Death Stranding--Death Stranding Page 5

  What if, subconsciously, Sam had developed an attachment to or longing for the Beach—one that paralleled his feelings toward his sister and mother? Furthermore, what if they had all become, in essence, objects of veneration? Upon further consideration, it wasn’t so hard to imagine. President Strand was an exceptional woman who exhibited panromantic qualities—as did her daughter, Amelie. This was surely one of the reasons why they had been able to commit themselves so completely to the cause of American reconstruction, their one true love. Sam, on the other hand, Lucy diagnosed as demisexual. His sexual desires were strictly limited to those with whom he had formed an emotional connection—excepting family members like Amelie, of course.

  It was only natural to regard those more highly with whom he developed an intimate emotional connection. For children, this could lead to veneration. Yet there was also an inherent contradiction in this, for divinity is distant by nature, even as we yearn to grow closer to it. Lucy came to the conclusion that this contradiction was at the root of Sam’s aphenphosmphobia.

  * * *

  “What the fuck?!” Sam exploded in rage when she told him her theory. “I’m a repatriate. A fuckup whose soul gets bounced back from the Seam every time I die in a horrible explosion!”

  Lucy had decided to share with Sam her working theory regarding his condition. She was prepared for some resistance, but the intensity of his anger was surprising. He glared at her as he reframed her assessment as wild speculation that he had been brainwashed by a cult. It was the first time Lucy had managed to coax such a powerful emotional response from him, and while she found it a little frightening, she did her best to remain professional, welcoming the breakthrough and the reduction in the distance between them. That was how she presented professionally, but a part of her was delighted by his aggressive response.

  Emboldened, she pressed him further, until she finally told him to snap out of it. To renounce his fantasies about the other side.

  For an instant, she thought he might explode in anger again, but instead he grew quiet, and after a long moment rose to his feet and left the room without saying another word. She feared she may have pushed him too hard…

  * * *

  Sam turned up for his next appointment, right on time. He looked calmer than usual, though that might have been wishful thinking on Lucy’s part. He’d been thinking a lot about their last session, and how it had ended. He said he wished she was right, about the Beach, and what it meant to be a repatriate. That he appreciated the time they’d spent together—that Lucy had spent listening to his stories.

  “It isn’t all in my head, and I can prove it,” Sam said as he pulled out a syringe. Sam was calm, but Lucy wasn’t. Then he stuck the needle in his chest.

  It all happened so fast. Lucy froze in her chair as Sam went into convulsions, eventually falling out of his seat. She ran to him, then, as he was laying on the floor, motionless, removed the syringe and performed chest compressions. But it was too late. Lucy sat there, next to him, for what felt like an eternity… And then he opened his eyes and sat up, still wearing that same calm expression. There was another handprint on his arm—a fresh one.

  Sam was awake now and began to talk.

  “I’m a repatriate,” he said. “Every time I die, I get stuck in-between, and then come back.” He was searching Lucy’s eyes now, reaching for the words as much as they were struggling to come out. “That world won’t have me, and neither will this one. I’m only free to come and go when I’m with her. With Amelie…”

  There were tears in his eyes. He looked so lonely. Lucy started crying, too. She’d taken his hand in hers without realizing it, but he didn’t pull away. Lucy squeezed, and he squeezed back.

  He needed someone he could be close to, be intimate with. Someone outside his family. Someone who wasn’t Bridget, or Amelie. Someone to whom he could reveal the whole of himself, someone who’d devote themself to him. Her. Sam smiled and nodded and they held each other for a very long time.

  * * *

  A few days after the incident in her office, Lucy tendered her resignation. A classic case of countertransference—the therapist getting emotionally involved with their client—and there was no way her professional pride would permit her to continue working. She felt guilty, of course. There was a permanent shortage of therapists, and many of her clients would struggle to find help elsewhere. But after what happened with Sam, she didn’t see any other option. She’d already come to terms with it. What she was doing for Sam more than made up for it. She’d never normally use this word, but she really did believe his aphenphosmphobia had been cured. He’d shown so much progress that, absent an extremely traumatic experience, she doubted his symptoms would ever return.

  To Lucy’s surprise, the president didn’t have any problems with their relationship. If anything, she was pleased. It meant that she’d soon be joining the Strand family, together with this new life growing inside of her.

  Their baby was doing well and they’d been told they were having a girl. Sam had already picked out a name for her—Louise. Lou, he liked to call her. He talked to her a lot, touching Lucy’s stomach, telling Lou to grow big and strong.

  Bridget was delighted when she found out, and suggested that they take a family photograph—Amelie was out of town, so it was just the three of them blushing and smiling. And that same blush, that same smile, when they received the printout, along with apologies for being old fashioned. There was a funny little message on it—“Be stranded with love”—handwritten and signed. “It’s unique now. You can’t digitize or copy it,” Bridget told them.

  Lucy was twenty-eight weeks gone. The doctor just checked them both out and said they were doing fine, but she wasn’t so sure. Lately, she’d been having the same terrible dream every night.

  When she opened her eyes, she would be all alone on the Beach. She was lonely and afraid, so she would start to wander around, looking for someone, anyone. She always spotted Sam and Amelie, standing at the water’s edge, their backs to her. Relieved, she’d call out to them. Amelie’s hair shimmered in the gray light, but when she turned it was Bridget’s face, twisted with sadness and pain. She spoke.

  —I’ll be waiting for you on the Beach.

  Lucy woke herself up with her own screams.

  “What do they mean, Sam?” Lucy asked, but Sam never gave her an answer. She began to feel like she was trapped in a cage of questions with no answers.

  Everything had gone wrong. She couldn’t understand it. She was a therapist, a good one, but even she couldn’t make sense of the nightmares, or what was happening to her…

  Lucy grew more and more weary. That’s when Bridget visited and saw Lucy’s face.

  “They’re not nightmares,” she stated matter-of-factly.

  Lucy felt Lou stirring inside of her as Bridget continued.

  “I’m sorry, I had no idea this would happen. Lou’s special. Lou has Sam’s blood, and through her you’re bound to the Beach. You don’t have to be afraid, though. You cured Sam—made him whole. You gave him a life to live for, to protect. Made him a part of this world. The world is a jumbled mess with life and death all mixed up, but Sam might be the one to make it whole again, like you made him whole. Without him, our fate is sealed; but with him, there’s still hope for a future. The Beach exists within each of our minds, but that doesn’t mean it’s just a figment of our imagination. It has value, purpose, and in time… you will understand.”

  Bridget gently squeezed Lucy’s hand.

  She took Lucy’s hand, like Lucy had taken his on that day a lifetime ago. She smiled and squeezed.

  There Lucy was, on the Beach. Everything she had seen in her nightmares, she saw in that instant. Somewhere inside her, Lou was laughing. And then it all fell into place.

  Sam’s birth, his family, the Death Stranding. For the first time she saw how all the pieces fit into a terrible truth that she didn’t want to believe, but couldn’t deny. She saw her part in it, too, and little Lou’s.
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  She remembered those funny little words on the picture. “Be stranded with love.” And she was.

  Lou’s kicking woke her up. She was alone, still half-asleep, so everything around her looked askew. It was that all-too-familiar feeling of the waking and dreaming being tangled up. But Sam and Bridget and Amelie must have led even more muddled lives. A reality between life and death, between this world and the next. Because of all this chaos and confusion beyond imagination stranded on their shore…

  “Help me, Sam,” she begged internally.

  She took the pills on the table next to her all at once. She tried to make sense of it, but this was never her world. She was born into an older one, one without a Beach, where the dead stayed buried and life moved on. She was shaking so hard. She didn’t think the drugs were working. She had some syringes loaded with sedatives. She thrust one into her arm, one after another, until she ran out.

  MOUNTAIN KNOT CITY // PRIVATE ROOM

  “I’m sorry, Sam, I didn’t mean to go digging up your past. I just wanted to understand. I just wanted to understand the connection between you and Lou,” Deadman explained, lowering his head at Sam, who didn’t know what to make of Deadman’s frank apology. It made him feel like the dick in this situation for being so furious, and he wasn’t sure how to deal with it. It was him who had attached the phantom of Lou to this BB and acted like he was atoning for the life he hadn’t been able to save. He was irritated by Deadman’s prying, but he couldn’t blame him for it either.

  “Seventy percent of my body is harvested from cadavers. I was a coroner before I became a member of Bridges. I know the dead, but I’ll never be able to know the Beach.” Deadman crouched down and looked into the pod at the BB, who had begun to sleep.

  “Have you ever heard the tale of Frankenstein’s Monster, Sam?” he asked.

  Sam had heard of the story. In fact, it had been Lucy who told him it. (Are you sure?) She explained to him: “The reason that humans want to be makers is because we are ashamed of being mere creatures. Our creation myths were formed because we wanted to be more than that. We wanted to be special. The Beach is the same.”

  “I’m artificial,” Deadman explained. “Grown from pluripotent stem cells. And when that vita spark didn’t manifest in all my organs, they replaced the defective ones with those of the dead. People born the traditional way have Beaches. You have one. BB, too. But I have no such connections. No ka. I’m a dead man. No mother. No afterlife. No Beach. I never even had a birthday. I’m a soulless meat puppet.”

  As Sam looked up and met Deadman’s gaze, he noticed that Deadman’s eyes were full of tears. He couldn’t believe it. This man had feelings. He was capable of independent thought. He was brimming with curiosity. He must have had a soul. (Silly Sam. Consciousness and the soul are different.)

  “You see now why I’m so obsessed with it all? It was why I looked after the BBs, too. If this kid is just some piece of equipment, then what am I?” Deadman tried to touch the pod, but his hand slid right through it. “The battlefield, now that was an awful Beach. But strangely, I didn’t hate it. Because I knew you were coming for me. I’ve never felt that before. Connected to someone. Anyone.” Deadman turned his head as if to ask Sam for affirmation of that connection.

  “Look, Sam. I sometimes think about this. If the Beach is linked to individual people, doesn’t that in itself mean that the Beach doesn’t actually exist? Doesn’t it mean that the Chiral Network and that Beach of Fragile’s that I use to jump from place to place is all just a delusion? That the only reason they form part of our reality is because we all share the same delusion inside our heads? That would make what we call connections extremely fragile. But it would also make things so much easier for me. It means that I wouldn’t have to come up with these justifications about Frankenstein’s Monster or cadaver organs.”

  Huh? Was that confession just before a big pile of bullshit? It all made Sam’s head spin.

  “You don’t need to look so grim. I know that I don’t have a Beach and that I can’t even sense it. I don’t have DOOMS. That’s the one thing that makes me the same as other people. But I still couldn’t stand it. I didn’t feel like I was alive. I was jealous of you.”

  As far as Sam was concerned, if Deadman wanted his DOOMS, he could have it. It was because of those abilities that he had lost Lucy and Lou. An uncontrollable urge welled up inside him. If Deadman hadn’t been a hologram, he would have hit him. (Despite your aphenphosmphobia?)

  —You didn’t have to cut ties and walk away.

  Sam froze at Bridget’s frail voice. He looked warily around the vicinity like a frightened hound.

  But all he saw was the look of puzzlement on Deadman’s face.

  “That’s what Bridget used to say,” Deadman said. Had Sam misheard Deadman’s voice? Or were they sharing the same delusion? “Bridget was right. I truly believe so.”

  “I didn’t cut any ties. They were never there to begin with,” Sam snapped back, afraid that he would hear Bridget’s voice in his head again. The hoarseness made him feel even more strange. It had been ten years. After ten whole years without contact, as Bridget lay there dying and Amelie was trapped on the other side of the continent, she had begged him to help. But what her lot called “ties” were nothing but lies. He couldn’t blame that frail woman for everything, though. He was here of his own accord. He was the one who hadn’t been able to bury the past. He hadn’t changed since the day he had been unable to protect Lucy or Lou.

  But simply blaming himself like that was a distraction from what really mattered. He knew it. That’s why he was afraid to look Deadman in the face. Deadman probably saw through everything.

  Sam couldn’t tell how Deadman was interpreting this long silence.

  “I thought we had ties,” Deadman muttered, severing the connection. The hologram disappeared. The space he had been occupying suddenly felt all the more empty. It was the same feeling Sam had back then. When all he could do was stand dumbfounded in the middle of the crater that had been gouged out of the earth. Where that city had once stood. When he remembered the ruins of the satellite city that Lucy and countless others had been snatched away from, he had the same feeling that he had when he thought back to Central Knot City, and how he couldn’t save them either, despite taking Igor’s BB. The actions of the invisible dead who were purging man from this earth kept Sam grounded and stuck in the past. Even if he stretched out his hand, begged them to give him sweet release, his prayers would never be answered. He would only ever be sent right back where he started.

  HEARTMAN

  Sam brushed away the snow that was clinging to his goggles and checked his location on the map on his device. If he ascended the slope then he should be able to see Heartman’s research facility.

  It was seven days since Sam had departed Mountain Knot City. He had already surmounted two peaks, crossed a crevasse, and climbed and descended more slopes than he could count. The weather had been relatively stable, but the skies were beginning to turn a little more ominous now and it looked like a blizzard was on its way. Sam wanted to get to Heartman’s place before it arrived. He couldn’t risk losing cargo this precious. It was irreplaceable. It was something that Sam struggled to class as “cargo” at all. It was Mama’s body wrapped tightly in a body bag.

  After dying together with her unborn baby, Mama’s ka had become connected to her ha through the ka of her child. It was likely because of that she was able to move her body as if she was still alive. Even after the umbilical cord that connected them had been cut, Mama’s body neither necrotized nor decomposed. In fact, it had remained in the same state as when she had just died. Such an unusual phenomenon had piqued Heartman’s interest and he had requested to examine the body. He thought it might provide a vital clue to understanding the relationship between the ha and the ka, and that between the worlds of the living and the dead that the Beach connected. If Sam was lucky, it might even offer some insights as to why Sam was the way he was, too. That�
��s why it was so important to get Mama’s body to Heartman. The long march to his lab felt like her funeral procession.

  After circumventing the large rocks that began to protrude halfway up the slope, Sam’s view suddenly expanded. He could see to the bottom of the basin and the frozen lake that lay there. It was hard to make out amid the snow flurries, but it seemed to be shaped like a heart. Like a simple heart that had been doodled by a child. Heartman resided alongside it.

  As Sam reached the lab, the sensor scanned Sam and opened the entrance. The delivery terminal that was set up next to it automatically booted up, welcoming Sam to the facility. Sam was about to announce his arrival when he was greeted by a mechanical sound.

 

  The door opened and Sam proceeded into a long corridor that was flooded with light. In contrast to Mama’s lab, Heartman’s lab was immaculate. There wasn’t so much as a speck of dust in sight, but no signs of life either. The hallway was almost silent. The sound of Sam’s footsteps and breathing were the only noises echoing faintly between the walls, which felt kind of cushioned and springy, just like the floors.

 

  Encouraged onward by the voice, Sam passed through the automatic doors. Suddenly, the hallway was cloaked in darkness. Sam couldn’t make out what was in front of him, but luckily there was a handrail to grab onto nearby. Sam gripped it and waited for his eyes to become accustomed to the blackness. Music was playing faintly in the distance. It was a heavy and melancholic piano piece. It was Chopin’s Funeral March. The moment Sam turned in the direction of the source of the music, something caught in his throat. Something that couldn’t possibly be there was floating in front of him.

  A BT.

  Sam reflexively held his breath and stopped moving. Perhaps this was why he hadn’t sensed any sign of human life in the lab. Maybe something had happened to turn this place into BT territory. But there was no response from the Odradek. Deadman had assured Sam that the functionality of the reset BB had been restored, but maybe Sam had messed up when he was tuning the BB with himself. What if it was still too soon after the BB’s memories had been wiped? On the way here from Mountain Knot City they hadn’t had to go through any BT territory, so Sam hadn’t noticed that the BB wasn’t responsive. But now he realized that he hadn’t been able to reconnect with Lou at all.