There's an expression on Mare's face that I do not recognize. It is entirely different from anger or frustration, but it's not absolute happiness either. Her hands are twitching, perhaps with a slight nervousness, perhaps it's just in my imagination. It's difficult to be sure.

I am creating my first original composition today. My pen is idly scratching on the paper as I try to think of the next word to place. It's difficult to sort through all the terms and find the best one to describe every thought, feeling and action. I would prefer to use my words to describe a river or a mountain, but Mare just wants me to write about the kitchen, first at least. She plans for me to be writing much more later, infinitely more.

I finally am unable to think of another thing to say about the bland, boring kitchen (and I've run out of synonyms for "bland" and "boring"), and I read the paper over to check my grammar and spelling or straighten out the characters. When I'm certain that the piece is beyond reproach, I pass it over to Mare.

Although I've written roughly sixty lines, it only takes a Mare a few moments to read the entire piece. At first, she goes slowly, like how she savours the first few sips of her afternoon tea, and I can see her eyes linger on every line. Then, she starts to increase the speed and by the time she flips over the page to read the other side, it doesn't look like she's reading it all.

Mare flattens the page with her hand, slides it to the edge of the table and sighs more deeply than I have ever heard her do.

I've read it before.

I'm incredulous and not about to have my work wasted by accusations of plagiarism.

How could you have possibly read my description of this kitchen before?

I have read it. Many times, even.

Who wrote it then?

It doesn't matter.

It matters to me!

I've read it. I'm sorry. I've read it.

I slam my fist upon the table right in the middle of the paper, ripping it from the impact. My hand hurts from the unaccustomed strain, but I ignore. There's a fire burning within me than I can't understand, but I cannot throw put more fuel onto the flames.

That's not possible. The chances would be astronomical. With all the words...all the possible combinations...A trillion people, on a trillion, trillion planets, all writing for a trillion, trillion, trillion years would never repeat each other.

But you did.

I fling my arms at the table in desperation.

But how?

My cheeks are hot and fiery red. Tears are welling up in my eyes. I don't understand what I've done wrong. I need to be alone.

I know the day's lesson isn't done, but I walk sulkily to my room and close the door behind me, not waiting to see if Mare followed me or not. I have a desk in my room now, with paper and pens. The pens are almost dry and the paper is filled with countless exercises, but it'll be enough. I'll write something she hasn't read. I will, even if it takes every last second of my life. I will write it. I will write about the beauty of the birds and the trees and the forest and the animals and the sky and the stars and the river and the sand and the mountains and the world. I will write about the outside, about what lies beyond the stable, and Mare will be amazed. She will never read another book but mine, for as long as she lives. She will promise this after reading the first line...no, the first word.

I set my pen on the paper, and feel my entire being thrust into the page, but nothing comes out the other end. I cannot write. I do not remember.

∞

There's a garden on the inside, full of vegetables, crops and orchards that remind Mare of her childhood. She implores that the taste of the plants hasn't changed, not in all these years, because the seeds were never able to "evolve". She offers no details on what this means, other than that it takes tremendous work, which it does.

Mare first showed me the garden after I asked her to take me outside, to see the valley where I used to live and write about it. I assumed the idea would intrigue her, but she brushed it away as absurdity without even fully considering it for a second. I pried, though, and she responded by taking me here.

The inside must be larger than I had first imagined. Not even my eyes can see the confines of the wheat fields, potato rows and apple trees that Mare has planted, but they must exist. Mare would never let these be exposed to the open air, to a potential sandstorm. I have a feeling that this might be some vanity project of hers, but even so, it would senseless to invite that kind of risk. The light here isn't natural either. It hurts my eyes to look at them, but the fields are heated by yellow panels somewhere overhead. It's a small, artificial planet encased by plaster walls.

Mare clearly thinks that this garden is somehow a substitute for the outside, but it doesn't come even close. The trees are entirely different, not scaled or sinewy, but covered in a rough, uneven substance named "bark". The grasses are also unknown to me. I have their names, their genus and cultivating techniques stored in my head, but as I run my had over the sorghum, through the barley or under the canola, I feel almost nothing, only a faint, unwanted scratching at my palms. There are no memories, no feelings, no emotions in their stalks, just glucose, sucrose and cellulose. I see the chemical formula before I see the plant.

And most unlike the forest or the river, this will all die if we do not expend a significant effort. Every nutrient in the soil has to be placed ourselves. Every rainfall has to carefully planned and controlled. And the rain can't be sticky and white like in the real world, but must be distilled and colourless until it tastes antiseptic and empty. Every bud, flower and outgrowth, every transfer of seed or winding of tuber must be checked and verified. Anything that doesn't fit Mare's specification (written on yellow squares attached to a fencepost every three metres apart) must be killed in any way possible, cutting, slicing, freezing, burning. There are machines that can do this, little rolling disks with buzz-saws and laser points, but more break down every year, and Mare refuses to fix them.

She refuses because she doesn't know how to do it.

That much is becoming more obvious as the work increases with every season without any end in sight. We only eat the most insignificant portion of what the garden produces, but for some reason we cannot scale back. We simply have to watch the fruits of labour fall to the ground and rot, making more nutrients for soil.

Mare insists this is because she no longer has this magical element called "fertilizer" which would treat the soil without any waste, but it's becoming difficult to tell what is fact and what is fiction with her. There's no mention of this "fertilizer" in any of the Franklin Organic Farming Manuals that she keeps in the garden for reference, so I'm inclined to believe this is just a piece of her overgrown imagination.

One of our minds is playing tricks. The trouble is figuring out which one it is.

∞

It's taken awhile but we're now able to play a game which Mare named "Scrabble". When she first took the game out of an airlock some weeks ago it crumbled within a few seconds of touching the slight breeze of the inside's ventilation system. There weren't even particles left to sweep off of the floor. It simply disappeared.

Mare planned to make another one, but although she started drawing the designs, she left them unfinished one day and never returned to them again. Luckily she had drawn enough to give me a sense of the finished product and combined with a memory she'd shared about playing it as a young woman, I was able to build my own, sloppily furnished version with the wood from a fallen tree in the garden and some of the tools in the shop.

There was a robot there that could cut anything it was entrusted with, but it was so covered with instructional squares I couldn't make sense of the thing. There were still words on those squares I didn't know or being used in a way in which I was unaccustomed, so I built the board by hand and made the letter tiles with tiny saws and ample sanding. By the time I was finished, they were as smooth as an endoplasmic reticulum.

Mare finds this game particularly frustratingly. This is only the first time we've ever played, and I'm already beating her by several hundred points.

You're cheating.

No. I am not.

You know which tiles I have, and you're intentionally making it impossible for me to lay anything down.

Actually, she could lay down "xyloid" and earn a triple letter score for the "x", but I'm guessing that one isn't allowed to know what their opponents tiles are (and certainly shouldn't admit to it). That's probably the purpose of the letter racks, hiding the tiles, not just keeping them upright.

Perhaps I was in the wrong, but "cheating" has such poor connotations. After all she was the one who showed her mind, not me. That's not cheating. It's her being careless.

I wasn't cheating.

You're stealing words from me.

Apparently we aren't even settling old allegations before moving onto new ones now.

Words aren't something that would meet the definition of "stealing".

You're taking words out my head and putting them down so I can't play them!

I was under the impression that I was only a party to those thoughts you specifically chose to share with me.

Well, yes, but...you're still cheating.

Fine, whatever. You win. I'm going to go read some more.

I leave the table and make my way over to my bedroom.

Why don't you do some more writing first?

I stop and look back at her, making my eyes seem droopy and tired.

Sorry. I'm just not really in a writing mood today. Maybe tomorrow.

But it's a lie. I am going to be writing, just not about what she wants. I enter the hallway and leave Mare to celebrate her newfound victory.

∞

Mare lays down a saucepan between us. It's not quite finished brewing but I can already smell the luscious aromas of chai reaching my waiting nostrils. I make certain not to lose myself in the luxurious smell, however. When Mare begins the day with tea there is almost always some difficult lesson ahead.

She sits, pours the brown, milky liquid into our respective cups, waits for hers to cool, drinks and then contemplates the drink for many minutes. She is deliberately taking longer than usual, but even without our minds connected, she would not fooling anyone. Her eyes never meet mine the entire time she does this. Only after a lengthy interlude of gently placing her teacup onto the table and staring almost longingly at it, perhaps in desiring of a simpler time, does she finally acknowledges my presence.

I don't blame you for what you did before you met me. You had no right and wrong, no essential goodness or badness, no malice or malcontent. You survived, as you were intended to do. Nothing more, nothing less.

What did I do to offend you?

Nothing, nothing at all. Please, what I'm about to show you, you must not think this has anything to do with you in any way. This merely a part of your learning. You've seen so much of the goodness of humanity, but now you need to see the bad. You need to understand the difference between who you were then and who you are now, in order to progress, to truly become better than you were.

What did I do?

You will see soon enough.

A pale skinned woman is laid flat against a loose collection of mosses and overgrown grass. A sparkling stream trickles nearby. The woman's thick and lengthy russet hair is mixed amongst the river bank, like the fibrous roots of flowers picked from the lushness of a spring garden. The woman struggles to sit upright but cannot move.

She pushes her arms against a well-built man, whose legs pin down her supple frame. The man mouths passionate pleas while the woman offers increasingly angry rejections. The man, his face still soft and adoring, lowers himself to her, his hands pressed firmly on the grass, keeping his face within inches of hers. The woman looks frightened and instinctively slaps the man across the face. The impact echoes throughout the peaceful meadow, drowning out the trickle of the water for a single, painful moment.

The man, taken aback, sits up and looks down at the struggling woman, confused. Then he smiles and plunges towards her breasts. Whilst the woman fidgets and squirms, he slowly, delicately unbuttons her blouse before fondling the twin peaks of fat underneath. At this, the woman stops squirming and simply stares terrified into the tender eyes of the man on top of her.

It isn't long before the man has removed her underwear and his belt, and he is smoothly gliding into her, his hands gripping the dirt in front of him in clenched handfuls. The woman keeps her arms at her sides. The look of terror in her face slowly recedes as she stares at the sky, and her eyes become completely blank.

There's someone watching from a tree on the other side of the stream. The bark cannot hide the long, dark shadow as it winds away into the unseen distance.

They're engaging in sexual intercourse. That was one of the earliest lessons. I haven't forgotten.

You can see nothing different?

Well, the female is not as engaged in the activity as they would be normally. Is she mentally deficient, perhaps not aware that she will be giving the gift of life?

No, nothing like that.

Then why the looks of pain, fear and emptiness?

She's being raped.

This is a different experience?

Entirely. One is an act of valuing another individual. The other is meant to debase them.

Violently?

That is generally the matter in which a savage shall take what they will.

I would never do that.

There's no point in lying to me. You were already long past sexual maturity when I found you. It's entirely inevitable that you did.

I didn't.

You cannot ever be right if you fail to understand your wrongs.

I didn't do it, I swear. See my memories.

You've been able to hold back thoughts from me for a very long time now. They mean nothing. Besides, when you must have did these things in the past they were meaningless to you. You didn't understand their significance. They never would have made an impression. They would have just fallen through the cracks of your memory, never to be seen again.

But I didn't do it!

I don't care, so long as you don't do it ever again.

Of course. In a heartbeat.

That's what they all say.

What do you mean, "say"?

It's a phrase that has no meaning here. Don't trouble yourself with it.

Mare pours another cup of tea. My first remains untouched. She seems unperturbed as she sips, but there's a faint twitch in her raised pinky finger as she holds the cup to her mouth. I wonder for a moment if I should exploit it, but even in doing so, she's already sensed my mind set to work. There's no point hiding what I think next.

This is wrong, then. This "rape" of which you describe.

Mare closes her eyes, the tea seeming to take up her whole attention.

Between two animals it is perfectly natural. Between two civilized beings it is totally forbidden. It is wrong for me, and for you now too. To condone it in any way is to lose every mark of humanity which I have given you.

Then why didn't you stop him? The man in your memory.

Mare places her cup down. The almost concealed, ignominious clank of its porcelain against the serving plate betrays her lack of concentration. She stands up to leave, the lesson unceremoniously completed.

It wasn't a memory. It was just a movie of some kind. That's all.

She plods away in the direction of her quarters never adding the "I hope" that know was there. It's attached to all her memories I've seen of late, the question in the darkest, deepest recesses of her mind: "is this real?"

∞

The brook from Mare's memory was perfect. I can feel it sparking old connections in my brain, bringing back senses and feelings that I feared were lost. I can the see the green again, hear the murmuring of the river or the scaly fibre of the trees. I can smell the sand covering my nose as I sleep. It all starts to flow from the pen, like that stream in the memory, just trickling into perfect formations of ink.

With every word I write the page just gets hungrier and hungrier. It wants more and more, and I feed it everything I have. I stuff adjectives, adverbs, subjects, predicates, prepositions and conjugations down its throat but it swallows with delight and asks for seconds, thirds and fourths. My pen cap breaks in the frenzy and I'm suddenly biting my finger, finding blood and continuing in the swirling, crimson ink that flows from the freshly opened wound. I'm worried my entire body will be drained before I finish.

But the page still wants more. My mind is running dry. The river is diverted into the dishwasher. The trees are chopped to make parlour walls. The sand is fired into glass. The mountain is ground into cement for the basement floor. I'm losing it; I'm losing the outside. I need to find it again.

It's late in the night, and Mare must be asleep or wandering around in some vegetative state. I approach the theatre, no longer caring about my feet creaking against the floorboards. Mare is a deep sleeper, and she's been spending more time in bed lately.

It is difficult to find the single clip of green I remember from the projector, but it is there, expertly lodged between grammar exercises that I've long since surpassed. I press the image and wait for it to be transferred to the screen, but nothing happens. I press it again, and the screen remains blank. There's a message that appears, informing me that I've been blocked from access, that I need to input a combination to see the image I've requested. I haven't the faintest idea what this means, but I'm sure there is a paper square somewhere to explain it.

There isn't one that explicitly instructs me on how to proceed, but one at least implies it by stating: "passcode is 080297". I type the numbers into the mini-screen, and the projector begins to operate. For those few moments it shows me the clip, I really wish it hadn't.

There are trees, similar to the ones in the garden, but much taller and thicker, perhaps a few metres wide and about sixty metres high. Their numbers are endless, crammed into incredibly tight spaces yet spread out for miles on end, far beyond the scope of the screen. Their green is breathtaking, awe-inspiring. I never knew that so many gradients of the colour existed, or even could exist. It is the only colour the eye can interpret in the picture. Everything else is subject to the imperious force of green.

But then there is just a hint of black in the distance, a slight puff rising into the air. The puff grows into a funnel a smoke until the canopy is choked in grimy blackness, and the green is permeated with oily debris. Then the world begins to shake. The trees tumble and crack under the rumbling of some unseen beast. The ground shatters into a million shards of dirt, root and rock as giant, metal blades carve the earth like one would shave a scalp.

The forest twists into grotesque and otherworldly contortions, snapping under the strain of mighty engines and roaring razors. Abysmal black tires, the size of mountain boulders crush the carcasses of the slaughtered trees beneath their indomitable weight and press the earth into a flat, brown plain, eviscerating whatever dares to stand in front of it.

It is only after every piece of life has been ripped from its foundation that an aeroplane flies overhead, dousing the once lush, wondrous forest in a curtain of petroleum that lights aflame before it even hits the ground. I want to close my eyes, but I cannot stop from watching as every inch of what was green and pure is consumed by ravenous fire.

It is only a matter of minutes before the entire world has crumpled and died, strangled by the cloud of ash and festering smoke, and all that remains of the dream of the outside, of that patch of eternal green, is a single, smoldering chunk of charcoal.

I have to see more.