Justification.

Dark thoughts were leading to dark actions.

He was running out of energy, the ability to cope with the fact that he had set himself to a standard that he couldn't possibly hope to meet. Was that it? No, that's what he told himself to make himself feel better. He was running out of energy, the ability to cope with the fact that he had set himself to a standard that he didn't want set for himself in the first place. And as a result had no drive to succeed. At anything.

When people are constantly doing something with there time they don't want to do, but have a sense of obligation to remain doing said thing. They look for more extreme measures to eliminate the thing that they don't want to do. Mostly so that it will look like it was out of their hands. Or, they will eliminate that which they feel obligated to.

In short, he wanted to quit his job, but before he did that, he had to kill his wife and boss.

He had to kill his wife and boss because they were the ones that knew about the standards he had accepted in to his life. They were the ones that knew because they were the ones that set them.

They didn't do it on purpose, and neither of them were bad people. They just wanted different things out of him that he wasn't willing to do. At least, not anymore.

It's hard to kill two people and get away with it. It would be slightly easier because they were having an affair.

Was that why he wanted to kill them? Was the rest just rationalizing the decision?

Probably, doesn't really matter.

Scratch.

The wind whistled softly, creaking through the window of his apartment. Soft echoes of rain falling outside were heard absently as he read on his couch. Then the scratching from upstairs started. He knew that there was hardwood floor in all of the apartments in the building, and you can always hear people walking above you, if they were wearing shoes. This was different though. This would be a long, slow, scratch. Three times, and each one seemed to stretch out across the length of the apartment. And stop.

He shivered. And went back to his textbook, he had exams to study for, papers to research. He had to focus.

Scratch. Scratch. Scratch. Then stop.

He heard a whimper, very faint. Did he hear it? He heard it, it was a whimper. He froze from fear. Was he just being paranoid? He could just be paranoid, it was that kind of night. Probably just the wind and the rain. Another whimper, he froze again.

Get up, and make sure your doors and windows are locked. Get up and make sure the door and windows are locked. Where is my phone? On the kitchen table. Get up and grab your phone, run to the door, run to the windows. Call a friend, invite them over, or invite yourself over.

 With panic in his chest. he got up. Ran to the table, picked up his phone, looked at it. It was dead. He always forgot to charge it when he was studying. He ran to the hallway that had the front door in it and stopped.

The door was open.

Out of instinct he ran to it, slammed it shut and locked the door. He let out a breath.

Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.

It wasn't coming from above him.

Socks.

He wore a black toque, a black denim jacket, and light brown pants, with black shoes. On this particular day, he was wearing white socks, which became very obvious when he sat down. So he tried to go through his day, sitting down as little as possible, or if he had to sit down, try to sit down behind something, so that no one would see his socks.

It didn't occur to him that maybe it was a stupid, stupid to hide your socks from the world. As if the world would care about his socks? And if they did, would that give him cause to care about what the world thought? Why did the world have more power than him?

The world had more power than he did.

He ended up being very tired on his way home from work, so he sat down on the bus, forgetting about his socks. A beautiful woman was sitting across from him, giggling. He thought that she was flirting with him in some way. But when he tried talking to her, she immediately grew stiff and looked freaked out. That's when he figured it out.

"You were laughing at my socks weren't you!"

"What? No..."

"Why would you laugh at my socks? I know they don't match, you think I don't know that they don't match my outfit!"

"It's nothing, I didn't even notice your socks. What about your socks? Oh I see, they're white."

Naturally somebody else on the bus noticed them, and young man, clean shaven, sharp outfit.

"I think you need to calm down, man."

"I need to calm down? She was laughing at me! Laughing at my socks!"

"I wasn't!"

"She says she wasn't."

"Oh fuck this, I'm getting off, I'll walk home." As he was walking to the door of the bus he turned back to the woman "That was just plain mean and hurtful, and just because you're attractive doesn't mean it's okay to be hurtful to people"

And as he was stepping off he could have sworn he heard her say:

"Actually, I think it is."

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.

Screaming.

He was thinking about the hot coffee he was pouring down his throat. He heard a scream and wondered if it was the all of the molecules being drained down his throat letting out their last call for mercy, like bison off a cliff. Then he wondered if it was him screaming, can you scream while you'll drinking something? Do you need to make a sound to scream? You do, you need to make a sound to scream. And molecules aren't alive, right?

So he was screaming, was he? Or did that come from someone else. He looked around and saw things that looked similar to himself when he looked at a reflection. He figured out that they were people. They were staring at him. He figured he should ask one of them.

"Did you hear someone screaming?"

"Yes, you were, just now, you were screaming. Are..you okay?" This one was wearing a dress. Woman. Until other information contradicts.

"I'm fine. Are you sue it was me? It could have been my coffee? No that's craz-" And he heard more screaming, so he looked down at his coffee cup. It was empty.

"So it's not the coffee. Then who's screaming."

"Sir" One of the ones that looked like him. Man. "Sir, are you okay? You are acting strange, do you know where you are."

"Ha! Trick question. That's like asking if...Why are you wearing that?" He pointed to a curious stripe design that went from the man's belt to his neck. "You look ridiculous! Aren't you afraid of being judged?

"Sir, do not mock my uniform, it's just a tie"

"Were we racing?"

"No. What I'm wearing is a tie."

"Between what?"

"This thing on my neck is called tie!"

"I wouldn't be caught dead wearing that, not even if my mom made me."

That's when the man in the tie punched him. And threw him out of the McDonald's. While being thrown out, he knew that it was he, himself, that was screaming.