CTRL-ALT--DELETE

"Sometimes, when I picture myself, like, in my inner eye, I see myself standing, with my wrists and ankles shackled to the ground beneath me. My clothes are torn and ripped, and, I can't be fully sure, but I think I've been brutally cut and whipped. And every single time I think of myself, that's what I see."

She was having a rough couple of weeks. For her whole life, every time she told somebody what she saw when she thought of herself, they always thought she was lying, especially the doctors she saw. She assumed they were just used to dealing with real people. She had long since assumed that her suspicions were correct, and she wasn't real.

She's real. As real as you or me.

When somebody becomes convinced that they aren't real, they can go a little crazy.

When somebody stays convinced that they aren't real. They are crazy.

She was crazy. "Crazy Cara" is what people called her for most of her life. Not to her face! That would be mean. She was crazy, because she didn't think she was real. And when you don't think you're real. Then nothing around you is really real either. It's crazy.

Somebody was yelling in the other room, she was in the hospital again, because of the accumulation of her rough couple of weeks. She kept on trying to make things feel real, but the more real things got, the more fake they seemed to her. So sex was hilarious(isn't it always?). She could barely say hello to her boyfriend, let alone 'I love you' without bursting out into laughter and poking his cheek saying "That's so REAL!".

So he left her. It took her a couple days to notice, and then when she finally did notice, she just assumed that the 'real' people outside of her world deleted him. A lot got deleted from her life in as little as two weeks. Her boyfriend, most of her friends, her job, even her parents. Her parents had never been deleted before, somebody was hitting an 'undo' button for her life.

So she decided that she would delete herself as well. Except everyone thought that it was just a suicide attempt, a cry for help. She didn't want to help, she wanted to be deleted, is that so much to ask for? All of the things that could have been real, clearly weren't. Because they kept on getting deleted. So why not just CTRL-ALT-DELETE and then END TASK?

After a couple of hours of examination, it became clear that she was not crying for help. She was forced to spend a year in a psych ward. Eventually, they realized that there was no convincing her that all of this world is real. So they convinced her that her program had to behave as if it was real, and that she had to function until the program ran out from 'natural causes'.

She felt lucky when she got out. She felt as if she was the only program out of them all that knew what was really going on. She knew how fake everything was, but didn't mind. Just because you knew how full of shit the world was, didn't mean that you were allowed to change it.