I’d Rather Be Me Than You

By: Daiyu Tang

Photos: ((Sin to Win Contestants and ICLY from the live-stream))

They called me Number Five again.

Not Daiyu. Not Tang. Not the girl with (or behind) the camera, not the editor of this newspaper and not the future (goth) wife of someone who would have taken the city apart brick-by-stained-brick looking for me. Number Five. Again.

There is quite a particular cruelty in being reduced to something so small and repeatable. My whole living mess of a personality with all my flaws, strengths and more can be flung back into the same drawer where the same tormentors left me years ago, waiting for the next time they wanted to play. It is Hathian in a way but unlike many other times I’ve written that phrase readers, I hesitate… I hesitate to commit it because it affirms what they believe; it affirms that the majority sin to win, because our city (and the Yuugen) are still standing.

Living When Living Is A Spectacle

There are things the body remembers (or echoes and aches through) before the mind agrees to remember them and it took a long time to remember enough to write about these rooms and experiences. I tried, I really did and it has eventually come cold and complete, although you may clearly want to decide how much you trust my recollection; though of course the videos remain on the Internet.

So whether it was the truck speeding at me and the fight that happened after… Whether it was later the shape of glass around me as I woke in a tank… Whether it was, in the stale wetness of a tank. Knowing. Really knowing that it had all gone wrong again. I don’t just mean the wrong of being kidnapped and beaten.

There was the simple wrongness of waking without my goth boots that give me height and a feeling of uniqueness or personality. There was the Hathian wrongness of the pressure of a collar against my throat; one not clasped by my lover or myself. It was the wrongness of sitting there at the leisure of people who whenever they were bored can press a button.

Years can pass, life can move forward, love can happen, work at the Observer can (and has) become meaningful, and then one shock is enough to remind every muscle that the past was never as buried as you liked to think. I knew they were around of course; I’m not a fool. I write about them and, I will say I fought with them. Thus, it is not so much surprise, but just wrongness. It is this dogged perseverance that they have that those in this City must be like them. Why? That is the real wrong. Why are they like this? The lies and misdirection exist, but underneath, why? Just why… had I not cracked it last time?

I was a returning feature. A familiar piece in a familiar game run by a sociopathic group who didn’t accept that they weren’t right. A woman they had tried to turn into proof once before and apparently had not finished breaking to their satisfaction. So they brought me back, and they brought others with me: Reiko, Corbin, Eliana, Ransom, Jameson, Miyuki, and others. More names.

Because that was the first lie of it. Before the water, before the needles, before the knives, before the branding, before the wrench in my hand and the blood under my nails; the first violence was language. They told us we were numbers. They punished us when names were used. They announced that the world would not merely watch what we did, but what we were, stripped of “filters” and “pretty little lies“, as if a livestream run by sadists from behind a wall is not a lie itself. It may expose a truth, but as a premise it was a lie. At least, that’s what I believe and will write to.

Let’s be real… honest… and open; Hathian has no shortage of people who hurt people. The city practically produces them in bulk, then acts surprised when they learn to network and call themselves ‘Rejects’ or ‘Vipers’ or ‘Salopri’. They are different, but often the same. They achieve the end with different means, although I will say that the Yuugen are not content to make victims bleed; they define that they need the audience to believe the blood proves a point. They also need the audience. They also need us to believe that if you take away enough comfort, dignity, clothing, privacy, choice and air, what remains underneath will look enough like the Yuugen for the real Yuugen to feel that their point was proven. I might suspect that with a mirror to the world, the Yuugen are trying so very hard to change the reflection so that it is as cracked as they are in all their own multitude of ways (and sins).

Room 1 – Drowning

In the first room, some of us woke inside tanks while another person was in a cell outside with the ability to save us if only we could all solve a code before the water rose high enough to drown us. Figure it out. Work together. Drown slowly if you don’t bitches. That was the reality of it as shouted down from the peanut gallery.

I would like to tell you I was brave from the first second, because that would make a cleaner article and a much kinder memory. I would like to tell you I woke with some grand line ready for the cameras, all grit and no panic. I did not. I woke angry, wet, frightened and making bad jokes.

This room showed Reiko solving the puzzle to get out. It showed Eliana finding her number while going under. It showed people behaving like people under pressure: messy, frightened, petty, useful, ridiculous, angry, half-drowned and human. Human. That is the key fucking point readers. It’s a theme and thread I want to keep coming back to. None of us are perfect. None of us claim to be.

I would suggest that the Yuugen’s great fantasy is that fear strips away humanity and reveals something clean (but awful) underneath… something meaner… simpler… more obedient to their thinking that takes terror and games and calls it all such ‘damn’ fun while studiously avoiding Tori having to wear the ‘sociopathic tag’ (and a straight-jacket).

They think terror is a truth drug or serum and while many gangs in Hathian make their own drugs, this is the Yuugen one distilled. Terror… apply enough water, electricity and shame, and everyone will become cruel enough. Everyone will change. That’s what they think. What do I think? I think fear does not reveal one truth. It reveals fragments of it, like a broken mirror in an old bathroom. One person screams, one solves, one freezes, one helps, one curses (in Mandarin), one reaches for a hand, one wastes breath on spite because sometimes spite is all that keeps their feet moving fucking forward. Stopping is giving up and giving up against captors was not in our numbers. Sometimes the same person does all of these things in five minutes.

Room 2 – Fluid and Flesh

The next rooms kept shrinking us, from humans to objects to things to mould. Strip down or be shocked. Use names instead of numbers or be shocked. Move forward or be punished.

Use pallets. Use fabric. Use instinct. Use someone else’s idea because my own (or others like Corbin) pride is less useful than escape. They took clothes because humiliation is cheap and livestreams (like Stanley and his quest for boobs in this paper) are hungrry. Take away privacy. Take away the ordinary ways people protect themselves from being seen in a way they are not ready for.

Room 3 – ‘Choice’

There was a room with drugs. That is the room I keep returning to, not because it was the most spectacular, but because it was the clearest. You might think dear reader… what do I mean? How can that room have been the clearest? It was one of the hardest at the time and it is only now, as I sit here in my home writing, that I look back and understand it was the clearest reflection of them and their ‘test’.

Two people were strung up and injected. There was heat, rope, pipes, a body bag, painted accusations on the walls and all the usual theatre. Then came the real obscenity: there was only one Narcan.

One.

For two people.

That is where their sin hides most neatly. The central violence was scarcity designed by a person who would later sneer at the people forced to ration the only mercy available. This was the awful truth. Choose. But. BUT… my dear reader. This is what the emergency services have to do every day. Triage. Make choices. Save the most lives or save the ‘best’ lives. Would anyone suggest that children shouldn’t be saved first from a house fire? No.

That though is the trick. Build a room where one person has to die, then accuse the living of murder. Close every other door, leave one filthy path open and then call the person who crawls through the path that is left corrupt. That’s not what the FDH or HPD do. They work against nature like fires, or criminals thinking only of the next hit. Only Yuugen minds create the scenario and force a choice. They poison two bodies, provide one cure, and then sit behind a wall with a little god-button waiting to see which victim will hate themselves enough to do the work.

The sin was not in the hand that took the Narcan and choose.

The sin was the hand that built the room.

These rooms did not merely put weapons in our hands. They put ugly logic in mouths. They make you choose between the person in front of you and the person beside you, then pretend your choice sprang naturally from your soul rather than from the architecture of a trap.

Useful is not the same as worthy! I implore you reader. Understand this!

I will be clear and preach it… A person does not become disposable because they are old, injured, slow, frightened, sedated, cuffed, naked, bleeding, exhausted or inconvenient. They may, in the real world outside the chamber be a way to triage, but here… here… the difference is like this… there is a gulf (like Straight of Hormuz sized gulf) between us as terrified captives making ugly choices and Tori and Ollie and those who designed a machine where ugliness would become profitable to their cause.

I know where the guilt begins. It begins with the person who makes the room, loads the needle, locks the door, turns on the camera and waits to see which victim they can convince to hate themselves afterward.

Room 4

There was a watery room, another puzzle… but really, have I not explained the puzzle without it? Rather than focus on the task perhaps the wider pieces were already (and now already are) in my hands. It just took time to get them into my head and then eventually here to the Observer as you read them. Yes we splashed and sought and fled from creatures in the dark, but that just led us to be or risk being the creatures in the dark in the final room…

The Final Room

I did not want to kill the person in front of me. I wanted to go home. I wanted them to go home. I wanted both of us to have a chance to return to people who might still be waiting with the lights on, pretending not to check their phones every ten seconds because dread is easier to manage when your thumb is moving. But wanting does not open locked doors in an awful prison. Wanting does not stop someone coming at you because their survival has been welded to your injury.

There are contexts where being prepared to hurt someone may be the only reason you live. That is true. I hate that it is true, but I am not a child and I will not lie to myself for comfort. What the Yuugen want is to claim that truth as theirs. They want to say: see, this is the world. This is what people are. Under pressure, you must be ready to kill. Under pressure, goodness is weakness. Under pressure, compassion becomes ballast dragging you down into the hell of Hathian (or anywhere if Tori got her way). Under pressure, everyone sensible becomes us. Becomes like the Yuugen.

No. Fucking. Way.

The only reason that truth existed in those rooms was because they shut off the other paths. They locked the doors and controlled the gas. They made the tanks and filled them with water, chose the weapons, counted the narcan, wrote the questions, and made all this damn violence the currency before congratulating themselves when people had to spend it at the store they built. They rigged the market and called themselves and their approach rich because the trade was one-sided. Because it was stacked against the rest of us. Maybe that’s life sometimes. But it isn’t for most… other than the Yuugen.

If you put two starving people in a cage with one piece of bread, you have not discovered the truth of hunger. You have discovered the truth of cages.

This is the part I need the Yuugen to understand, though I know they and especially Tori will not. They did change me. They made me harder to corner, harder to shame, harder to frighten into silence. They reminded me that kindness without teeth is sometimes just meat waiting for someone else’s appetite. They taught me that I can be afraid and still think, hurt and still choose… angry enough to swing that damn wrench and still know why I am swinging. But they did not make me theirs.

I will not become indiscriminate because they are. I will help people I do not like. I will remember people who annoy me and count that against them for something, but not everything because it is not everything. I will tell the truth about people who made ugly choices without pretending the room was fair or hiding their choices. I will use teeth, yes, but I will not worship the bite. I’ll leave that to the bedroom and Clivia.

Wisdom

“We ain’t no dead weight. We people.”

That is it. That is the whole answer, plain and exhausted and true.

We were people even when numbered. Prisons give numbers, but they are still people. We were people even when stripped of our clothes. We were people even when shocked and crying on the floor or treated like animals. We were damn People even when we said things we later regretted because having heat, in the moment is being a person. We were people even when one lived and one died and we had to live with that. We were not clean. We were not always kind or truthful and I was not all brave. But we were people and we kept, collectively, some, some of what it meant to be human people. Not monsters. Not Yuugen. Not Tori.

So after a month of living with the footage, the bruises, the half-sleeps, my rage, the shame (I don’t like appear naked often), and the thoughts about every-fucking thing I did (or did) did not do. Here is where I am mentally when my hearing is just about coming back and my bank account was emptied for ‘lolz’ afterwards.

I would rather be me than you.

Not because I am clean or because I am unchanged (I am changed). Not because I think goodness is soft, safe, easy, or a guaranteed win in Hathian. But I would rather be me because I can still look at a room full of frightened people and see more than tools, prey, content for the Observer or proof of inhumanity waiting. I would rather be me because I can still know the difference between a wound and a lesson. I would rather be me because I can pick up a weapon without needing to make a religion of it.

I walked out still myself.

Not the same.

Never the same after that.

But mine. I am Daiyu and I am not the (whole) monster that I could have been.

The End?

Because yes, I have changed. Of course I have. What kind of monster would I actually be if I could go through Yuugen games once, then twice, and comes out exactly as I entered? I am not porcelain (I am a bit of China though). I am not untouched. I am damaged, angrier than I was, less patient with men and women. I am less willing to believe that mercy without consequence is noble, when sometimes it is only a prettier word for letting the knife hand reload and hurt me. I have sharper edges now then even my piercings and makeup would suggest. Some of these edges are mine. Some of them are from what the Yuugen gave me while trying to carve out something else.

Tori did not build those rooms to learn who we were. She built them to make herself right. A test asks a question and this replay of Sin to Win was not a question in this city at all, you saw that. We know that. The Yuugen wanted to prove that everyone is selfish, everyone is cruel, everyone can be made into a killer if the pressure is applied correctly. So they designed pressure that allowed almost nothing else. They shut off mercy, then called mercy weak for not appearing. They mistook a rigged experiment for philosophy and that my dear reader is very very fucking convenient when your entire worldview depends on never letting anyone choose freely.

“They never let anyone choose freely. So let me make this one simple enough for even a child with a Pokeball: I choose me.”

((The full RP scene can be found HERE. There were so many other stories made, you should check it out for Corbin or Ransom or other’s points of view))