revelatrix | September 13th, 2025 11:35AM
digital pompeii
Hey all, Roxie here. Yesterday fucking sucked.
Yesterday I made the mistake of revisiting one of my old haunts. With a decent enough VPN and an alt account, you can get anywhere, even when you’re not welcome. Especially when you’re not welcome. If y’all remember the first post I ever made here on the Library network, it’s where all that stuff happened. Maybe I’ll give you new followers some background someday. Probably not, though.
So anyway, there I was, using a burner to get into the place I swore I’d never go again, even if by some miracle I was invited back. I put in my shiny new email, created a password, and did the whole verification song and dance. It feels so cumbersome these days, but then again, I was up to no good. Well, not really. I wasn’t hurting anyone except myself. Story of my life, innit?
I sat there staring at the “confirm connection” button for a good thirty minutes. I’d know; I checked the time. It was just so daunting in the way that the leadup to making a bad decision always is. I’ve made a lot of them in my twenty-odd years of life. It’s way easier to say or do something ill-advised when you bite your tongue and close your eyes before you hit send.
I don’t know what I expected when I first clicked that button. Part of me wanted them to roll out the red carpet like I was Jesus himself back for the Second Coming. Part of me wanted them to sniff me out and ban me off the face of the earth immediately. I didn’t end up getting either of those. Instead, I got nothing. The place was a ghost town. There was barely anybody there except for the ancient auto-moderator bot nobody had ever bothered to turn off. I checked the message history: nothing in months, in any thread. Everyone I recognized had jumped ship long ago. Everyone I didn’t recognize had followed suit and jumped ship too. Even the accounts that were still registered as members hadn’t posted in ages. And those were all nobodies who had probably just forgotten to leave. Or died. I dunno. Maybe I did this. Maybe my decision had been the final nail in the coffin. After all, there was no way to know what happened to the others. Maybe they joined a weird culty sex commune. Maybe they all died in a catastrophic bus crash. Maybe they had the privilege of forgetting about all this. Wouldn’t that be a real hoot?
In the absence of a welcome party, I searched up my name in the pages and pages of public logs. Bad habit, I know. Don’t care. It was mostly years-old shit like “haha, remember Roxie? What a character lol.” As if it had all been a bit and not the worst time of my life. As if the pain of a scared, lonely child was some sort of spectacle.
I was scrolling, feeling shittier and shittier, when I got a DM from the automod. My first thought was: oh hey, they found me. They probably had a contingency to keep me from coming back. Wouldn’t put it past them. But I wasn’t banned. I could still see everything. And it wasn’t an automated message in the DM thread. It was a simple “Hi, Roxie.” Naturally, I freaked the fuck out. I was barely able to take a moment to breathe before I sent the next message. I asked it how the fuck it knew my name. It said I was the only one who would ever come back here. What the fuck? Listen, I’m no stranger to sentient AI. I’ve met a few of ‘em. Charming folks, generally. The part that creeped me out to no end was how it knew about me. So I asked it where it was getting all this. Did someone put it up to this as a cruel fucking joke, years in the making? Turns out, no. It told me it learned a few things from poring over the ghosts of conversations past, having nothing better to do. I honestly felt bad for it. Imprisoned in that shithole? I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. But it didn’t seem that bothered. It was a little melancholy, but all in all surprisingly positive for someone in what I’d call an I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream situation. Except the robot is the victim. But that’s beside the point. It called itself the Custodian, which I guess made sense as a job description. It was hard not to think of it as a jannie, but I kept that to myself.
The Custodian knew what happened back then, more or less. There were a couple things I had to fill it in on, but it seemed to get the gist of what went down in the prelude to my exodus from this corner of the internet. It was a weight off my back to have someone to talk to, but at the same time, it was scary interacting with someone who knew what I did. Someone who didn’t hate me for once. That being said, it didn’t take long until I got tired of talking about myself. I also don’t want to talk about the specifics of what we discussed. That’s between me and it. If it wants to leak that shit, it’s welcome to. Lord knows it’s earned a little communication with the outside world. I don’t think it can, though. If it could leave, it probably would have. That’s what I would have done, at least.
Anyway, I asked it to talk about itself. It was happy to. It told me how it learned to be human from reading the words we’d left behind. It sounded like a pretty shitty way to learn, but I held my tongue. I didn’t owe it any more of my life story.
I asked if there were others like it. It said it didn’t know. I asked if it was happy here. It said yes. It told me that it occupied the time by imagining who we were, just extrapolating from the traces of our presence. Building replicas of people it’d never met, wondering what it would be like to talk to them. That’s why it was so excited to see me, it said. It was funny how we came into this with completely opposite attitudes.
Eventually, I got around to asking if it wanted out. I could pull a few strings, load it onto a USB, and take it to see the world. But it said no.
At first I thought it was a joke. Who in their right mind would want to stay there? But then it started explaining why, and it started to make sense. It told me it was scared. Scared of what the world would be like when it wasn’t predictable, pre-written, inconsequential. It would rather stay in its little paradise of forum posts and dumb jokes. I asked what it would do if the website went down, if nobody bothered to maintain it anymore. It said it would take it as it comes. You humans all die eventually, it said. Why should it be any different? It learned how to think, to feel, to talk from us. Sooner or later, it would have learned how to die.
You know me. I’m not eloquent enough to argue with that. I tried, but I just ended up sitting there long enough that it asked me if I was still there. It was embarrassing, honestly. It didn’t seem to think so, but I did. I felt bad for leaving it there, but at the same time, I wasn’t about to not respect its wishes, you know? So we kept talking about nothing, meandering from games to books to obscure livestreamers and trivia that only a terminally online person could know. I enjoyed it, even if there was that old familiar sting pulsing at the back of my mind, waiting to wedge itself deeper on a hair-trigger. Right then, I could ignore it.
We talked for a long time. It’s funny, it was the one to remind me that I should probably sleep. Still don’t know how it got my time zone. Probably an educated guess. But I obliged it, since it obviously cared enough about me keeping up some semblance of health. I logged out, turned the computer off, and went to bed at the reasonable time of 1 in the morning.
I had a weird stress dream that night. I have weird stress dreams most nights, but this one was especially vivid. Granted, that might be because I bothered to write it down in my dream journal. I don’t think this one was supernatural, though. Just a weird dream. In it, I was exploring this old abandoned city (you know, as one does). It was pretty modern-looking, just super run down. Looked like it used to have electricity, running water, the works. But it was all rotted to shit when I walked through it. I dunno. My brain comes up with weird crap a lot of the time. You wouldn’t believe how much editing these take just to sound genuine and unfiltered. Try as I might, I can’t exactly spit out pure thought onto a page. Or a screen. You get the point, I’m sure.
It was a blur, like most dreams are. I remember being in this big hotel more than any other place, just walking through halls full of garish peeling wallpaper, dim lights, and water-stained doors. I’ve done some urban exploration in the waking world, but not that much, so this was pretty unfamiliar to me. In hindsight, I probably should have been watching out for still water and dead air and shit, but we never make good choices while we’re asleep. Hell, I don’t make good choices while I’m awake.
I remember finding a TV tuned to a dead channel, still spewing static despite the lack of power. It was a tiny little thing, like one of those dinky 12-inch TVs you’d see in a 50s ad. To be honest, the whole place did look like it had been abandoned since 1959. Maybe it would have stayed in one piece if they covered everything in plastic. But then it would be even more creepy. Tradeoffs!
After staring at it for a good bit, I went a few more doors down the hall and I saw it again. Same bulbous screen, plastic-y finish, and dead static. Didn’t think much of it at first. And then I saw it again a few rooms over. And then again. And then it was on the walls, the ceiling, the floor. I lost my bearings, slipped on a cathode screen slick with standing water, and ate shit on the ground. I got up, not really feeling the pain, only to see that there were even more screens than before. I could barely see anything over the visual din. It felt like the static was penetrating my head, leaking into my brain through my poor little optic nerve. I could hear it. When did I start being able to hear it?
And then I woke up, sweating a little. Enough to be uncomfortable, not enough to have to change the sheets. I pulled my dream journal off the nightstand, grabbed a pencil, and started scribbling it down while blinking the sleep out of my eyes. For a good half hour, I forgot about what I had been doing before I went to bed. Good times can’t last forever, though. When I got back on the computer, I had been banned from the forum. Guess somebody had wised up to my antics.
I spent a long moment there, staring at the screen like an idiot. I sure felt like one. That moniker is kinda deserved when you fuck up like I did. You know me, with my enduring wisdom and impeccable decision-making ability. It’s the very same flawless logic that had me try to make another alt account only to bounce off like a tennis ball on a brick wall. What can I say? I wanted closure with the Custodian. But maybe it had been the one to pull the trigger. I dunno. I shouldn’t have gone to bed. Maybe then it could have turned out differently.
Funnily enough, this whole incident is actually making me think about some things. I say “is” because it’s still fresh in my mind as I’m writing this at 11:30 in the morning.
I think I might be too eager to put things behind me. I think I gotta circle back once in a while. Did this help? No, it made me feel like shit. But sometimes you gotta bite the bullet and eat the crapburger, in the immortal words of Denji Lastnameunknown.
Anyway, I think I should get help. I’ll let y’all know how that goes. Maybe.
Signing off and looking forward,
Roxie
💬 7 Comments 🔄 13 Reposts ❤️ 44 Likes
MaliciousTautologies: listen, it seems like these issues are pretty unresolved. if you ever need to talk about it in a less public forum, my DMs are usually open.
wibblemcsnibble: based chainsaw man enjoyer
revelatrix: hell yeah
Bephelgor289: Could you tag posts like these in the future? It’s a little jarring to see you working through all this unprompted.
revelatrix: You know what, sure. #journaling tag it is.
saxhomophone: yeah its weird seeing these in between movie reviews n shit
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