Death Stranding: The Official Novelization, Volume Two

EPISODE XIV – SAM STRAND

Sam was lying on a sandy beach.

The first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was the color red. It was a shade that he had seen somewhere before, a color that lay in the depths of his memory. The color of blood that he first saw in his mother’s womb.

Both the sky and the sea were red. Was this Amelie’s Beach? He couldn’t believe this was the same Beach she had brought him to so many times before. The planet floating in the sky made him feel even more uneasy. It looked a lot like Earth, but the landmasses were in a different shape. At the very least, it wasn’t the same Earth that Bridget had taught him about when he was a boy. The land looked like it was in the shape of a curled-up fetus.

Sam brushed the sand off himself and stood up. He looked this way and that, but there was no one else there with him. Maybe the jump had failed. Maybe now that the Beaches were in so much chaos, he had jumped to a different Beach from Amelie’s.

“You’re too late. What took you so long?” The sound of Amelie’s voice erased Sam’s worry. When he looked in its direction, he saw Amelie standing there.

“Amelie?” he called out as she stood there with her back to him, looking out over the ocean.

“You still don’t know who I am, do you?” she asked.

The face of the woman looking over her shoulder at him was Amelie’s. But the voice that belonged to it was Bridget’s. “I’ve been waiting for you right here. You were supposed to stop me. Stop all of this.”

“Bridget?” Sam gasped.

The woman smiled. “Yes. It’s me, Sam,” she replied.

Her voice sounded like it was coming from far away. Did that mean this wasn’t Amelie’s Beach?

“My daughter, Samantha America Strand, doesn’t exist. At least, not in your world.”

Bridget’s riddles only made Sam even more confused. “I’m sorry, Sam. I’ve had to wear a mask for so long. Amelie and Bridget are both a part of me,” Bridget admonished Sam with Amelie’s face. Was she trying to confuse him even more?

“Do you understand, Sam? ‘Amelie’ and ‘Bridget’—those are just names. What I am is an Extinction Entity.”

Bridget began to explain.

“This painting is a Da Vinci.”

A man spoke. Bridget was looking at a painting of a woman holding a naked baby in her arms as it tried to wriggle its way out of them.

“It’s called the Madonna of the Yarnwinder. The yarnwinder is the thing the baby is holding. The baby is drawn to the yarnwinder while its mother looks on worried. While her left arm is holding her baby, her right arm looks like it’s about to pull the baby away, doesn’t it?”

“With that horizontal stick, the yarnwinder looks a little like a cross.”

As Bridget pointed out her observation, her father placed a large hand on her head. She may have pouted and resisted because she didn’t want her father to mess up her hair, but in reality she loved receiving his praise. She looked up at the painting hanging next to her father, who smelled of cigars, that had been painted almost five hundred years ago.

“That’s right. It’s a cross. The baby is Jesus. The mother is the Virgin Mary. She was afraid that Jesus would be crucified on a cross in the future to sacrifice himself to save mankind.”

“But how did the Virgin Mary know that was going to happen, Papa? Why didn’t she stop it?” Bridget asked.

“Because we’re only human,” her father replied.

Bridget’s father’s face looked slightly cold. He seemed to smell of sweat. Bridget liked the smell of her father’s cigars, they smelled like dried leaves, but she didn’t like this smell.

“A holy sacrifice must be made so that humanity can keep on living.”

Bridget didn’t understand what those words meant at the time (I was only five years old). It took many years afterwards for her to finally comprehend them.

Bridget dreamt of the cross time and time again. For some reason, she always felt like she wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about it, so she remained silent, taking her secret with her to the grave.

—So now I can finally tell you.

The shoreline stretched on for eternity. Bridget walked along it alone, looking out over the sea on her right side. Even if she carried on walking until her dying breath, she’d probably never reach the end. When Bridget realized that, it made her happy. It meant that this world would never end.

The calm ocean surface reflected the light of the sun. It was so gentle and beautiful. Bridget was a smart girl. She knew that all life on Earth came from the sea. The sand on the beach was white and felt good as it poured through her fingers. It was fun to mold the sand and make sandcastles and imaginary towns, too. She even built a breakwater so that her little town didn’t get destroyed.

Bridget knew she was dreaming, but she always looked forward to these dreams so much.

But once she realized that the white sand was made from the corpses of coral and fragments of shell, she became afraid to dream. It became a beach of death.

Bridget didn’t want to have that dream ever again, but she couldn’t pick and choose. Eventually, she came to dream of that beach every night.

That eternal shoreline transformed into an eternal nightmare.

It was sometime afterward when she came to see the Beach littered with crosses. She saw them thrust into the sand, floating in the sea, and disappearing and reappearing on the horizon. Sometimes she even saw them in the sky.

Then, one day, she found a rotten, enormous cross discarded at the water’s edge. It was so big, it looked like it could have crucified a whale or a giant. But all that was nailed to it was a doll of a baby angel that had its wings plucked away. She felt so sorry for it that she rescued it. She washed it with seawater and gently cradled it in her arms. She found it cute, how its eyes opened and closed when its head was tilted. Even after she woke up, the baby still slept within them.

After a while, other things began to appear on the beach. At first it was the carcasses of small fish and birds. They didn’t appear to be wounded, nor did they rot, but they were cold and lifeless, so Bridget assumed they were dead. Those things had already died long ago in Bridget’s world. They were animals that had gone extinct millennia ago. The corpses of extinct species, from ammonites and trilobites to mammoths and dinosaurs, increased and increased. The strangest part of it was how all the animals that washed ashore had umbilical cords.

Bridget was frightened by her dreams, but she couldn’t tell anyone.

All she could do was hope and pray for the destruction of the Beach in her dreams. And it was granted. Although it wasn’t quite destroyed in the way that Bridget hoped for.

When she fell asleep and awoke on the Beach, both the sky and the sea were stained blood red. For some reason, the old Earth that she had only ever seen in picture books floated above the horizon. The world was full of sadness. This time she didn’t feel scared like she usually did, but like she wanted to cry. From beyond the sea, the source of her sadness approached. It was the “things” that had disappeared the moment that this world, and this universe, had been born.

The second those “things” met this world, the sea boiled and the sky fell down. A wave higher than any skyscraper washed ashore, stranding all the extinct creatures. Corpses piled up on top of the white sand made out of more corpses. A young Bridget could only cling tightly to her doll and watch. Nothing lived on that beach.

—Those were the dreams of extinction I had. Even as I grew older, they wouldn’t set me free. In my dreams I watched the world end. So many times. Countless past extinctions that decimated life on this planet again and again and again. I even dreamt of the destruction to come. Human corpses used to wash up on my Beach. They all seemed to look like me somehow. All of them had the same umbilical cord.

That strong and intelligent girl learned to live with her nightmares of extinction. She could never escape from them, but she didn’t let them overwhelm her, either. They never drove her to suicide or madness. Her dreams of extinction made as much sense as living in this world did. That’s how Bridget came to accept them in the end.

Senseless people did things for senseless reasons. They started wars, they hurt each other, killed each other. It was the same as the Beach. Bridget decided that she needed to understand why.

Ever since she had tried to destroy her dream, the Beach had turned into an even more frightening world. She needed to understand why that happened, too.

Bridget devoured knowledge. She learned about life and the universe. She learned about people. About the world. She learned about everything. She strived to understand this world in a human way. Her entry into politics was an extension of that learning.

—It wasn’t quite the right answer for me, but it wasn’t a mistake, either. Then I faced my first hurdle.

“It’s stage three,” the doctor explained, showing Bridget an X-ray. Bridget felt numb. It felt like this was happening to someone else. The doctor cast his eyes downward and cleared his throat. “I’m afraid it’s going to require removal.”

It was just after Bridget turned twenty when the cancer was discovered in her uterus. She’d be lying if she said she wasn’t shocked, but she had no choice in the matter. Bridget obediently accepted the surgery.

As soon as she lay down on the bed and breathed in the anesthetic, she lost consciousness.

“Don’t worry. It’ll all be over when you wake up. You won’t even know. You won’t even dream. It’ll feel like it only took a few seconds,” the doctor explained before the surgery.

“Like Rip Van Winkle,” Bridget smiled back.

What the doctor said was right. But it was also wrong.

Bridget was on the Beach.

The surgery was over in a second. As she came around, Bridget felt a dull pain and the faces of her doctor and parents swam into view. She was in a hospital room. It felt like she had only just been knocked out.

But Bridget was still on the Beach. She couldn’t tell if she was dreaming or awake. She couldn’t tell which side time was passing on.

—I was split across two worlds. My ha in one, and my ka in the other.

They existed simultaneously, but that existence was a contradiction. So Bridget came up with a story and gave the other Bridget on the Beach a name. “Amelie.” Ame was French for soul. A soul that’s a lie.

As a human of this world, Bridget had to abide by its laws. Bridget had to give birth to Amelie. Then she saw it. A human corpse had washed up on the Beach. One that looked just like her. If that was Amelie, then Bridget had to revive her somehow. She felt like if she didn’t, then humanity would go extinct.

Bridget had consciousness and a body, but no soul.

Amelie had consciousness and a soul, but no body.

—But Amelie wasn’t restricted to the Beach, she could appear in this world, too. Just as I could visit the Beach in my dreams, Amelie dreamed and came to this world. Just like how a BT comes here, too. You can see dreams, but you can’t touch them. That’s why it’s not incorrect to say that no one has ever met Amelie.

Amelie on the Beach was Bridget. That’s why she looked just like her (even though I didn’t have a ha). That was fine at first. But in this world, Bridget’s body followed this world’s laws and began to age, while Amelie remained twenty years old on the Beach.

It was just after the first Death Stranding when Bridget realized she had to explain that gap somehow. America had collapsed and Bridget sensed the dream of the Beach she had been having since she was a child sliding into reality. The crosses, the corpses with their umbilical cords, the dolls, and the things from across the sea she had seen so many times. And Amelie’s birth. She had to weave them all together to create one strand. She had to use it all to unravel the truth behind her extinction dreams and the situation that the world found itself confronted with.

The first lie that Bridget told was that she had a daughter named Amelie.

She confessed to her young but skilled ex-special-forces aid, John Blake McClane, that Amelie had been born before the Death Stranding and suffered from locked-in syndrome. That she didn’t know why at first, but after she heard the theory that the Beach linked life and death, it all made sense. Her daughter’s soul had deviated toward the Beach, but after the Death Stranding, the Beach connected to this world and her daughter’s soul—Amelie’s soul—finally linked back to her body.

His sympathetic disposition was a blessing. He could understand and attract others. His disposition was similar to Higgs, whom Amelie would go on to meet later. Despite the fact that he knew all too well how the world worked, he never exploited anything for his own ends. He was the kind of person who pushed forward without question, as long as it was for someone or something else’s sake.

Bridget told him that Amelie had finally been born into this world. That her soul had converged with her body and she could move. Now, she could go back and forth between this world and the Beach. Maybe she could use such an ability to overcome this unprecedented disaster.

John believed in Bridget and swore to dedicate himself to American reconstructionism.

They formed Bridges and dedicated it to building a system that would restore America.

That system was the Chiral Network.

The Beach was connected to the world of the dead. Which meant that it was also connected to the past. Light and electromagnetic waves never disappear, they just continue to diffuse. They continue to the ends of the universe without disappearing. The electromagnetic waves given off by someone’s brain, the memories of events recorded by the light… they never disappear. We humans perceive that world as the world of the dead. Which meant that if humanity could piece those fragments back together, then maybe we could find a way to avoid another Big Five-level extinction. It was a revelation to Bridget.

In exchange, an umbilical cord grew from Bridget’s abdomen. It wasn’t an umbilical cord that connected mother to child, but an umbilical cord that connected her to Amelie on the Beach. She tried to cut it again and again, but it always came back. It was just like the umbilical cord that she saw on all those extinct creatures on the Beach.

—That’s right. My umbilical cord was just like the one I saw on all those animals. I was the existence that you deemed the Extinction Entity. But why me? Why did humanity have to go extinct? That was another reason why I activated the Chiral Network. I wanted to know more about the past. Know more about the path the world had taken through extinction and rebirth. I founded Bridges for that reason, too. But events were keeping pace with me. The voidouts began to happen more frequently. People were born with DOOMS. The BBs were born. But the longer I fought my war against the inevitable, the weaker I became. My ha had cancer. The Beach’s punishment, maybe, for not playing along like a good little EE. And then, just like that, my ha was gone. I couldn’t finish what I’d started. So I asked you to do it for me… and you did.

Amelie and Bridget were at the place where everything started. Once, there was an explosion… a Big Bang that gave birth to time and space. But it was more like a big fluke. All that matter and antimatter should have canceled itself out, leaving nothing. But somehow, somehow a tiny speck of matter survived—just enough. Enough to make this world and everything in it.

—It’s like the universe is trying to return us to the nothing we came from. A world that should have gone extinct is a world in precarious balance. Maybe the Big Five were its best attempts to finish us off. But somehow, life always managed to survive—just enough. Enough to thumb its nose at the will of the cosmos. You know, I’m starting to think that extinction might be the key to overcoming total annihilation. It forces life to fight to survive. To endure. To exist. That’s why the Big Five ultimately rekindled life instead of extinguishing it. From the ashes of the dead rise the living—stronger and wiser. Inheritors of the legacy of existence itself. They defy the universe and refuse to surrender. Extinction is an opportunity.

That was the truth Amelie discovered once the Chiral Network connected the entire country. It gave her hope and finally tied her existence to the existence of this world.

But much like Bridget and Amelie were two sides of the same coin, this truth also hid another side. A crueler side. The gap between knowing and action was too large to cross.

Even if mankind avoided total annihilation, they would still go extinct. Mankind was the species to be sacrificed on the altar of survival.

Amelie had spent countless nights on this Beach alone, despairing in solitude. Then she realized something.

Her dreams of extinction were collected memories that resisted the truth of the universe—that it sought to return us to nothingness—and brought her the revelation that could reweave Bridges into something new.

What Bridget did was discover a third alternate side to extinction.

—It was me who made you a repatriate. It was me who tried to sacrifice you—as a Bridge Baby, as the savior of this world, as a human offering. And it was me who killed you.

The phase of this world had begun to shift ever since Clifford Unger’s wife had attempted suicide and been rushed to hospital. But for her it was already over. Once she was pronounced brain-dead, the doctors tried to resuscitate her, but it was impossible. There was an argument over whether life support should be continued, but in the end, she was taken down a different path. A direct order came in from a source close to the president.

Cliff wasn’t informed of the details. He was fobbed off with lies about how his wife closely resembled a case from the Manhattan voidout one year earlier, so she’d need to be transferred to a government facility for the appropriate care. The woman was seven months pregnant.

Once her fetus was extracted, he became the subject of the Bridge Baby experiments.

Cliff believed that both mother and child were being cared for at first, but once he learned the truth, he tried to retake his son. He failed. Both Cliff and his baby died. According to the records, the one who killed them was the president’s aide, John Blake McClane.

—But it was me who pulled the trigger. I killed you and Cliff. I didn’t mean to. How could I? How could I wish to kill our savior? (I wanted to save Sam instead of saving the world from extinction—Wasn’t that what I wished for? To save Sam so that we could watch the extinction together from this Beach?)

Bridget wandered around the Beach looking for Sam’s soul. Just like in the real world, his abdomen had been torn in a cross by the piercing bullet. He had been left on the Beach, all alone. When she found him, she picked Sam up, restored his soul, and repatriated him back to the world of the living.

Bridget had trampled over the very laws of this world.

Bridget had killed a fetus. A fetus that may have been extracted from its mother’s womb, but was kept artificially alive in a pod and hadn’t even been born yet. Then she brought it back to life. Sam’s body wasn’t one that could be returned to. Amelie had restored his soul and now his body had to adapt. It was an action that flew in the face of the entire flow of time. She had forcefully applied the laws of that world to this one. It made the world scream.

—But in doing so, I upset the fundamental balance between life and death. I just wanted to save you. I am an Extinction Entity. It’s my fate to lead our species to extinction. But that moment, you became part of that fate. You became a “repatriate.” And DOOMS started spreading my nightmares to others throughout the world. It was I that got you and everyone with DOOMS into this. Not long after, the Death Stranding occurred. The dead clung to our world. Until then, voidouts affected all creatures. This world made everything disappear. But after that it was only humans who necrotized, only humans who became BTs, and only humans who caused voidouts. I had pulled the trigger on the “Sixth Extinction.”

I may have been able to avoid the complete annihilation of the universe, but the extinction of humans was set in stone.

Sam couldn’t look Amelie in the face, but wherever he looked he was reminded of her story. A strangely shaped Earth hung in the red sky, now so big that it looked like it might fall down at any minute. The sea was calm, but silently reflected the blood-colored sky.

The shoreline went on forever. Just like Amelie’s confession seemed to eternally go around in Sam’s head.

“The Last Stranding has already begun. A Seam has formed from my Beach and the Beaches of every soul in America. And soon, it will be inundated by a vast surge of antimatter, starting here. Stay here with me and bear witness to the very end.”

Amelie sat down on the sand. Her golden hair swayed slightly. Sam could smell her scent. It was the same Amelie he had played with since he was a boy. He still didn’t understand what it was that connected her to extinction.

“You mean just watch it burn?” Sam asked.

“Together, with me, until the last flame winks out. Doesn’t sound so bad, does it?” Amelie asked sweetly. Sam had no words in response to her casual tone. “The gates to the other side are already open. You can’t stop what’s coming. But… if you cut me and my Beach loose, perhaps you can stop it from spreading. You might just prevent the Last Stranding. And mankind will live to die another day.”

“Then it doesn’t have to end here?” Sam asked.

“But it does,” she replied. “This Beach is doomed no matter what. One look ought to tell you that. Which is why we must sever our connection. But you can’t stop the inevitable. The Sixth Extinction will happen, either today or tomorrow.”

Amelie handed Sam a gun.

“You can either end it with dignity, quick, clean, and in a flash… or you can struggle in vain, knowing full well what’s waiting come the finish. Those are your choices.”

Sam couldn’t tear his eyes away from the gun as it dully reflected the light. Until he arrived at the Beach, he was certain that he would take out the Extinction Entity. He tried to make himself believe that the person calling itself Amelie was a sham. An evil being that brought calamity.

To “close the gate” all Sam had to do was take the gun and blow her away. But that wouldn’t change the course toward extinction that humanity was already on. Knowing that now, what would be the point of taking that gun? Having just heard Amelie’s confession, she wasn’t the only Extinction Entity. Repatriates, those with DOOMS, and even Bridge Babies—if they had been born to resist extinction, then he also had to acknowledge that they were used to arrive at extinction. Sam gingerly reached forward and gripped the gun.

He had to choose. Had to decide. Had to make a move one way or the other. If he didn’t, nothing would ever change.

He adjusted the weight of the gun in his hand. It felt heavier than any other cargo he had ever had to carry, and much more fragile.

The wind blew and the dreamcatcher hanging by his chest swayed in the breeze. It felt like the wind was blowing right through him, freeing him from all the weight. The gun dropped out of his hand and fell into the sand. These human hands that had forged so many tools over the ages to keep enemies away now held nothing.

Instead, Sam reached out both arms like a newborn baby grasping out for anything it could get its hands on.

He embraced Amelie.

He felt her warmth, smelled her scent, and felt her heartbeat through her chest.

“We’re always connected, no matter what. You taught me that.”

Amelie hugged Sam back tightly. Sam responded. Their physical barriers dissolved and their kas connected.

—Here. It’s a dreamcatcher.

Sam was a young boy when Amelie had given him the dreamcatcher on the Beach.

—Wear it when you sleep, and I’ll keep the nightmares away. I’ll always be with you. When you’re all grown up, you’ll need it to make us whole again. And when the time comes… you’ll have to stop me. You’re the only one who can. Promise you’ll remember, Sam… I’ll be waiting for you on the Beach.

The fragments of his dream reconnected into one. The dreamcatcher turned bad dreams into good. But dreams are just dreams. Once you wake up, the same reality from before you closed your eyes is still waiting for you. But sometimes, the power of dreams that you had in the past can show you a different side to reality in the future. That was what Amelie had wanted to say back then. But Sam had been young and hadn’t been able to appreciate the value of what he had been given. Now he did.

“You knew. You always knew,” Sam said.

“ I did and I didn’t. I had so many dreams of the future. I didn’t know which ones to trust. Which is why I decided to share them with you and the others. But, to connect the dots, to make sense of everything, you need perspective. You need time. Time has no meaning to me. I am not a line, I am a single point. Which is why all I could do was just show you all the choices, and let you decide.”

“Our nightmares are your dreams?” he asked.

“You found the common thread—the strand that links them together. And you did that the only way possible. By living life one day at a time.”

Amelie lifted her face from where it had been buried in Sam’s chest, and the outline of the pair that had fused into one returned to normal.

Amelie thanked Sam and looked at the gun at his feet.

“A gun won’t help you here. But it still has a role to play. It was the bonds between people that brought the world together. And if that is what matters most to you, then I will stay here on this Beach. Once the Last Stranding starts, it can’t be stopped. I can’t go with you. All I can do is try to spare you the worst.”

“Why do you have to stay on the Beach?” Sam asked.

“I am the Beach. And I must stay here and ensure that the extinction happens. Even if it takes tens or hundreds of thousands of years. That’s what an EE does. If I stay here to pay the price—to be the sacrifice—then you should be able to have some more time. It’s just that…”

As Amelie looked at Sam, she smiled a human smile.

“I couldn’t take it anymore. I got so tired of waiting. And I figured that no one would blame me if I just got it all over with, so that’s what I did. I don’t remember when or where, but that’s how I felt.”

Maybe that was the little girl talking who was yet to arrive at the truth. Maybe it was the old lady whose entire body was afflicted with cancer cells. Maybe it was even the woman who had the epiphany about rebuilding America. She had a dream and she couldn’t talk to anyone else about it.

“But you and the others came together—connected. And you may be living on borrowed time… but you still have hope. Before each of the Big Five, life rebelled. They fought back. Evolved in order to survive. The extinction isn’t just an ending. It’s an opportunity. And if I have to pay the price for that, then so be it. Even if we aren’t together, we will always be connected.”

Amelie pulled Sam into another tight hug.

“Thank you, Sam.”

Those were her last words. The strength in her arms suddenly slackened and the sandy beach had been swallowed up by a sea of blood. They were held afloat in a bottomless ocean. But only Sam was dragged back down. Amelie’s voice echoed in his ears and her warmth remained in his chest as he sunk to the bottom.