Death Stranding--Death Stranding Read online

 

  Sam suddenly snapped back to his senses. The Funeral March music was gradually winding down.

  “No luck.” Heartman sat up and wiped away his tears. He quickly tapped the hourglass on the table next to him and the still sand suddenly began to flow upwards.

  Sam reflected on how this strange backward hourglass represented Heartman’s heart, which desired nothing more than to rewind the past.

  “Oh, sorry. Where were we? I know it may seem like a nuisance, but I’m acclimated to it now. Most of life’s basic functions fit rather easily into a twenty-one-minute time slot. Sleep is the tricky one,” Heartman commented light-heartedly.

  “I die for three minutes and live for twenty-one. The cycle of my life is much like yours, except for the fact that yours is split into twenty-four-hour periods, while mine is split into twenty-four minutes. But when I’m dead on the Beach, time seems to go on forever. Because time doesn’t exist on the Beach. It’s like how time passes when you’re asleep. But this cycle is my reality. Consider the BTs that return from the past and the timefall that accelerates the degradation of everything it touches. How can our sense of time cope with such irrational phenomena?

  “How do you think we got here? I believe that it was because of our awareness of time. We can imagine a future beyond ourselves. We know that even the Neanderthals buried their dead and laid flowers. We humans can see a tomorrow. We conceived concepts like eternity and an afterlife, helping our societies to outlast us as individuals. And in order for societies to outlast the lifespan of the individual, we conceived of an afterlife, and a future beyond ourselves…

  “Alas, the Death Stranding threatens to undo all our progress. Take me, for example. I want to find my family on the Beach and pass together with them into the world of the dead. This phenomenon has managed to produce a man as strange as me. Honestly, the twenty-one minutes I spend here—all downtime, nothing more. Time spent waiting to go back to the search. My body may be present, but my soul is on the Beach. I’m already dead…”

  Sam thought that it was most likely a piece of fiction that Heartman had concocted for himself. It was to explain his truth and share it with others. If someone only talked about their own story to themselves, they’d go nuts. They’d withdraw into themselves, becoming the king of a kingdom they were the only inhabitant of. That’s why we all need someone to share our story with. That’s what making a connection is (maybe Heartman, Mama, and Lockne and Deadman too were all struggling to try and create: a place for themselves in this world). Maybe Bridget’s plan to rebuild America was nothing more than a narrative, either. Immediately after the thought struck him, the cuff link on Sam’s right wrist began to feel much heavier. He ended up blurting out anything to escape its weight.

  “I know that feeling. Lost my family in an accident,” he said, not really knowing what family he meant, in all honesty. Was he talking about Lucy? Bridget and Amelie? Or about the photograph he had lost. Perhaps he was even talking about the parents he had never even met.

  “Well! I never expected you to open up to me,” Heartman commented, inverting the hourglass. Through some sort of sorcery, the flow of the sand turned and began falling from the upper compartment to the lower one. The amount of sand sat in the top never lessened. Yet it still piled up below. “I’m the same as you.”

  MOUNTAIN KNOT CITY OUTSKIRTS // SATELLITE CITY

  “Don’t worry, it’s alright. Trust me,” a voice told Heartman.

  Even if he closed his eyelids, the light raining down still managed to hurt his eyes. He was wearing a mask and vaguely aware that the anesthesia would make him drop off any moment now. The doctors had told him that the surgery would take the better part of a day, but when he next opened his eyes it would all already be over. Ten hours would pass in the blink of an eye. He experienced the exact same phenomenon whenever his consciousness switched to its Beach phase. But when he spoke of this phase to others, they always likened it to a near-death experience. The structure of his story and the motifs within were shared by many people. They always described looking down at themselves from above. That they heard their name called when they attempted to cross a river, only to find themselves alive again when they turned back. That they were going to meet the friends and family that had passed on before them. Or that they were passing through a tunnel with a light at the end. The records Heartman saw always mentioned the same details, over and over again. Then, after the Death Stranding, all of that was replaced with talk of the Beach. A beach and the ocean. All near-death experiences became the same.

  Around the same time that the dead started to return from the Beach, some people began to be born with the ability to sense the world of the dead, and some people emerged with the transcendental ability to use the Beach to move through physical space. There were even those who were forced back to this world when they died—who, in effect, were immortal. They were called repatriates. A theory was even floated that suggested using the Beach to create a pathway for a network. The Beach evolved into a physical concept. It may not have existed in this dimension, but it existed in a state that could be utilized in the physical world.

  “You’ll be drifting off soon. Just a little longer.” The surgeon’s voice already sounded very far away.

  Then Heartman was floating above his body, looking at it lying there with its chest clamped open. What was going on? Was he having a near-death experience? The EKG wasn’t showing anything out of the ordinary. His other vital signs all read normal. Was he dreaming? Even though he had been anesthetized?

  The doctors continued to move calmly and efficiently. They looked like engineers fixing a soft biological machine.

  It had been a few years since the problem with his heart was first detected. Since he found out that his heart had been stopping in his sleep. He had no idea. He was asleep! His wife suspected it was sleep apnea, but Heartman didn’t really care. It wasn’t like he was going to die, and besides, he didn’t have time to be going and seeing doctors back then. He put aside his wife’s concerns and threw himself into his work. He had been scouted by Bridges and he was busy grappling with all his data on mass extinctions.

  It was around that time when he began to have the same dream over and over again. He knew what they were. They were dreams of extinction. Everyone with DOOMS had them. At the time, he had no idea that he had that condition. He knew he was a genius, but not this. He didn’t even believe in the Beach. He had assumed Bridges was simply after his intelligence, but it seemed they had detected his DOOMS, too. Bridget even told him as much herself.

  After the Death Stranding, people were rushing to figure out what had happened. It was completely unprecedented. They didn’t even have a name for it.

  Eventually, the annihilation events came to be known as voidouts. The monsters that came from the other side were named BTs, and they came from the world of the dead via “the Beach.” The phenomenon itself was named the Death Stranding. Naming all these elements was the first step toward objective study and discussion.

  The first Death Stranding wasn’t a voidout between the living and the dead, but a voidout between colliding matter and antimatter. Eventually, the theory mutated. It was us. Our dead became the BTs. It was the BTs that were responsible for the voidout. But why was it only humans that became BTs? Because the only ones who could perceive death and an afterlife were human beings. It was our astounding human consciousness that had detected the Beach and summoned the BTs forth. The tragedy of extinction was switched into the glory of being the chosen ones. It was elitism on a global scale. Only the ones who could overcome such a tragedy could go forth to the promised land. It was pure arrogance.

  That’s why Heartman hadn’t believed in the Beach. Mankind was still intent on continuing to climb the stairs of evolution, when in fact we had already reached the landing long ago. New existences were already beginning to catch up with us from the other side. And if BTs were one of them, then we would just have t
o step down from that pedestal. Heartman hadn’t accepted Bridges’ invitation in order to save mankind or rebuild America. He just wanted to prove his theory.

  He had immersed himself in data about mass extinctions to prove the universal truth of extinction. The whole reason that he joined Bridges was to discover the few records of extinction that still remained. He had come here together with his wife, who was also a member of Bridges, and his infant daughter. They were the only ones who had joined the expedition as a family. They were lavished with attention and admiration as a symbol of connections. But Heartman’s dreams of extinction and his heart defect became more and more severe.

  Heartman knew that the reason he had these dreams of extinction was because of his heart defect. They were just nightmares that reflected how unwell he was. That’s why he underwent the surgery. To prove he was right. There weren’t any operating theaters in the colony he was based at for his research, so he was transferred to an ICU in Mountain Knot City.

  The surgery itself went well. For a few days after the surgery, he would have to rely on an artificial heart, but that was all part of the plan. His wife and daughter were relieved and asked if he would be home soon. He said yes.

  Heartman and his family lived in a satellite city outside of Mountain Knot City. A place where a voidout-based terror attack would later snuff out the lives of his wife and daughter after they returned home.

  Heartman understood what had happened in his core, it didn’t matter whether people believed it or not. He had been asleep right up until the explosion. Then, as if still in a dream, two flashes of light burst before his eyes, one after the other. They were so intense that he couldn’t perceive any other color in the world. He could feel the hospital room vibrating and the thunderous rumble of its foundations shaking. When color did eventually return, the hospital room lights were still out.

  It must have been a blackout. Heartman was all alone in his room and there didn’t seem to be a soul out in the hall, either. Heartman tried to call for help, but nothing came out. His chest was tight and he couldn’t breathe. All he could feel was a sharp pain like a knife had been plunged into his heart. He tried frantically pressing the emergency button, but it was no use because the system was down.

  The artificial heart had stopped working, and once more he found himself floating, looking down at a body close to death in the dark.

  When he tried to sit up he found himself on the Beach.

  It was a sandy beach. The waves were lapping at the shore. But it was also strewn with the stranded carcasses of whales, dolphins, and other sea-dwelling creatures that Heartman didn’t recognize. It was just how the people who had near-death experiences described. It seemed so incredibly realistic. He couldn’t believe that he could dream something so vividly. His stomach lurched. If he could see the Beach this vividly, then it couldn’t be some subjective concept in his imagination, it must actually exist. But to accept that fact, Heartman would have to let go of everything he had always believed in.

  He suddenly noticed several lines of footsteps leading toward the sea. Yet he still tried to write them off as manifestations of his own imagination. That was also why he saw people walking in the very same direction when he gazed in the direction in which the footsteps led. It had been his own head that produced these figures.

  They were the kas of the people who had died in the voidout. He didn’t know any of them, he just saw hundreds of backs silently heading away from him toward the ocean. If he had known them, they would have been more than blank behinds. They would have been the backs of someone with a name.

  Heartman stood up and looked across the crowd of people. Someone was stumbling toward the sea to the side of him. She was a small old lady. Heartman had never seen her before, he didn’t know her name, nor did he know her face. The woman looked up at him, but her eyes were unfocused, and Heartman doubted whether she could even see him at all.

  She simply stood there before raising a finger to her lips as if to shush him. Without acknowledging the confused Heartman himself, she prodded the AED on his chest. The pain went through him like an electric shock. That’s when he saw them—his wife and daughter—and it dawned on him that they too had fallen victim to the voidout.

  Heartman tried to shout out, but the pain in his chest wouldn’t let him. Their backs were becoming more and more distant, like they were being washed away by a sea of people.

  When Heartman stretched out his arm another jolt of pain shot through him. When he realized that the pain wasn’t in his head and was proof that he was still alive, Heartman began to despair.

  “Wait! Don’t leave without me!”

  He could finally speak. But they didn’t hear. Another pain shot through Heartman’s chest. The intervals between the shocks were getting shorter and shorter, and becoming more systematic. His heart was starting again. His body back in that hospital room was trying to call him home. He couldn’t shout anymore and his legs wouldn’t move. He wanted nothing more than to chase after his wife and daughter, but he couldn’t get any closer to the sea.

  None of these strangers were having a problem reaching the sea, so why did it feel like he was the only one stuck in the sand and unable to move? He didn’t belong here. His place was still elsewhere.

  Heartman would never forget the voice of the doctor proclaiming he had saved him. That same voice might as well have proclaimed that he would never see his family again.

  It had been twenty-one minutes before the ward’s backup generator finally kicked in. The artificial heart had started working again and an AED had been used to shock it back to life.

  It was because of that heart that he had been ripped away from his family. Heartman had nowhere to direct his sadness, so instead he turned to anger because, at the very least, he had a target to be angry at. It wasn’t even toward the terrorist attack that had caused the voidout in the first place. He was angry at his heart that had ripped his family apart, and the Beach itself. Everything had changed.

  Once he knew that the Beach existed, he decided to focus all his anger into understanding how it worked. That anger transformed his heart. He became able to share the Beach of others. That’s when this cycle of twenty-one minutes of life and three minutes of death began.

  Heartman went to the Beach each time and searched for traces of his wife and daughter. Then, when he came back to this world, he continued his research into the Beach. He had managed to make a few discoveries. For one, he realized that when he was having dreams of extinction, his ka was already on the Beach. He had simply perceived it as a dream before because he had been unable to accept the very existence of the Beach. He came to believe that he had dreamed of the big five extinction events and lived these past extinctions vicariously in his nightmares. And that the accident in the hospital room hadn’t been his first trip to the Beach. When he looked back in time, he calculated that he had been there an unfathomable number of times. His combined research into extinction and the Beach became his guiding light. And once he knew everything there was to know, he would finally be able to reunite with his family.

  * * *

 

  The AED interrupted Heartman’s long monologue as he shared his past with Sam.

  Heartman sighed and wiped the tears from his eyes. Sam knew that this time they weren’t just some reaction to chiral matter. If Heartman wasn’t going to give up on finding his family, maybe Sam shouldn’t have given up on searching for Lucy.

  But he knew that he didn’t have the tenacity of Heartman. (Is that truly how you feel?)

  If Sam hadn’t given up on Lucy and Lou, then maybe he could have asked for Amelie’s help in searching the Beach for them or something. But Sam had missed his chance, and ran from Bridges. (You didn’t even think of that?) It was inevitable that they would chase him once he started running.

  “There’s something I want to ask of you,” Heartman said, fiddling with his cuff link. The huge display on the wall showed a map. I
t showed the location of a number of shelters that spread out like a spider’s web from Mountain Knot City and Heartman’s lab by the heart-shaped lake. One of the shelters belonged to the Geologist, who Sam had battled through the blizzard to visit. He remembered how the man had told him that he’d discovered a fossil from the Beach.

  Everything looked fine and dandy until his focus fell on a black belt of terrain that lay to the east of Edge Knot City. It ran north to south, almost like it was partitioning the areas that had already been connected to the Chiral Network from Edge Knot.

  “This is the only area known to contain fossils from the late-Cretaceous Period—when the dinosaurs died out. The assumption being that the last ones lived here, and here alone. You see, hiding in the earth, then, are memories of a major mass extinction. The fossil Beach that the Geologist found appears to be authentic, as well. Now that his shelter is connected to here by way of the Chiral Network, we’ve been able to share some more detailed data. HQ has even been able to restore data from the past, and the data of mine that was wiped out in the terrorist attack.”

  Sam thought he could see Heartman’s face brighten. It didn’t seem as heavy as when he was talking about his wife and daughter. His usual curious expression was back, too.

 

  Heartman muttered at the AED to shut up, and began to fiddle with it. The numbers counting down in the small window disappeared. Sam must have looked alarmed, because Heartman shot him a thumbs up of reassurance.

  “Lots of us Bridges members used to be holed up in the shelters, excavating and researching the past, but thanks to the voidout terrorism and all the local destruction that number has dropped significantly. Luckily, we’ve been making a lot of noteworthy discoveries out here lately, but in an ironic turn, the more we discover, the more the tar seems to be eroding everything away.” Heartman pointed to the black belt on the map. “We call it tar because that’s the easiest thing to call it, but it differs from tar both in structure and in its properties.”