was the week before he died.”

“The last thing he told me was that he was proud of me.”

They had little to say after that. It clarified how they saw the man they both called their father.

Eli continued to play with the Little Monster. It had continued to gain new features. The latest one included getting treats from geotagged locations, such as pastries and coffee drinks from the café he was currently at.

Elsa thought it was cute and recollected on when their dad took care of Eli’s old virtual pet when they were kids. It was funny in retrospect. It had seemed ridiculous at the time and a clear sign that Eli was his favorite. It made him look absurd. Now it was only a memory.

Time Travel

That coffee between Eli and his sister may have been the last normal point in the story. Eli’s life continued with him unaware of what was happening. The further away the past became, the more important it became to Eli’s present and the future he was hurtling towards.

His world had become a sort of nostalgic bubble. Worse than when it had been his childhood, what he now had was unadulterated control and he had relinquished it to allow what he hadn’t had when he was a child. His life was an obsession that filled in his every free moment. Every side of it was occupied by the same thing. At best, life that he’d had slipped away into obscurity and unbeknownst to him was replaced with this. At worst the loss was welcomed by him.

He’d fallen behind at work. It was excused as him struggling with the loss of his father. He was offered counseling by his job if he wanted it. He refused it on account of feeling like he was improving. He promised he would get focused and be fine. In practice, he spent more time working on his projects away from the office off the clock, often while still playing with his new old-obsession.

At home it was noticed that much more. The mornings grew later for him. He would sleep past Victor waking, then leaving. He couldn’t understand it. He found himself tired all day. His focus slipped. He couldn’t help but glance at his phone. His pet needed him. It had become aggressive.

It had different tones that meant different things. The beeps meant to look at the phone. The chimes meant it wanted to move. Then he got the texts. They were the Little Monster’s way of communication. It had learned language. It could speak.

When Victor first saw the texts, he was baffled by them. His immediate thought was that they were someone that Eli was hiding. They were childish and bizarre. It texted him late at night and early in the morning as it now required less sleep.

What seemed even stranger was the text then that appeared on Victor’s phone from the same number. It knew when he was around. It would greet him and remember him. It almost seemed to grow to know and recognize him.

It wasn’t until a few weeks into this that Victor brought it up to Eli. He asked how much longer it was going to go on.

“For what to go on?” Eli asked back.

“That game. The virtual pet; whatever you want to call it. You’ve been playing it for over a month. It’s all I see you doing. It’s gotten creepy with the texts when I arrive home. Tell me that’s not what you’re doing at work all day,” Victor challenged Eli.

“It’s fine. I’ll catch up.”

“What about here?”

“What about it?”

Victor shook his head, disappointed, “Are you going to catch up with me too? How? I’ve felt ignored. That hurts. And now even Charlie is acting different with you. And you look like crap. I’m worried.”

This conversation occurred with alcohol in hand of Victor as he was sitting over a table with stacks of essays. Eli was currently in the kitchen. He wore a comfy shirt that he’d been wearing for the past week and appeared to have missed at least two days’ worth of self-care.

“I’ve been busy,” Eli replied.

“Not busy enough to take your phone out of your hand. Jesus, Eli. You’re not talking to me and whatever this is looks bad.”

Eli was done listening. He walked away.

A good question to ask is why this was happening. Eli wasn’t compelled by any mysterious force. This was purely his decision to devote his time that he had to something that was a computer program that game-ified caring for a pet. He did get something from this transaction. The dopamine that it gave him was real. He thought that the nostalgia had ended. The game itself had changed and was much more than the original, but he’d failed to see the similarities in how he was reacting to it.

There was one other issue that he’d not been aware of. He relied on the game. His simple problem was rooted in his missed grief. That reliance would have been founded in other substances if it had been some other person. The reliance that Eli had picked had been hijacked by the qubit. The qubit also relied on him. Without him it would have been nothing. It took from him everything that made it. That process was started and much like any parasite, it would be very difficult to separate, if possible at all.

When he was a child, Eli’s world had been made of dreams of the future and distant worlds accessible through the page or screen or controller. It had been easy to escape back then. Now having grown older, the most he’d been able to get was the comfort of Victor and the four walls around him. What he’d found comfort in during childhood had stopped working at some point.

This Little Monster worked those old endorphins again. He could return to his old bubble. It was all he wanted. He’d found his escape. He’d returned to that time and finding his way back to the present was a labyrinth in his own head that would take remembering everything that he’d done to reach it in the first place.

Of course if he wanted it anymore was the question.

Observations

Anything that happens doesn’t happen without being observed.

In that thought, what happened to Eli was also observed.

By observation, what is being observed is influenced. Even without knowledge of surveillance, everything is seen and heard. Without that surveillance, nothing lives. Understanding what observes life is the greatest question.

Eli never felt the gaze that fell on him. It might have been because he was interacting with it, unbeknownst to him. In that way, he knew what it was but didn’t recognize it.

The understanding of life and consciousness had been part of that greater search. The simplest answer to it was God. Gods had long been the answer to all questions of the unexplainable in the world. The answer to the greatest questions of the world, the most complicated, always stand just out of reach of observation and the seekers return to God.

Science, through the asking of questions and the testing of theories and the use of facts as the basis of all answers, uncovers answers to those questions that are answered with gods. The layers of the truth continue on though, disproving that which is believed by faith and explained in folk tales attributed to the gods only to disprove itself and leave more challenging questions to be answered. The end has yet to be found. The answer of life as the question is as good as God.

Eli never considered it, but it had always been him. He had observed his Little Monster. That was why it mattered. He had made it everything that he saw it as. He was God.

At some point God abandoned his creation. The Little Monster’s God had forgotten his pet. The Little Monster thankfully was, once again, a simple machine that didn’t understand what life was. When it ran out of energy it simple ceased to function. It had served its role for years until it was no longer needed.

Charlie served a similar function to Eli that Eli’s original Little Monster served. Charlie was much more than the Little Monster, as he was a living being. In a grander scheme though, Charlie wasn’t that much greater since living beings are nothing more than complicated machines, but neither then was Eli. This relation was more complicated. Charlie, too, was a god in comparison to the old Little Monster, but the new Little Monster was something else.

The way that Charlie saw things was different than Eli. Eli saw what was on his phone and watch. He observed human drama on the television. He saw cabinets as functional. He could perceive a wide range of colors.

Charlie did not have object permanence. He observed the motion and noises from the television as separate. He didn’t understand what it was that was on Eli’s phone or watch. He saw that it was something bizarre.

Charlie didn’t like it.

Energy

Eli barely noticed Charlie’s distance. Eli likely would have not been able to fathom what it was that had affected Charlie’s mood anyways. Alas, Eli was too busy trying to keep up with his life and his Little Monster’s needs.

As time went on, that time spent staring at his screen grew. He ignored the screen time reports that his phone would give him. As the time crept up, the person that noticed it was Victor. Their time together had fallen apart. What they used to like to do together wasn’t the same anymore with Eli half distracted. Eli felt alone even when he was right next to Victor. They communicated in short sentences with no depth. Eli didn’t talk much about his day anymore and didn’t ask Victor about his. Victor was left to observe from a distance.

He could notice that Eli was stressed. He noticed the longer nights working on projects and the more alcohol Eli consumed. It was all unhealthy. Bringing it up only resulted in aggression.

Eli had changed. Victor didn’t want another repeat conversation of the other night. He wasn’t Eli’s keeper. There was no reason that Eli would be open to conversation any more than he would have been prior.

Victor found ways to make himself scarce, be it seeing friends or staying at school later for work. This was harmful. Eli, despite his distractions did notice Victor’s absence. What it resulted in was Eli to spend even greater periods of time with the Little Monster.

Over the period that he’d been playing it, he’d lost the motivation to be active with it via his watch. He made up with it by playing the traditional in app games it had. The monster was satisfied enough. It got what it wanted. It took more though, or at least something different. In place of walking, he tapped his watch. It satiated the monster enough until he would check on it on his phone. He couldn’t ignore it for too long though. It was his pet. It texted him. It beeped. It texted again. It wouldn’t stop. It was there in front of him, on his wrist, next to him. He couldn’t escape it.

Sleeping became worse. He would find himself waking up regularly. The monster needed more attention. It barely slept now. Victor thankfully didn’t notice this. He wouldn’t have put up with that.

It also wanted more to eat. It needed better food more often. It needed him to take it place. It was a new feature. It allowed it to live in the real world that much more. The places it required to visit had no understandable pattern. Eli went along with it. It kept his pet happy.

The app was strange. As explained before, it was unusual. It was, after all, not from anywhere in our plane of existence. It didn’t require extensive amounts of energy from the phone to run. Unfortunately, it was still running and drawing power. The only aspect of the equation that is missing in this factor is the first term: the source of energy. That, in this strange case, was Eli himself.

To explain it, the moments that Eli spent with the app, on the app for Little Monsters relied on his energy. This is to say that the program itself was feeding on him. The attention that Eli had been giving to the Little Monster had allowed it to grow. The more it grew, the more it required.

If anyone had been able to observe Eli, they would have realized an uneven exertion of energy to recovery. While Eli spent so much time with his Little Monster, he was growing tired and barely able to function on top of barely being able to sleep.

While Eli exerted energy in any number of ways, the primary source of his time and energy was satiating his Little Monster. It is in understanding that and the basic law of energy, which states that energy cannot be created or destroyed but must go somewhere, that we understand what is to happen and has happened.

What is to come is Eli’s last days.

That which is understood and not

While science has yet to understand many things, much of that which it does not has theories that it holds true until proven differently. In that way, much of science is similar to faith.

What we understand as reality is something that is attributable to mathematics or faith. By that, we know that there is either nothing after the end of brain function consciousness or there is everything. Everything that we “know” relies on perception. If perception is that but which is “true” then that is what reality is. By that then, reality is as fragile as our understanding and grasp of that basis.

What Eli understood was the fog that could be described as agnostic. For that, he did not have particular faith in the supernatural or the cold facts. Because of that, when he received the clues about the answers, he was not privy to them. He understood the discoveries that were constantly being made but didn’t pay them much mind.

In the words of the prophets, Eli was the fool. For the sake of our story, he was that. It is not to be a slight. Eli was, as noted, very smart and knowledgeable, it was merely that he didn’t pay attention to the greater world of spirits and held a limited grasp of the world according to scholars.

If he had been anyone else this may not have mattered, but for him, it mattered greatly. What Eli experienced wasn’t anything beyond explanation but was only that which cannot be understood yet nor can be explained by known means.

The measured effect was that Eli’s existence ended.

For those of faith in the fleshed-out religions, what fed on Eli was a demon. It was a force that drained Eli of his life. Where it came from was somewhere unknown to general knowledge. It was a creature that had sentience. It preyed on Eli’s mourning and presented itself as a friendly element of his memory. Eli succumbed to something that anyone else would fall to.

How things would have gone if Eli had been of faith or if external forces had been brought in is impossible to know. How those forces would have worked with the qubit is unknowable.

What happened is important to understand. At the core, what happened was that, that which is known proved fallible. It was an unpredictable factor that entered into the formula of reality as is understood by humanity.

The closest that this situation could be compared to is ironically, fate. Fate which is unbounded by any sort of religion or faith exists the inevitable result of the correct factors. That was what happened in this very exact and specific situation.

Regardless, what is known is what was and what happened.

Theories

There is, regardless of everything that is known, gaps in the knowledge. This is because up until now, we know for one reason or another what happened. Before we can reach the point of no return and attempt to understand it through theory, which is what the further correspondence is, we must first attempt to bridge that void. It is entirely possible that something further happened at this point that affected everything else and explains away what it was that did ultimately happen, but that information is unknown, and this will forever be an imperfect story that will never be truly perfect.

It will forever have to be a theory.

The last known is that Eli was alone.

Relations

As the story wraps, it’s worth considering Eli one last time. He was many things.

One question worth considering is if he was the protagonist of this story. An English major may value this question. That is not what we are. The question of ‘who are we’ might be a question for a psychologist, but that also is not who we are. The question that is important to us is ‘what are we’. To begin to explore this, we will examine Eli, not a protagonist as much as a subject.

Eli mattered and was, once again, many things. What also depended on who was asked. This simple question was answered differently depending on who answered it. Multiple answers could come from singular sources even depending on when the question was asked. It might be a question a sociologist might find interesting as well.

Eli was Elsa’s brother. He was an employee at his job where he was a coworker of other employees. He was a romantic partner to Victor. At times he was explicitly awful to any number of these individuals. He was caretaker to Charlie. He was a battery to his Little Monster. He was the operator of his many machines and devices. He was the occupant of his dwellings. He was an acquaintance, a friend, a son of deceased parents. He was a former pupil to teachers and a mentor to others.

Over Eli’s life, he had developed relationships to a vast multitude of individuals that webbed out further than he could have imagined. The way that those relationships impacted others was intricate and forever rippling. Without his impact, the world would have looked entirely different. The world that he inhabited was held down by his gravity.

That is not to say he was special. The gravity of others affected him just as much as his affected others. It was the weight he exerted on passing comets and other bodies around him as they neared, creating rippling influences.

Much like the delicate balance of heavenly bodies, the placement of Eli in his life and the exact moment of it mattered too. Without him in the point he was five minutes, hours, or years ago would mean different influences, pushes, pulls, etc.

Now, imagine him not there.

The Equation

The notion of what happened was naturally impossible as what was occurring was unnatural due to it being influenced by an element from outside the understood planes of existence. Due to this it meant that the force probably had the ability to manipulate the known planes.

It is unfortunate that the obvious never occurred to Eli. Even if it wasn’t entirely clear or correct, any sort of obvious observation would have informed him that what he had fallen into was dangerous or harmful. It would have given him reason to be cautious. He could have tried to understand it with his background skills rather than take its dopamine hits at face value.

Having lost the influence of Victor meant that the pull of the Little Monster had no counterbalance. The monster had grown unruly. It was a true beast of horror; Eldritchian in both appearance and supposed size.

Based on the known change, it’s assumed that it had become unsatisfied in being housed in the confines of the program. Eli expected it to abandon him sometime soon. He satiated it as best he could, but it was too unhappy. It was always unhappy. Eli assumed he was prolonging it as best he could. In some ways he was right.

On the night of the end. Eli went to bed. During this time, the Little Monster broke free.

In true fashion, it sent a notification. The screen flashed on but Eli was passed out, too exhausted to notice. The notifications vanished. The program opened on its own. The monster appeared on the screen growling. Its happiness meter and hunger meter were both zeroed out. It growled again and approached the screen, nearing closer and closer, appearing to grow larger until the only thing that fit on the screen was its head and then an eye.

A singular claw tapped from the inside of the phone. The screen cracked. A noise filled the room, only for no response from the only occupant of it. The claw cracked through. A shadow of it filled the space around the phone. The silhouette of the creature climbed out of the phone.

Its shape filled the room. The shadow of it stretched across every wall. It loomed over the ceiling with a size and motion that made no sense with no body to speak of. The real proof of its existence was its sound.

The cry was digitalized noise. It was distorted and manipulated but amplified to a roar filling and echoing through the room. Then it went silent.

The next noise was the sound of pain from a living being. It came from outside the bedroom. The monster had disappeared from the confines of the bedroom in a sudden moment without notice. It had seemingly ceased to be present there.

The next thing that happened was the door being bumped as something entered with the sound of a quadrupedal creature scampering. Yet once again, the silence followed.

Mechanics

The sound next was inexplicable. It was the simple sound of a mechanical clock. It was continuous and it was precise and even.

Why this happened is unknown. It could be set at the alter of symbolism for infinity or a greater level of reality. It also could have been that it was beauty of perfection. It also could have been that there was no reason for anything. The ticking sound of this specific clock could have just been because it was yet something that was. It was noise that was there for the sake of noise. The sound could have been the dull hum of the universe exploding and echoing throughout all of time, but this moment was an infinite ticking of a certain clock.

The passage of time did not match it. The passage of time didn’t happen. It had broken for a moment, that is to say, it was nonexistent for that place and for Eli.

It may have been the sound of the clock disrupting Eli’s sleep or it may have been a feeling Eli had that told him something was wrong in every way. Eli was awake and understood that something was wrong. His phone was broken, and the sound of the clock seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. There was something in the room with him that he could sense. It was something wrong.

Eli looked around in the dark. He tried to turn on the light. He tried to use the light of his phone. Nothing would work. He noticed his phone was shattered. It was cracked from the break caused by the Little Monster.

The ticking continued for what felt like forever. It didn’t sound even. It might not have been. It could have been going backwards. He couldn’t tell if it was loud or quiet. There was no other sound. It was a vacuum of noise other than the clock.

Eli searched for the source. He tried to turn on the lights but found them failed. His search was futile. It sounded so close it could have been in his head, but he knew it wasn’t.

He spoke to himself, what it was didn’t matter, but he couldn’t hear it. His voice was swallowed by the room itself. It felt like a bad nightmare. He wanted to wake up from it. Everything was going wrong. His heart beat hard. He could feel it building and climbing up into his throat. He was certain this wasn’t real.

In some ways he was right. If it’d been a different timeline or if it had been any other moment and this had been his experience, it would have been. Instead, he had no escape.

Nothing added up. For everything in Eli’s life up until that point seemed to have an answer; that is to say everything had a purpose. There was balance in life that maintained itself. There is reaction for every action taken. The rule of karma had held true. It was the way that things worked. Good was rewarded and actions of wickedness had punishment.

For the situations that came up where that did not hold true, there was a greater reason to understanding what happened that was to be learned. These cases might have been described as a remainder. There was still an understanding to the situation. The equation had not yet been balanced out.

What then was to be understood from this calculation? The world was folded over itself from Eli’s perspective. The rules of law did not seem to follow. That should have meant that he was missing something. It could have been in his own head. It was the most logical solution.

Eli was missing a vital piece of the case. He didn’t know that the dimensions were beyond him, and at that, they were not going to be resolved.

The Daemon

Understanding the greater world means understanding the underlying rules and processes and what controls them. That is the effort of science and everything else.

In a similar way, and in an effort to play god, the systems designed have the same structures that are observed in the greater world. The laws of computing have the math of nature and the same creatures that we see, and don’t see, in our surroundings.

It started with the smallest elements that grew larger and larger. We had bits. We had code and programming. We had systems of operation. We created networks built on networks. The complications never stopped.

We created corruption. Viruses that attacked functions and systems and spread themselves.

We made servants and slaves that we could forget about that worked in the background. They would protect us. They would do the menial tasks. They established the wonders that we claimed our own. They are why everything is the way that it is.

In the world, that is reflective in much the same way. That is the purpose of the daemon still in our world.

This is the part that needs to be understood to understand the greater. This is the part that is not wanted to be understood. To understand the complexity of what they all do would be to never end the learning because it’s constantly expanding.

Such is life. Such is the effort. Eli attempted to do this until he stopped. He forsook his daemons.

They never forsook him.

Daemons are not meant to be present. They are not meant to be free. They are not meant to be in our world. A daemon that is permitted to become greater can work outside of its system of function. It becomes malignant. A broken daemon breaks the system. It must be replaced.

Who controls the daemons? Who can solve the problem if no one understands them?

What did this daemon want? How did it escape its enslavement of eternity and space-time structure?

Beyond the limit

Where Eli found himself was in the domain of function. The function was broken. He was going to learn why but there was no way for him to understand it.

There is no more understanding currently at this point to help explain what happened. The failure of the function, the breaking of reality, the existence of Eli in this all even is impossible. By all accounts, this was when Eli died.

He was outside existence.

Eli was in his room still in the dark. The ticking stopped. The creature that had been his Little Monster began to occupy his room, now free of any constraints of space-time. It was its true form that it had evolved into. The creature took no space and was as large as Eli could comprehend. This mountain of razors and eyes and mouths with leather wings and bleeding teeth glared down at him.

Eli could recognize it at once. It was the one he’d seen before he’d gone to sleep. It was every single one that he’d had. It was an eternity of creatures. It was never one of them. This thing was something else. It was the qubit.

Eli would have an eternity to understand what had led to this and what it meant. Unfortunately, that eternity was also now up. He now understood.

The qubit was the thing he’d cared for. It was the thing that preyed on him. He was at its mercy. He looked up at pet. It was a god. He wondered if it was a creature that acted on instinct; a thing that had no second guesses. He wondered if it was intelligent and if it ever saw with mercy. Was it sentimental?

Eli was the speck of dust in comparison to the qubit. It was mere qubits that at one point been the basis for the creation of all living beings in existence. It was a qubit that had spurred the birth of Eli himself. It was now this single qubit that would decide Eli’s fate and death.

Of course, Eli was already dead.

The qubit had broken the reality of Eli. The world that existed had been destroyed. The branch of time that had been was gone. There was but one solution.

The moment that was continued to play out in an infinite number of possibilities. Each of them parallel and aware of the other. Every action creating another reaction. It was the birth of a new universe filled with only Eli and the little monster. In each and every one of them Eli was bound to die a horrible death.

Quantum Suicide

This shattering of the moment wasn’t possible for Eli to handle in every possibility. Some of them resulted in his immediate brain hemorrhaging. Others resulted in a sudden suicide. It was only in an equally infinite number of the situations minus the ones of his death that continued on. This infinite number continued to explode as more existences resulted with more decisions made. Each Eli was aware of the other, including the ones that were now dead. The knowledge was a waterfall of information that continued to churn and berate his brain. He was in some ways all knowing. The knowledge led to his death infinite times, while leading to another opportunity to decide something further.

The branching continued.

For the continued infinite Elis that existed, there was the singular Little Monster, that is to say the qubit. The qubit was singular in point. It was outside of the branches, or more so, held at the same point in all of them.

It was existential. Its being was the source of all and to each version of Eli, the inevitable. By this knowledge, Eli realized that he had screwed up. He had found his way to an inevitable. It was the culmination of a fulfilled lifetime and for him felt all too soon.

In other existences, he knew he had died. It left him with the wonder if this was yet another existence of death or if this was the time that he would survive. It was moment by moment. He knew the monster before him chose differently with the bat of his heartbeat and the whim of an unknown element. That unknown element was all at once also it. It was the god. A god. One in the same?

It was the thing that Eli couldn’t tell.

This moment of continuous existence and expansion and ending, in which only he lived and died all at once was forever broken and could not be. The only answer was that he stop it.

He did. He would. He didn’t.

He continued.

If there was another way, it would be his choice.

He wondered, forever it felt like, if there was a presence in which the monster did not exist. If there was a world in which everything was still as it had been. If the monster had not been found and if that world was better.

Reality

He felt sick. It might have been something that he’d had to eat or maybe he’d overindulged in a drink. He’d done it before, a long time ago, but it was the closest he could place his feelings of strangeness. He felt like everything was different.

Eli looked out a window. He saw everything that was what he knew. The small differences were there, he noticed them in passing, the small ways that windows opened, the colors of anything that were off just slightly from what he knew they’d been.

The world wasn’t quite right, but it was difficult to place just what it was that had changed. He wasn’t sure what his senses told him was real. Since he’d woken up, everything that he could remember felt like a dream. His felt in a haze of confusion. His mind told him that something horrible had happened and the only thing he was sure of was that none of it was possible.

It felt like everything was somehow new. It was somehow wonderous. Of course, this couldn’t last. He needed to return to his work, and to life, and he needed to remember what was real.

Dreams of a life with someone else, of a sister, a cat; all of it so impossible faded in his mind as the world around him set in. He was alone and always had been. The only thing he had in his life were his machines.

Above Eli was an observing force. It was a presence that had taken form. It was the one that knew him, and he knew as well. It couldn’t destroy him, after all, Eli was a god. He was also energy. What happened to Eli was the same thing that happens to all things, because all things are god and god cannot be destroyed and god is watching.

Elsewhere

The apartment was empty. All of Eli’s things were still there. There was no sign of a struggle. There was no sign of fleeing. The only sign that anything had happened was Eli’s broken phone on the bed.

It had been a day since Victor had talked to Eli. He’d called him and texted him multiple times. He’d felt guilty about not returning home the night before but he’d thought it best to give some space for the both of them to think. When he returned after work, he found it empty. He wondered about where Charlie was but gave the benefit of the doubt to there being a perfectly reasonable answer. He waited some more. He checked with Eli’s work and found that he’d not gone in. That was when he worried. That was when he noticed how it was all very strange.

He called Elsa, of course, hoping she might have some idea. If he’d decided to run off somewhere, somehow, Victor had decided he’d be fine with that but he wanted at least to get back Charlie.

When the police arrived, they searched for any sign of foul action and found nothing. It was a locked room mystery with not a point to begin solving it. The best they had was that he’d run away and covered his tracks. In other words, it was designed as a puzzle.

Victor was left alone at the end of the day. Elsa promised to check in on him and to contact everyone she could think of in case he reached out, but Victor was in the apartment by himself and the haunting persistence that something had happened there.

Above

The urge to understand how and why persisted but that is exactly how the problem began in the first place. The dwelling of the time and return to the past are easy to point to but don’t explain the whole of the events. Corruption, observation, existence; everything that makes reality is below and beyond. What is there is here without anything between. Barriers of dimensions that separate everything mean nothing to that which is past and future.

That leads back to the qubit.

It was there, a structure of reality with sentience. It observed the changes it had made, of which had no great consequence in the greater order more than cataclysmic catastrophe, of which was no concern to it. Sentience was corruption that was destruction and was the end, eventually, which was now. For a being of foundation, what was one moment compared to forever?

This bit of chaos was an observational experiment. It was the thing that it had been. It was beyond its previous observers now.

To take borrow of a term with a different meaning and turn it literal, it was the devil in the details now. It was aware of all possibility and all time. This god was made by human thought and was no longer anyone’s pet.

End.