It's three in the afternoon, and Sollux is still awake. The red-blue blinds are shut to block out the blazing Alternian sun, leaving his room in darkness illuminated only by the fluorescent flickering of his screen that casts a pallor on his ash-gray face. He hasn't eaten for eleven hours and hasn't slept for twenty, because eating and sleeping would take away precious time that he could instead be spending squeezing another half-percent speedup out of this inner loop.

He's always been in love with computers for their bipolar binary nature; 5 volts or 0 volts, on or off, true or false. No in-betweens here, no metaphors that could be interpreted like this or that. Just stark white text on a black screen. The hardest part of anything was not using 2wiitch-ca2e statements. And ever since he first learned how to program, he's always worked himself to exhaustion and never even tried to stop himself from doing so, always worked until he's completely satisfied with his output. When it comes to deciding whether to stop, there's only one side to that Möbius single reacharound argument; it's Sollux versus himself and the best he can do is a draw.

Because to him, it's not himself who's important. He absolutely hates himself; he thinks that Sollux Captor is just some no-life yellowblood. It's what he does that matters. The work is what matters the work is all that will ever be when he's dead and gone and reduced to his constituent parts and decayed into food for the worms. The body doesn't matter (never mattered) the mind doesn't matter (never mattered) the conformation of electrons and protons and paradox that makes up Sollux Captor is useless useless (useless) USELESS because there isn't (never was) anything worthwhile there. All that matters is the execution (til death), the ideas and the thoughts and the actions and the tick-tick-tick-tap sound of his fingers blending into the buzzing of the bees in the apiary, a monotone that drowns out the entire rest of the world and leaves him alone with his monitor, alone with the viewport into an inky white-on-black ocean into the abstract realm of the code: bracket bracket open close parenthesis, slamming line after line of code into the editor like a typesetter placing heavy metal slabs into the printing press. Sollux could only hope that his work would be more permanent than those long-lost shreds of decaying paper would ever be, that maybe one day in some far-off future someone will look back on his work and maybe find a line or two clever enough to put in their own project, that maybe this Sollux Captor person might have had the occasional good idea or two. These few megabytes of information are the only proof that will ever remain that he ever is was will be, so he opens his mind on the keyboard and lets his raw grey matter spill out.

He completely loses track of time because time isn't important, only the work is. Raw code flies through his finger tips; he switches windows, compile fix compile fix compile test test test build push context switch compile almost faster than his conscious brain can keep up with because in this flow there's nothing but code and a logic that steps through states and it's him in there processing the instructions at five billion clock cycles a second in superlinear superscalar hyperthreaded architecture; the seconds blur into minutes into hours and then it's three in the afternoon and he's probably one of the few trolls on this part of the planet that's still awake. But even though the primitive parts of his brain are screaming at him to just curl up in his recuperacoon and sleep, even though his skin is starting to itch because he hasn't felt soothing sopor in over twenty hours, he still keeps going because it'd drive him even madder to see this code taunting him unfinished from his recuperacoon. He fights through the weight of his eyelids and the syrup he's moving his fingers through and then--

And then he's done. Everything works, it compiles and passes tests and works better than anything else he's ever written. He stares at it, because that can't possibly be right, it can't possibly work. He stares at the work of the last god-knows-how-many hours, looking over his own shoulder, finding and picking apart the nits that only he would ever know about but that he knows that everybody else would find as soon as they even glanced at it. Some comma out of place, some bracket indented wrong or misaligned parenthesis catches his eye, some minor hackjob barely even worth noticing, and in a fit of rage he selects it all and deletes it and starts over. His cognitive cacophony crashes back into his brain like an ocean of despair, presses it in a vise and turns the handle until the voices of the dead and the damned explode out of his mouth in a register that goes beyond the limits of his voicebox and gives the other trolls in his hivestem nightmares. Stupid stupid stupid his fault for laying it out like that how could he have been so goddamn dumb 240/120/60/30/15 minutes ago, he's always making these mistakes (on mistakes [on mistakes {on mistakes}]) and that's why he'll never get anywhere why he'll never amount to anything (why he couldn't save her), why why why why why why W H Y

and then his thoughts go fractally incoherent; he slumps from his chair like an overfull garbage bag and his head crashes against the floor as his eyelids droop.

It's midnight and Sollux is still alive. He opens his eyes and blinks once, twice. There's still pulsating voice in the back of its head, but it's quieted down the dull roar he's learned to live with. But there's a pinging noise coming from somewhere above him, and it's not in sync with any of the aches his body is using to tell him that he really should stop doing what he just did. Once he pushes himself to his knees, he can see Karkat's Trollian icon bouncing up and down. He takes a seat in his chair, leans his head on the table for support, and reads the backlog of what looks to be the past five minutes or so.

CG: SOLLUX.

CG: SOLLUX CAPTOR.

CG: LISPYKINS.

CG: DON'T TELL ME, YOU WENT ON ANOTHER ONE OF YOUR CODING BINGES AGAIN AND NOW YOU'RE ASLEEP.

CG: OH WAIT NO, I MEAN ATHLEEP. YOU'RE PROBABLY THLEEPING IN YOUR CHAIR BECAUSE YOU WOULDN'T KNOW PROPER POSTURE IF YOUR DORSAL BONE COLUMN SPONTANEOUSLY JUMPED OUT OF YOUR MOUTH AND WRAPPED ITSELF AROUND YOUR PROTEIN CHUTE.

CG: ONE OF THESE DAYS YOU'RE GOING TO WIND UP WITH CHRONIC PAIN AND WITH EVERY TWINGE IN YOUR NERVES YOU'LL THINK TO YOURSELF "OH WHY DIDN'T I LISTEN TO KARKAT, WHY DIDN'T I TAKE HIS ADVICE ON PROPER ERGONOMICS."

CG: AND I'LL BE TOO BUSY TO LAUGH, BECAUSE I'LL BE TOUCHING MY TOES. JUST BECAUSE I HAVE THE GLORIOUS FLEXIBILITY THAT COMES WITH GOOD POSTURE.

TA: are you done wiith thii2 elaborate revenge fanta2y yet, or do you want me two take a nap whiile you contiinue 2ome more.

CG: OH GOOD, YOU'RE AWAKE.

CG: I WAS ABOUT TO MOVE ON TO SLIDE 3 OF 18 OF 'WHY SOLLUX CAPTOR IS THE WORST FRIEND EVER' BUT I THINK I CAN TAKE A BREAK FOR NOW.

TA: look ii'm 2orry iif ii wa2 up two late but ii wa2 codiing

CG: OF COURSE YOU WERE, THAT'S THE ONLY REASON YOU'RE EVER UP ALL DAY. WHAT WERE YOU EVEN WORKING ON, SOME KIND OF AUTOEROTIC SELF-STIMULATION MACHINE?

TA: yeah, equiiu2 a2ked me two make one for hiim. he 2aiid he wanted iit to 2iimulate a mu2clebea2t.

TA: no you diip2hiit, ii wa2 workiing on that 2erver ii've been workiing on for the pa2t fiive week2.

CG: STILL?

CG: HOW MANY TIMES HAVE YOU DELETED THAT GODFORSAKEN THING AND STARTED IT OVER FROM SCRATCH?

TA: ... four.

TA: eiight iif you count the tiime2 ii diidn't fiinii2h the entiire thiing fiir2t.

CG: NOW, I MIGHT NOT BE A HACKER EXTRAORDINAIRE LIKE YOU ARE.

CG: BUT I'M GENERALLY UNDER THE IMPRESSION THAT FOR SOFTWARE TO ACTUALLY BE USEFUL, YOU HAVE TO ACTUALLY SEND IT TO OTHER PEOPLE.

TA: wow, good job kk. at thii2 rate you're well on your way two iinterplanetary hacker fame.

TA: iin fact

TA: ii thiink ii'm gettiing a vii2iion of the future riight now!

TA: ii 2ee 2hiitty piirated 2oftware giiviing 2houtout2 two 'c@rc1|\|0' wiith horriible a2ciiii art of your 2iign on top

TA: 'wiith much love from the thre2hekutiionerz'

CG: OKAY, OKAY, I GET IT.

CG: LOOK. THE POINT IS, YOU HAVE TO REALIZE THAT YOU'RE NOT AS BAD AS YOU THINK YOU ARE AT THIS.

CG: AND THAT THE ONLY WAY THAT YOU'LL EVER GET BETTER AT WHAT YOU DO, IF THAT'S ACTUALLY POSSIBLE, IS TO MAKE MISTAKES SO YOU CAN LEARN FROM THEM.

CG: THERE YOU GO, YOU MADE ME GIVE SAPPY ADVICE TO YOU LIKE I'M YOUR LUSUS. ARE YOU HAPPY?

TA: you know ii'm never happy.

CG: THAT'S MUSCLEBEAST LEAVINGS AND WE BOTH KNOW IT. NOW GO WASH YOURSELF IN YOUR ABLUTION TRAP AND GET SOME FOOD.

TA: all riight, all riight. no need two get your bulge contaiinment cloth iin a bunch about iit.

CG: OH. BEFORE YOU GO.

CG: WHEN YOU TYPE SOMETHING LIKE 'A2CIII', DO YOU REALIZE HOW RIDICULOUS THAT LOOKS?

TA: yeah ii do.

CG: JUST MAKING SURE.

CG: GO TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF.

Sollux rolls his eyes and switches away from the Trollian window. He opens vii back up to the file he'd deleted, and gets back to work; it'll take another marathon coding session to get back all the work that he'd lost. Then he pauses and goes back to the Trollian window, where those gray words still stare at him as if Karkat himself were in the room, judging him for every single little fuckup he makes. What a dumbass, he thinks; he's not sure whether he's talking about himself or Karkat.

He turns off his monitor, picks up his keys, and heads out the door. After all, even if the only thing that matters is his work, he can't work if he's starved himself to death.