by G Aliaksei C
One has expectations for how death feels. A soldier expects pain. An old man expects silence. A submariner expects the creaking of hull buckling in all around him. A fireman expects the agony of flame.
Yet no such expectations exist to define what you are supposed to feel the first time you die yet awaken alive. Is rebirth painful? Confusing? You just don’t know, but you immediately try to guess.
My best association was cryo-sleep training. I learned that being drained alive, frozen and then warmed up left the body in a state like that of dried, cold fish, causing coughing and discomfort for weeks. That was the nearest experience I had to being dead, and then alive, so I compared my current sensations to that of just having left a cryo-pod.
Definitely not what’s happening, I figured a moment later, dismissing the idea. I felt no need to cough, wheeze, or suffer in general as I became aware of my body. In fact, I felt quite fine, if a bit stale. And it was definitely not what one would feel after a bad case of chest cavity amputation via weaponized gravity beam.
I knew not of any time passing between my death and my awakening. Instead I felt clear in the head, healthy, fit, and yet very sure I was dead.
Am I in heaven? Is this Director Fall’s secret plan to send commando paratroopers to invade the heavenly domain?
No, I scolded myself, I am neither a commando nor paratrooper. I would never be selected for an operation like that! My brother? Maybe.
I moved my eyes around, confirming that particular important function, then hesitantly opened them. My brain, panicked, turned my vertigo ninety degrees as perspective changed, and I realized I was standing upright rather than lying down. This was driven by yet another assumption I had about the world, one claiming that landscape horizons are mostly horizontal, rather than hovering overhead. This bit of prior knowledge, unlike the others, didn’t betray me.
Having been alive for a solid five seconds had a whole stack of other misguided assumptions, such as my being in a medical bay. This premature guess made being on a hill in the middle of a dry wasteland very emotionally confusing.
I stood upon a hill, overlooking a gray valley of stone and dirt. In the distance, cowering behind a curtain of light fog, were tall, steep mountains. Rare red crystals the size of buildings were scattered on the valley floor, like ruins of some enigmatic civilization. The crystals were the only thing giving the view any color - had they not been there I would have thought I was colorblind.
But why would I be standing there, alive and alone, after just being shot dead in the Hive’s throne room?
Definitely dead, I thought. The realization combined with my current view felt displeasing, sort of like working towards an objective for a long time, only to find out that the end result is entirely different from what you thought. Not particularly bad, certainly better than non-existence, just different.
But this was certainly not the landscape of a heavenly domain. If anything, hell would look just as welcoming.
So, an invasion of hell is still a possibility. Surely an expedition like that would need engineers.
My thoughts had already derailed. Despite my Corporate-rooted atheism I wondered how an invasion of either heaven or hell would be engineered. One would need to design weapons that could damage celestial beings and grant these weapons sentience so they would go up or down with the soldier. If heaven is the target, then both the soldier and weapon would need to be deserving of passage to the upper domain. And what kind of soldier would go to heaven? Hell was a much easier target. Certainly, if it existed, hell was already embroiled in The War, billions of soldiers resuming their grim, earthly tasks of conquest and destruction.
Unimportant. Back on track to figuring out my current state of existence.
Eye movement, left to right. No pain. I still had two eyes, though, which was very good. Let’s try the neck next.
Hopefully I still have a neck, too.
In a heroic effort of will I turned around and had to look up to see the top of the enormous, matte-black pillar behind me. My entire back cracked at the motion.
There was no sign of how I came to be standing here, besides this… landmark. Suspicious vines crawled up the obelisk. Another red, moss-like plant grew under and over the vines, lining the lower edge where the metal met the ground. Following the obelisk up to its peak with my eyes nearly blinded me, the realization that the sun was perfectly overhead coming a moment too late to save me from several seconds of bright spots in my eyes.
I knew for a fact that the star I had glimpsed above me was not, in fact, Earth’s sun. It was small and perfectly white, and it had a dark halo around it that gave it an artificial, alien look. I resisted looking up again, stunned by the view, trying to comprehend how such a sight was possible.
I had to be looking at a white dwarf - but what was that halo around it? And why wasn’t I blind or dead? White dwarfs were notoriously deadly stars, I knew, and bring so close to one was not an affair one could survive without protection.
Dyson sphere! I realized. The dwarf was encased in a semi-transparent sphere that regulated just how much light, radiation and raw death escaped to warm my skin and the valley around me. That was the most plausible answer. It was still painful and harmful to look at, and likely deadly to stay under for extended periods of time, but at least my skin wasn’t boiling away as I suspected it should.
Despite all that my eyes, designed to withstand the flash of a nuclear explosion, should have had no issue looking right at it. Instead I had to blink away a temporary blindness after a single glimpse.
My eyes. The usual Heads Up Display provided by my cybernetic eyes was lacking, and their failure to adjust to the brightness of the sun only proved their new, organic nature. Interestingly enough, it’s easier to replace eyes with cybernetics than to perform the same operation the other way around. So, how did my eyes become biological again?
Not the most important question, I noted, raising a hand to check the state of my torso. It was still there, unexploded, dutifully connecting the upper and lower parts of my body as if it wasn’t violently blasted by a combat rifle just seconds ago.
And gravity disintegrators are notoriously effective weapons.
Glancing left and right caused my brain to freeze further and my jaw to drop lower.
You are in an open location, unarmored! A trained yet panicked part of me screamed within my skull. Statistically speaking there are at least four enemy snipers within range of you right now! You are under open skies for void’s sake! Get down, pretend to be a potato plant and don’t reflect radar! Unconsciously my arm snaked towards my sidearm, then very consciously announced that my gun wasn’t there, and that all was not well in the world without its comforting grip in my palm.
The rest of my awed mind ignored the panic, completely locked on the horizon, or rather, its absence. There, far behind a low mountain ridge, a string of striped silver light reached up and away, disappearing into the sky.
Yet it wasn’t a space elevator or skyscraper I realized as I took in a series of black stripes in the sky just over the mountains. I stumbled sideways to look behind the wide black obelisk, confirming the incredible. One black block was ever so slowly sliding overhead, away from my position, while another was creeping towards me from the other side.
The mechanics and scale of the sight dawned on me. A series of stripes overhead, visually merging in the distance with the strip of land I stood on, reached all the way over the fireball in the sky, coming back around from the other side to form a ring.
A ring around the star, a structure of mad scale upon which I now stood.
The panicked part of my mind shut up, joining the rest of my mental capacity in line to get a dose of the plentiful awe supplied by my eyes.
“No way,” I gasped, swinging my head left and right, “Heaven is a fucking ringworld?”
I slid down and sat like that, leading against the black pillar for several minutes. My mind worked overtime to accept first, being alive; second, b
eing on a technological marvel as incredible as this.
Imagine a hamster cage floating in space. Half of the time the roof of the cage gets covered with a solar panel that simulates night for hamsters, and collects power for small things like life support, artificial gravity, and the weapons these hamsters use to kill each other. Were that hamster cage millions of kilometers long, and wrapped around the orbit of a fireball, you would have…
A ringworld. Arguably, the peak of architectural prowess. The materials to construct such a structure require several planets worth of mass. Containing the atmosphere, creating gravity, and defending the result from the wraiths of the universe was, in my time, an inconceivable challenge. Now I stood on one such megastructure.
In my head, I began to do math. I estimated the distance to the shadow-plates overhead, the period of day-night cycles, and assumed that the shadow-plates moved with orbital speed. The result was that, some things given, the ringworld I was on also rotated at orbital velocity. That, in turn, meant that the gravity I was experiencing, the force pulling me to the ground, was not centripetal, but rather some form of artificial gravity.
Unfortunately, the Human body does not run on awe and adrenaline for long. I was getting thirsty, and the near sun already had me sweating.
I checked the pockets of my cargo pants, looking for clues as to what I was supposed to do with this load of surprises. Instead of answers, I found a metal flask and a folding knife.
The flask, thank the void, had water rather than alcohol. The knife, judging by the engraved blade and handle, had belonged to Fall himself - I had once seen him peeling artificial apples with it.
I looked around again at the unchanging dry grassland, decided not to make inconsiderate decisions, and unscrewed the flask cap. Gulping half of it down in a sudden burst of thirst I began to look around. Because the sun was permanently overhead the pillar provided no shade, leaving me cooking in the heat.
Walking around the obelisk several times I took in the terrain. The hill I stood upon sat at the center of the valley, flanked by mountains on both sides. The valley was littered with large crystal hills of the same crimson as the moss at the base of the obelisk. The flatland extended parallel to those ridges, leading somewhere towards the sides of the ring. No sign of civilization anywhere. The atmospheric fog hid the rest of the details and hindered my attempts to estimate the width of the megastructure.
Scratch that, there was a sign of civilization here. A hand-operated well pump, one you would see in a European village in the twentieth century, sat a few dozen meters away, beside the hill. I walked over and cranked the handle, indulging in the stream of crystal-clean water that flowed out.
I wanted to be angry at the pump for its uselessness in helping me figure out what in the void of space was going on, but it redeemed itself in full with its endless supply of water. It was, by a wide margin, the best water I had ever tasted. I left the primitive, life-giving fountain of salvation and returned to the obelisk.
The situation was quickly complicating. The fact of my recent death was not even on top of the growing list of concerns - most other worries were being slowly displaced by a rising feeling of insecurity for my continued existence. There was nowhere to go, nothing to do, and the heat was starting to get on my nerves.
On impulse I tried to access my HUD’s medical monitor. Of course, I no longer had the cybernetics to supply said HUD, but the mental effort did produce a result. Before my eyes, a display appeared. The holographic surface drifted around me with the wind. On it, through clear charts and checks, was my medical information. Less surprising was the only medical concern, highlighted in yellow.
Possible heat stroke.
I was deeply impressed that I could see the holographic screen clearly in the blinding sunlight, an underrated capability even most physical flat-screen devices lacked.
I felt certain the display did not only exist in my mind, like the HUD. This system was clearly projected in the world rather than in the eyes, visible to anyone. I examined the medical monitor, examining myself in detail. The verdict was more concerning than the threat of a possible tan.
I was lacking all my implants.
That’s saying more than a missing eyeball or neural chip. The neural mesh spanning my brain was missing. My skeleton, previously a Durasteel-steel alloy, was now normal, weak Human bone that produced blood instead of nanites. The muscle enhancement fibers were gone. The suspension holding my shielded brain was missing, along with the shield, replaced by natural suspension fluids.
That, I knew, would have taken more than an appendix removal surgery. It was, in fact, rather impossible. Removing and replacing the skeleton would be the least complicated of the procedures. All muscles would have to be replaced and regrown. All organs would need replacing. The brain, for one, simply wouldn’t survive the removal of the neural mesh.
Yet, somehow, I was now completely Human once more.
Realizing that my wish for a medical monitor was granted, I wished again, this time for a map. It appeared without delay, replacing the first screen and expanding to cover more area. The whole screen filled with the top-down view of the valley and monument. A “No Connection” message decorated the upper right corner. My flashing green triangle appeared next to another, black diamond icon. Tapping that opened a whole new text window.
Drake Monument.
In memory of Drake Frost, Inventor and Soldier.
I stared up at the black obelisk with wide eyes and sudden distaste. My own gravestone didn’t even have Wi-fi.
Drake Monument? What sense of style does one have to possess - or lack - to believe a black pillar of metal would be a good choice for a monument? Who would be so uncaring?
Probably the same humorous bastard who thought it was a good idea to drop me off here.
No matter. I tapped away at the map, zooming out. Ah! There were two cities relatively close to the monument, one a few hundred kilometers orbit-left, the other under fifty kilometers ‘orbit-right’. Fumbling with the lore I figured out that, on the map, the ringworld rotated left. Up or north was ‘right-of-orbit’, while down or south was ‘left’. So, if I were to walk that way…
That’s when I spotted the tank.
There was no good reason to call the thing a tank aside from its apparent size, mass, and obvious unfriendly function. It was hard to estimate size without anything nearby to compare for scale. It ran on four wide, sharp-tipped, three-part legs, heading straight for me from the town’s direction. Two barrels poked up from behind the upright torso, while four limbs cradled an oversized bardiche-like weapon. I could hear metal ripping up dirt and rock as the war machine moved closer, a small head-like sensor-turret rotating to track me.
Swords and guns? There’s something I never thought I would see, the whole ‘It’s a walking tank!’ thing aside.
The size of the strange machine was confirmed at around three meters in height as it parked at the bottom of the hill. Perhaps most notable were the glowing patterns, runes flowing out of the major joints, lighting up brightly with every move. The deadly construction of this unit made me think that the runes were not purely decorative, but rather a practical, if colorful necessity.
I appreciated the construct’s structure, with thick slabs of brown-colored composite plates covering the wide legs and limbs, overlaid with bricks of reactive armor, while all sorts of containers, pouches and electronic modules of unknown purposes decorated every inner surface of the lower and upper torso. My imagination and ability to make associations was struggling to keep up with the new sights. The largest bag-container on its back convinced me that it was some sort of support vehicle.
And where did making such assumptions get me? Nowhere. Releasing the bardiche, two of the four upper limbs reached up and latched onto the sensor dome atop the torso, lifting it off, revealing a smaller, gray head. Six glowing red eyes swiveled up to look at me.
A second creature, perhaps two meters in height, scurried out from the dust
cloud behind the insectoid-tank-thing. If you took a cockroach, upscaled it, gave it bulging muscles, put a powered combat suit on it and gave it a bazooka you would have an estimate of this second being. The two bugs shuffled forward, gripping their weapons.
I, in turn, gripped the knife at my side, staring down the two from my comfortable hilltop. My eyes worked each set of armor over, working to produce an effective plan of attack. I was not a true combatant, and was not confident in my combat abilities, especially against these two.
I was scanning the two aliens, looking for any flaws in their defense, when I saw it. Across the ranged weapons of each alien, embedded in the sides of the exotic projectors, were glowing spheres. They were larger than my prototype, they had different colors, yet I was certain they were Gems. There was a very good reason why my invention had to glow - it involved the materials used to collect and convert energy into electricity. I couldn’t think of any other glowing spherical object that would need to be embedded in weapons.
It made a certain kind of sense. A transmitter could be somewhere far away, overhead, perhaps within the shadow-strips creating night for the Rings. The weapons below then could function on virtually endless energy reserves, limited only by the Gem’s sustained output.
The runes, I realized, had to be a form of decentralized Gem as well, for why else would they glow?
The success I had achieved less than an hour ago was, now, worn by the two aliens standing before me.
If I still had nanites within me, I had to know if they worked. Glancing down and focusing on a rock before me I willed energy into it. Before my death I could have flash-boiled the stone. Now, my efforts proved fruitless.
I refocused on the aliens and attempted another utility. This one finally proved effective, taking the first and only place on the list of artificial powers I had retained after by death. A light glow illuminated the two aliens in my eyes.
They were both sentient and living beings.
“Peace, Corporate.” The voice was calm and relaxed, definitely female, and I couldn’t help but lower my own knife. Threatening a creature that could probably do judo moves with an M1 Abrams and a cockroach wielding what could very well be a hand-held building-killing cannon with nothing but a knife in hand was not the brightest move anyway.
