Death Stranding: The Official Novelization, Volume Two

EPISODE IX – 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.

Deadman’s face flashed before Sam’s eyes. He could feel the anger billowing up as he imagined punching the liar square in the jaw.

Then, Lou let out a laugh.

As Sam peered down into the pod, Lou gazed back up. Lou seemed to be trying to tell him something. Sam looked back toward the BT. He could have kicked himself. It was a dummy.

Sam flicked it with his finger and carried on forward, led by the unending music.

Someone was lying face up on a padded lounge chair ahead in the darkness. The sleeping face beneath the glasses was that of Heartman, who Sam had talked to over codec a few times now.

“Heartman?” Sam whispered.

The man didn’t look like he was sleeping. His chest wasn’t rising or falling at all. He wasn’t breathing. Sam had a bad feeling about this. This was why there had been no sign of life.

He supposed the piece of equipment beside the chair was there to monitor Heartman’s vitals. It was similar to one of the machines in Bridget’s room. It was most likely an EKG. The EKG reading should have depicted a wave, but it wasn’t oscillating a jot. It was flatlining. Heartman’s heart had stopped.

“Heartman?”

The music stopped. It felt like someone’s funeral had just come to an end. Lou was staring at Heartman with a strange expression. The Odradek was still unresponsive. Then, a small device on the left side of Heartman’s chest let out an electronic noise.

Immediately afterward, the body shook. With an electronic beep, the EKG graph began to draw waves. Then the man drew a deep breath and sat up, and looked at Sam with the face of someone who was still slightly groggy, with tears in his eyes.

Sam still hadn’t grasped what was going on when Heartman stood up and wiped the tears away. He adjusted his glasses then offered his hand to Sam. Seemingly unperturbed by an unresponsive Sam, the man began to speak.

“Well, you certainly caught me with my pants down. Glad you could make it, Sam. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to alarm you. But I am what I am.”

Sam just stood there, not knowing what Heartman was talking about or how he should reply.

“Ah. Please lay her down there,” Heartman instructed. He seemed to think that the reason Sam was so confused was because he didn’t know what to do with Mama, and indicated toward a stretcher next to his lounge chair.

“Still no sign of them,” Heartman muttered to himself, not paying Sam any mind as Sam laid the body bag down. Heartman was skillfully fiddling with his cuff link.

“You know your heart stops beating?” Sam said in an attempt to get Heartman to turn around.

“Don’t worry about it,” Heartman replied, pointing at the device on his chest. “It stops every twenty-one minutes. I spend three minutes on the Beach, and then return.” His voice was as casual as if he was describing his day.

“Sixty deaths and sixty resurrections per day. Sixty opportunities to search the Beach for my departed family. This is how I live. This is my life,” he explained.

Sam was becoming increasingly confused, but Heartman was paying no attention and continued to fiddle with his device. On a small table beside the chair stood a small hourglass, but for some reason, no sand was falling from the top compartment. Old books, images, and music neatly lined the ceiling-high bookshelves. Between the books and other objects stood a picture of a woman with a wide, innocent smile and a shy little girl. The ceiling was almost hidden from view by the hanging skeletal samples of whales and other creatures.

Somehow, the room appeared the way Sam had always pictured a room belonging to Heartman would appear. The look of the man himself, still fiddling with his device, fit Sam’s image to a tee, too.

The windows displayed on the monitor that monopolized one entire wall were closed one by one, until the monitor itself faded out. Then a large picture window appeared. The entire wall was a window. Heartman beckoned Sam, who was squinting in the bright light.

Outside the window, Sam could see the heart-shaped lake.

“That’s my heart right there,” Heartman said, pointing outside. “That crater was made by a voidout. I see myself in that crater. My wife and my child.”

Sam was even more confused. Was that supposed to be some kind of metaphor?

“It’s like looking at the shape of my heart,” Heartman continued as the AED in Heartman’s chest projected a hologram into the air. A 3D image of an animated heart was pulsating rhythmically. “The doctors called it myocardial cordiformia. Mine is an especially unusual case. It doesn’t run in the family.”

Heartman gestured toward the sofa and encouraged Sam to sit down. Heartman sat back down in his lounge chair.

“You know, I never came to terms with their loss. In the days that followed, I became obsessed with an idea: that the Beach is real, and they are on it. Some of my colleagues ridiculed me for it, they said that it was just a theory or the dogma of some groups who shared a particular paradigm, but I knew it was real. I would induce cardiac arrest—three minutes at a time—and search for them. Day after day after day…”

That meant that the two people in the photo on Heartman’s bookshelf were his wife and child. Here was a man who Sam could somewhat relate to.

“All so you could say goodbye?” Sam asked.

“Quite the opposite. It is said that everyone’s Beach is different. So what if everyone’s afterlife is different, too? I find the thought terrifying. Spending eternity alone. Which is why I decided to find my family and make sure to move on with them.”

“You mean die with them?”

Heartman smiled at Sam’s question and raised his thumb.

“If death would see us reunited, then yes. But the repeated cardiac arrests took their toll on my heart. The muscle gradually deformed. And after a while they started calling me ‘The Beach Scientist—Heartman.’” Heartman got up from his chair and held out his hand. “So, I’m Heartman. Nice to meet you.”

Sam’s expression remained blank as Heartman approached the stretcher. Mama’s face slowly appeared as he pulled down the zipper. There was no paleness to her face, nor any hint of postmortem lividity or rigor mortis. It looked like she was sleeping peacefully.

Heartman let out a curious sigh.

“A body that doesn’t necrotize. No sign of decomposition. It’s as if she were still alive,” Heartman commented.

Sam recognized that look. It was the same look that Deadman had given him when they had first met. The look of a scientist filled with pure curiosity.

“She’s the perfect mummy. An impeccable corpse,” Heartman continued, fiddling with the body. Behind his curiosity there didn’t lie some great moral motivation to help mankind, but the innocent urge of child to disassemble a toy to see how it worked. Sam had to say something. He didn’t like the way Heartman was tinkering with Mama’s body so brazenly. It wasn’t about respect for the dead, he just didn’t want to see Mama’s body violated like that when Mama’s ka still lived on inside Lockne. Luckily, Heartman seemed to sense Sam’s disapproval and looked up.

“Where’s the other thing you were supposed to bring? Ah, found it. Behold.”

Heartman showed Sam a small case that he had removed from the depths of the bag. From it, Heartman took out a transparent cylindrical container that Sam had never seen before. It seemed to be made of reinforced plastic and filled with some kind of liquid. Inside floated something that looked like a string. Were Bridges up to something again?

Sam remembered how Deadman and Die-Hardman had made him carry Lou all the way to the incinerator without telling him anything. Once again, he had found himself lugging cargo he was kept oblivious to. Back then it had been with Bridget’s corpse, and this time it was with Mama’s. He was furious at Bridges for once again using him as an unintentional errand boy. Sam’s anger must have been showing on his face, because Heartman wiggled his index finger at him to placate him and indicated toward the container.

“It appears to be an umbilical cord, yes?”

Sam didn’t even bother responding. He supposed that it did, but it also looked like the remains of some kind of weird creature. One that lived on a planet with an entirely different kind of ecosystem.

“Human, by the looks of it. I think?” Heartman remarked, showing Sam his cuff link and throwing him a meaningful look. Heartman was telling him to play along. Sam didn’t know what Heartman was up to, but he could understood that much. The situation seemed awfully similar to when Deadman had raised his suspicions about the director.

“It doesn’t look biological. I can’t say for sure without looking into it further, but I don’t think this was an ordinary conduit between fetus and placenta. It looks more like a BT’s tether.”

Heartman showed Sam the container up closer. Once he got a good look at it, Sam could see a substance like fine particles writhing around upon its surface. He had no idea that BT tethers that materialized like this could be harvested.

“And this was Mama’s?” Heartman wondered aloud to himself.

Sam had been the one to sever it, but he had no recollection of picking it back up. Heartman gave another meaningful nod.

“Yes… A body that doesn’t necrotize and an umbilical cord connected to the Beach… These are remarkable discoveries, Sam…” Heartman commented excitedly.

Sam began to back away, hoping to escape the hug that Heartman looked like he might give him at any moment. Heartman gave Sam an apologetic look, and placed the container with the umbilical cord in it back on the stretcher, before closing the body bag back up.

“Would you mind looking at this for a moment?” Heartman asked, turning to the monitor on the wall.

It showed a four-legged creature lying in a snow-covered field—a mammoth. Sam wondered if it had been dug up around here and continued to gaze at the monitor, unsure of Heartman’s intentions.

“Look closely. Can you tell what it is?” Heartman asked.

He zoomed in on the mammoth’s abdomen. The camera was picking up something strange. An umbilical cord was extending out from its belly.

“Do you see it? An umbilical cord is extending out of this mammoth’s body. This record, made before the Death Stranding, happened to get left behind. And look here.”

Heartman switched to the next photo. This one showed an ammonite with a similar cord. It was dangling from the center of the ammonite’s spiral-shaped shell.

“So far, I’ve only managed to dig up these two photographs, but I have been able to establish that neither of them are fakes. Now, the umbilical cord issue might be one thing, but what’s stranger is that neither this mammoth nor this ammonite were found fossilized or preserved in ice as you might expect. Both of these species have been extinct for thousands of years, but, as you can see in the photographs, they look as though they only died yesterday. Just like Mama. And I’ll bet that even more of these specimens are out there, waiting to be found. My colleagues are on the hunt as we speak. Once you activate the Chiral Network, I might even be able to retrieve some of the past records, too.”

To Sam, it all seemed a bit out-there. Still, he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the monitor. Had that cord dangling from the ammonite really connected it to the Beach? And what else did that imply?

The AED’s voice rang out across the room. Heartman shut down the monitor and the view outside the window reappeared.

The heart-shaped lake was right outside. If that lake which had been gouged into the earth by a voidout was the same as Heartman’s heart, that made his heart itself a scar. The fact that he had chosen to settle near it and looked down on it every single day as he went about his unusual routine told Sam that this man was living in the past as well. Mama and Deadman were the same. They may have adopted the name of Bridges, but they were attempting to build Bridges toward the past.

“Each person has their own Beach. Just as an umbilical cord attaches one fetus to one mother, we are attached to one Beach. That’s the rule. But I’m the exception. My Beach is connected to others. As if it were the beneficiary of a coronary bypass. Maybe this twisted heart of mine made it possible. I just want to find them. I’ll be back soon, hopefully from where my family are,” Heartman said to Sam as he reclined in his chair.

“You probably think what I do is strange. That no matter how special my Beach is, that doesn’t mean that my wife and daughter are still there waiting on it. And you’re right. There’s still so much that we don’t even understand about this world, so how can we possibly expect to understand anything about the Beach? But I have a theory. When a ka departs its ha, it goes to the Beach, which forms a corridor between this life and the next. Under normal circumstances, a body is incinerated within forty-eight hours of its passing and before it can necrotize, so that the ka can pass over to the other side knowing that it has no ha to return to. Its attachment to this world disappears. But once a body necrotizes, the ka becomes bound to this world. But because it doesn’t actually have a body to come back to, it becomes a BT.

“In any case, the ka doesn’t spend a long time on the Beach. But there are exceptions. For example, those who didn’t die a natural death. Those whose bodies were wiped out in an instant without necrotizing or being incinerated don’t become BTs, but their attachment toward this world keeps their ka from leaving the Beach. You can laugh it away as the delusions of a mad man if you like, though, since no matter how many times I wander the Beach, I never find my wife and daughter.”

The AED announced how long Heartman had left.

“My body will never go back to the way it was now. I’m willing to bet on that. But it all has to have some kind of meaning. The battlefields—the endless wars you found yourself trapped in—they’re from a time that actually existed. From a world war that took place over a hundred years ago. That war was a particularly nonsensical one. One in which weapons of mass destruction slaughtered people on a vast scale. The inherent meaning of each individual death was snatched away from those victims and they became nothing more than a number. They had no idea why they died. It’s the same for those who die in a voidout.

“If that strong attachment to this world and the yearning to stay connected to it created that battlefield, then that might support my theory about voidout victims becoming trapped on the Beach.”

“Deadman told me that man, Clifford Unger, was in the US Special Forces,” Heartman went on. “He must have seen a lot of war in his time. His misery and hatred, combined with your BB acting as some sort of catalyst, may have brought these battlefields to our world. It’s just a theory, but perhaps that man who can summon BTs also summoned Cliff’s anger.”

“You think Higgs is pulling his strings?” Sam asked.

Sam found himself unconsciously gripping Cliff’s dog tag in his pocket. What if Higgs summoned Cliff and that battlefield to get in Sam’s way, now that he could repel the BTs?

“I don’t know. But evidence does suggest that Higgs brought them here,” Heartman mused.

The window on the wall went into shade mode and the lake outside disappeared. The interior of the room slowly grew darker.

“Oh, before I forget, I have a favor to ask,” Heartman quickly interjected.

“Could you just… relax until I come back? Time stops on the Beach, but not in the Seam. Rest assured, it’ll only feel like three minutes to you,” Heartman explained. Heartman closed his eyes and the gramophone placed at an angle to his lounge chair began to play music. It was Chopin’s Funeral March again. “We’ll continue this shortly.”

The AED emitted a beep and the EKG flatlined.

As the Funeral March echoed quietly throughout the lab, Sam had no idea what to do. It was just him, Mama’s corpse, Heartman’s temporarily deceased body, and a gently snoozing BB. There wasn’t a single person who was truly alive or truly dead in the entire room. Although it was unclear what really defined who was alive and who was dead in the first place.

All Sam could do was settle himself on the sofa and wait for Heartman to come back. He was still holding onto Cliff’s dog tag. It was covered in scratches and listed his name, affiliation, and religion, but no matter how long Sam stared at it, he still didn’t understand anything about Cliff. He didn’t understand Cliff’s relationship with Lou, nor anything about the man’s life or death. If Higgs was harnessing Cliff’s anger and summoning the battlefield to get in the way of Sam’s mission, it seemed like a very roundabout method. There must have been other things that he could have done that would take less time and effort.

For someone who talked so big about bringing humanity’s extinction, why didn’t Higgs just use a nuke or voidouts or something to destroy all the cities and take out the Chiral Network knots? No matter how effective a repatriate’s blood and other bodily fluids were against BTs, they were just still byproducts of one body. It wasn’t like there was enough of Sam’s blood to get rid of every single BT. They still posed a massive threat.

Higgs had once been a respectable porter. Fragile’s comments and Bridges’ data backed that up. In fact, when he first started working with Fragile, his main motive had been to help other people. But that had all changed when he jumped ship and began working with someone else.

That meant this new partner must hold the key to everything. But neither Bridges nor Fragile knew who it was. Higgs had made good use of Fragile’s DOOMS and organization, so his partner must have offered him something even more powerful. Maybe Higgs’s true intentions lay beyond extinction. His proud proclamations about how he was the particle of God and the arrogance that went with that claim seemed to imply as much.

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 to 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. It 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.”

Sam had seen it up close and personal when he had thrown the nuke into the lake. He couldn’t forget how the tar absorbed the enormous energy of that blast.

“We set up some research shelters there before the tar started bubbling up, and even built a distribution center out there. Some relay equipment for the Chiral Network, too.”

The map displayed what Heartman described in chronological order.

On the map, the tiny black specks on the map that had been small only one year prior suddenly expanded into an extensive belt shape. It showed that when Amelie and the rest of Bridges I had first arrived, it could probably still have been circumvented. It was just after she arrived in Edge Knot City when the tar began to well up and the scale of the erosion expanded. Something about it felt intentional. In fact, the timing probably matched up with when Amelie was first captured. The only person Sam could think of who could pull off such a stunt was Higgs.

“Then how the hell am I supposed to hook the west up to the network?” Sam asked.

It seemed like Heartman had been anticipating Sam’s question, as he gave yet another thumbs up.

“I’m asking you for your help in building a new one. It won’t be much, given the handful of equipment we’ve managed to scrape together. Nothing like the Knot Cities, that’s for sure. But a knot is still a knot. Sam, I want you to use the Q-pid to put the scientists on the network, then go to Amelie. Afterward, we can get back to the important job of researching the Death—”

Heartman collapsed like the strings on a mannequin had been cut, and his body crumpled to the floor. Sam attempted to spring to Heartman’s aid, but the floor reacted first. It expanded to absorb the shock of Heartman’s fall and cushioned his landing. The AED on Heartman’s chest began to count down until resuscitation. Exasperated by the fact that he would have to wait another three minutes, Sam went to sit himself down on the sofa. But before he made it, Sam’s cuff link began to vibrate, indicating an incoming call.

It was from Die-Hardman, only this time Sam couldn’t see him. Sam’s cuff links had been set to sound only. Sam didn’t remember doing that. Then he remembered the look Heartman had given him when he took out the umbilical cord. When Sam checked the cuff link, he could see that the communications were going through the lab’s firewall. That meant that Heartman didn’t want Die-Hardman to see the cord. That could also explain why Sam had been made to bring it here in secret.

Perhaps it was because Sam knew Heartman was hiding something from Die-Hardman, and because of what Deadman had told Sam during their own secret discussion, but the director’s tone felt colder to Sam than before. It was a little late to consider now, but it seemed like Bridges had changed a lot since the Bridges he knew ten years ago. Deadman, Mama, and Heartman had all joined after Sam had left. And now that Bridget was dead, there weren’t that many members left who even knew America as it once was. Die-Hardman was probably the only member remaining who was there when Bridges was first established. Sam had been born some years later, so even he wasn’t sure how it was first formed.

Bridges wasn’t one thick rope, but rather numerous fine threads bundled together, each with their own motivations. Sam was one of those strands, too.

Sam descended the outer stairs of the snow-covered lab and turned around. He didn’t like leaving Heartman like that. It may have been routine for him, but to Sam, he was leaving behind a corpse that had gone into cardiac arrest. What if the AED didn’t restart his heart properly? Wouldn’t his body necrotize? Sam began to worry.

But Sam had his own routine to get back to now. Sam had to carry on doing his duty without letting on about his misgivings toward Bridges and Die-Hardman. As he began to climb a mountain, Sam activated the Active Skeleton that he had equipped in Heartman’s lab. It was a piece of equipment that attached itself to both of Sam’s legs, and improved his walking and stability. He felt so light! Once he had climbed the slope a little, the heart-shaped lake came into view.

Every time he took a step into the snow, the strap of his backpack dug painfully into his shoulder. Even though he was wading through sub-zero temperatures, he had to wipe the sweat from his face more than once. A whole day had passed since Sam had left Heartman’s lab. It was only one more peak and then the rest of the journey would be smooth sailing. His legs may have had the help of the Active Skeleton, but it didn’t do so much for his back. The weight of the cargo on it was making him want to admit defeat, but it was just a little farther. Once he had connected this area to the Chiral Network and made it to Edge Knot City, he’d be able to put this pack down once and for all. Then the UCA would be rebuilt, he could save Amelie, and he could free Lou. He would finally be able to confront his past self who had failed to save Lucy and Lou, and make peace with it. What’s more, once the whole Chiral Network was up and running, Heartman could make even more discoveries about the Beach and extinction. And once they fully understood the Beach, then maybe, just maybe, Sam would be able to set Lou free from the Beach and himself free from the Seam. If he could untangle life and death in this world then they’d finally be free.

Sam caressed the pod, but Lou showed no reaction whatsoever. More than ten days had passed since Deadman had tinkered with the pod and they still weren’t communicating as they had before. Lou spent most of the day asleep. But maybe that was to be expected. They hadn’t approached any BT-occupied territory or experienced any spikes in chiral density lately. Babies were supposed to sleep a lot anyway. Besides, if regular babies needed so much sleep, then what about babies that hadn’t even been born yet? It would have been selfish to wake Lou for no reason. Wait… wasn’t he intending to reforge their relationship from the beginning after Lou’s memories had been wiped? Calling this kid Lou was so self-centered of him. This kid could have been called by a different name when it was in its mother’s womb. All Sam had done was project his past onto this poor baby. He was basically repeating what Bridget had done to him when she left America in his hands. He recalled her voice inside his head.

—You’re the one I wanted to send, Sam.

No, America’s finished! Bridget, you’re the president of jack shit!

Sam thought back to the hospital room that had been transformed with holograms to turn it into a fake Oval Office. It felt like the weight of Bridget after she fell on him back then had been added onto his back. The children always carry the baggage that their parents leave behind. Whether it’s debt or fortune, the parents force them to bear it whether they like it or not. Parents liked to preach that this was the baton of life and the succession of history. Their kids were even forced to grieve their deaths and usher their souls onward. (Was that why you carried Bridget’s corpse?) But what were parents who outlived their children supposed to do?

A strong wind struck Sam straight on. It roared like an animal and blew past him. The snows thickened and all Sam could see was white. He got down on his knees to give his legs a rest and readjust his cargo. A pain shot through him and he let out a grunt. The wound he had sustained from a stray bullet on that battlefield still hadn’t healed.

Sam heard a muffled cry from the pod. It seemed that Lou had reacted to Sam’s pain. Maybe he was mistaken. Maybe he had arbitrarily determined that to be the case. Maybe he was being arrogant. It didn’t matter. What did matter was that Sam felt the connection between him and Lou repairing itself. He stroked the pod. Then he let out a sigh and got back up. The wind had only blown strongly for a moment, but the snow was still falling and his surroundings had grown silent again. Everything was back to normal, except for one thing.

Something flashed in front of him.

Sam fell to his injured knee again, and then onto his ass. He pulled off the straps of his pack and set it on the ground. Then he removed the Odradek, thrust it into the snow, and switched it on. Sam’s cargo was immediately blanketed in white and now resembled one of the many boulders strewn across the landscape. It was all thanks to his hologram projector. It was one of the new functions included in the upgrade the equipment underwent in Mountain Knot City.

Sam hid in its shadow. Unless he was mistaken, the light had bounced off something manmade.

Then the light flashed once again, adding weight to his theory. Now it was moving. Maybe it was some MULEs? The hologram should have blinded them to his presence, as well as invalidated any sensors. As long as he remained quiet, there was no threat.

But maybe Sam had been too optimistic, because the group had now plainly changed course and were heading this way.

Lou’s fists were clenched tight in sympathy with Sam’s nervousness. Sam could make out five people so far, each of them spreading out in a different direction. It seemed to Sam that they were trying to surround him and they were slowly but surely closing in. They were clad from head to toe in what looked like thick gray cloaks. Each one had a gun in their hand. These weren’t MULEs. This was an armed group. If Sam had to guess, they were probably after the relay equipment he was carrying. But he had to wonder how they knew he would be delivering this equipment and how they had guessed the route he would take. Sam kept an eye on the five’s movements as he quickly took out his bola gun from his backpack and assembled it. If his assailants had been MULEs, he probably could have distracted them with some spare cargo, but it didn’t look like that tactic would do him any good here. They probably wanted to destroy the equipment. He also had to consider the possibility that these five were just the vanguard, and that Higgs was lurking around somewhere. A battle with the BTs could be imminent.

First and foremost, Sam had to protect his cargo. Putting his faith in the protection afforded by the hologram cloaking, Sam decided to try and draw the group’s attention toward him. To his right was the slope he had just descended, and although his left was open, there were likely numerous crevasses lying ahead.

Sam dropped down and retreated. The group’s reaction was swift. Every single one of them at once moved to Sam’s left flank. They were trying to drive him toward the slope.

The guns they held were most likely loaded with normal lethal bullets, but all Sam had was his bola gun, which was intended to apprehend and immobilize and only fired binding bola wires from both ends. It wasn’t deadly in the slightest. The enemy continued to close in. Sam flattened himself against the snow-covered rocks to use them as a shield, but the five enemies circled ever closer.

An uncomfortable feeling, like his organs were being squeezed hard, suddenly came over Sam. It was like someone had plunged their hand inside his abdomen and was churning his guts around inside. Sam felt like he was going to vomit. Lou was frightened.

There was no crying, but Lou was curled up as stiff as a dead body, eyes squeezed tightly shut. That’s when Sam realized that it wasn’t his fear that was being transmitted to Lou, but the other way around. Lou’s fear was gnawing away at Sam. He hadn’t had the same violent reaction when he was transported to Cliff’s battlefield. He hadn’t even felt this way before when he was crossing BT territory.

Lou’s emotions were coursing into Sam like a raging river, and since Lou didn’t know how to express them in words, they were doing a number on Sam’s insides instead. BBs had no way to express themselves in words, which is why they needed to be connected to their host via an umbilical cord and use of the Odradek interface. It was actually because they didn’t articulate the world in words that they could sense the world of the dead.

Sam closed his eyes and placed his hand on the pod. Lou was unusually afraid of these particular assailants. Shattering the silence, a bullet grazed past Sam’s shoulder.

Now they were directly under attack. Sam peeked out from behind the rock to assess the situation. Several armed men were approaching his hiding spot to surround him. He counted five so far. At first glance they looked like ordinary MULEs, but they were obviously out for blood. Was this what Lou was so scared of?

Another gunshot rang out. This time the bullet scraped the rock shielding Sam. Then somebody raised their voice. Just like the MULEs, they spoke in a language that Sam didn’t recognize, with short screams that seemed to make up a code that only their comrades could decipher. It seemed to be coming from nearby. Sam knew that it would all be over if he stayed where he was, so he readied his bola gun and sprung out from behind the rock.

The shooting continued, following him closely, but the Active Skeleton he was wearing helped him leap away. Sam threw some hematic grenades in an attempt to blind his attackers. He knew that showering terrorists in that precious blood of his was unlikely to do much, but the only weapons he really had at hand were supposed to be for the BTs, so they would have to do. At least if he left any corpses here, he would have the tools on hand to deal with them before they had the chance to turn.

As the splatter of Sam’s blood blinded his pursuers, Sam ran at full speed for the snowfield.

The pain in his left knee had now completely disappeared as the Active Skeleton forced his legs to move whether they hurt or not.

An electromagnetic shot fired into the snow. MULEs used the same weaponry, so that meant these attackers must have been MULEs once. Having succumbed to their Porter Syndrome, they had transformed into Homo gestalts and were moving according to somebody else’s will. Sam threw himself into the shadow of the first boulder he found and caught his breath, but his attackers were already scanning the field and were soon moving in. Sam heard another voice. It belonged to a man equipped with different weaponry—an Odradek on his shoulder and a BB pod on his chest. He must have been the leader. If Sam could take him out then he might be able to escape.

Sam felt another cramp in his gut. Lou was terrified. Clutching the pod close with one hand, Sam stared at the apparent leader. The umbilical cord connecting the man to his pod was emitting a heat like it was aflame. This was the man who Lou was so scared of.

Once it had all clicked in Sam’s head, the man’s Odradek immediately burst to life, spinning wildly. At the same time, Lou began to scream. The man’s Odradek formed into a cross shape and pointed in Sam’s direction. It was like Sam and Lou were the BTs for once. Lou was twisting and turning inside the pod and kicking at its walls. Was Lou what they were after? The BB pod on the man’s chest began to emit a reddish-black light. It must have contained a BB. Did that mean that the BBs were resonating with one another?

The man screamed an indescribable sound once more and burst into a sprint. The four others followed behind, plowing their way through the snow. Sam forgot about Lou for the moment and fired his bola gun. The bindings, which were double-ended with counterweights, flew through the air and wrapped themselves around the legs of the man in front. As the man fell face-first into the snow, the electric shock emitted by the bola bindings should have knocked him out.

Sam set the output of his Active Skeleton legs to max and made another run for it. Jumping and dashing along the way, Sam aimed for the crevasse. It was like he wasn’t in his own body. He had no feeling in his legs at all. What if something was broken? He couldn’t stop now.

The Active Skeleton only had a little bit of power left, so Sam needed to put as much distance between himself and the men as possible before they gave out.

A belt of rocks came into view. The pinnacle-shaped boulders were around the same height as him and were huddled tightly together.

Sam’s pursuers had called off the chase for the time being. Sam could still see where they were and they were no longer running. That being said, they were still closing in at a steady pace. They must have been homing in on Lou to detect the pair.

Sam tried to take a step forward, but the Active Skeleton made a warning sound. The battery was completely depleted. As Sam released the legs, he was reminded of his own body weight and tried his hardest not to succumb to the pain in his knee. It felt like he was standing on a different planet. One with gravity several times stronger than Earth. Every step felt extraordinarily heavy compared to moments ago, and the distance he had tried so hard to put between him and Lou and their attackers was shrinking by the second. Sam dragged his heavy body, trying to convince himself with each passing inch not to panic.

As he got closer to the rocks, he saw that the boulders were shaped like spirals, almost as if they had been twisted out of the ground by giants. Or maybe they were more like trees that just looked boulder-like on the surface. In any case, it felt like he was entering a rock forest.

Sam felt a presence. Huddling behind a rock, he took a rope into his hand. It didn’t matter that it was supposed to be for packing cargo. If an assailant approached, he wouldn’t hesitate to use it on them, too. At least it would be more useful in close-quarter combat than any firearm would be.

Sam focused all his attention on the sounds around him and awaited the enemy. His and Lou’s pursuers would have a hard time spotting him in here. He noticed as the approaching footsteps seemed to falter. Sam half-rose from behind the rock and sprung behind one of the men. Clutching each end of the rope, Sam slipped it around the man’s neck, tightening the pressure on the man’s carotid artery. Unable to fight back, the man slumped into unconsciousness.

It looked like Lou was still afraid, but had calmed down a little compared to before. This was still far from over, though, and Sam began to worry about the relay equipment that he had left in place. Their attackers might choose to destroy the equipment over killing Sam if the latter proved too difficult. Sam needed to prepare for that possibility.

Several meters away, the man with the Odradek who Sam considered their leader, along with the two other attackers, were advancing back-to-back. Sam jumped out from behind the rock, exposing himself to the danger, and without a moment’s hesitation the men broke their battle formation and launched into an attack. As the bullets flew toward Sam, he shot back with his bola gun, sending bola bindings flying through the gaps between the rocks. He didn’t manage to take any of the men down, but one did get hit by the weight on the end of the bola bindings right in the pit of the stomach.

Now there were two men left in front of him. Bullets were whizzing past Sam as he threw another hematic grenade toward a boulder. He wasn’t throwing it for the effect of his blood but for the power of its blast. The boulder was tipped with a large, open red flower, and it was smashed into rubble by the explosion, showering the enemy with small pebbles mixed with Sam’s blood. The two men let out bestial screams as the blood rained down on them, and began shooting wildly in every direction. Sam shot his bola gun in the shadow of the rocks, sweeping one of the men off his feet as planned.

Now there was just one left. The man with the Odradek threw away his gun and charged. He had his electric spear in hand and was screaming inhuman screams. The tip of the spear gave off a white electrical charge. It was aimed straight for Sam. Sam hurled himself directly at the man’s chest.

Their shoulders crashed into one another and a sharp, numbing pain rushed up Sam’s neck. The attacker must have felt the same pain as he dropped his spear. But the man pulled back half a step and landed a kick right in Sam’s knee. The pain made Sam gasp. He lost his balance and began to fall. He reached his hands out to stop himself, but unable to reach anything, Sam simply fell onto his back. The air in his lungs had been completely knocked out and he couldn’t even groan in pain. The man kicked Sam in the side and sat on top of him. He squeezed down on Sam’s neck with one hand and grabbed a knife with the other. Sam couldn’t move a muscle and Lou began to shriek again.

The other man’s BB pod was right in front of Sam’s face.

The man was stronger than Sam had imagined. The man’s knees were like vices digging into Sam’s armpits. Sam’s ribs were making worrying noises. It felt like they were going to buckle any second. The man continued to strengthen his grip around Sam’s neck, until Sam could no longer breathe. He could feel the world becoming distant. He knew that if he couldn’t break free then he would go into cardiopulmonary arrest. Or at the very least, his tibia was going to shatter. Lou continued to scream.

Sam snaked an arm around the man’s back and managed to free one side of his cuffs. With his left hand, he tried to grab the wrist at his neck, but the man’s arm didn’t move a single inch. In fact, incensed by Sam’s resistance, the man’s grip seemed to tighten even more. Sam could feel himself beginning to pass out. He mustered the last of his strength, and in one last-ditch effort plunged the cutter from his cuff link into the man’s back.

The grip around Sam’s neck loosened right away. Sam continued to slash at the man’s back. The man slumped forward. The stab shouldn’t have been fatal. Sam pushed the man’s body off himself and stood up. Then he simply tapped lightly on the pod and began to walk toward the shelter where the Evo-devo Biologist was waiting for him.

MIDWEST REGION // EVO-DEVO BIOLOGIST’S SHELTER

The likeness of the man destined to save this world flickered onto the monitor. It was an image of an unshaven porter with his hair tied at the back of his head. It was Sam Porter Bridges. The sole member of Bridges II. In this small, dim, and gloomy room that the Evo-devo Biologist both worked and lived in, the monitor seemed to glow all the more brightly with him. She was excited because this man was about to come here and connect her lonely outpost to a vast new world.

It had been two days since Heartman had let her know that Sam was on his way, and when she estimated the distance between Heartman’s lab and her own, she was sure that he would be arriving any time now. Her colleague had already sent her a message letting her know that Sam had dropped by. The Geologist had gone on and on about how wonderful it had been to use the Chiral Network to restore all the materials, data, and theories that had been previously lost. Every word of his message oozed excitement and hope.

He also reported that since he had been posted out here, he had been steadily investigating the local strata, and had discovered something that seemed to link past mass extinctions with the Death Stranding. A fossil Beach.

That alone would topple the prevailing Big Five theory. Once the Chiral Network covered the entire continent they could expect to make even greater discoveries. The Geologist ended his message with how much he hoped that Sam would reach her place soon, too.

Now, Sam was finally about to arrive. The Evo-devo Biologist had shared her hypothesis with Heartman and her other researcher colleagues, and now she wanted to verify it. She also had something she needed to ask Sam in particular. It was about a porter who had made deliveries here a few times in the past. She accepted it was unlikely that Sam would know him, but still, she wanted to know what had happened to the man.

“Did you hear about all that weird stuff that’s been bubbling up out west lately?” The porter made a funny expression as he stored his cargo. “Would you happen to know anything about that, EV?”

EV was a nickname the porter had given the Evo-devo Biologist. Her real name was of Scandinavian origin and the porter, knowing he would never remember it, had opted to call her by her profession. EV was a shortened version of “evolutionary developmental biologist.” Technically, she should have been called ED, but that was beside the point.

When she pointed out the mistake to the porter, he simply brushed it off with a “Don’t sweat the tiny details. EV sounds like Eve.”

This porter had been delivering cargo to EV ever since she had first come out here with Heartman and the others on Bridges I. Bridges had their own porters, but there had been a labor shortage, so they had enlisted the help of a voluntary porter organization. This man was a courier from Fragile Express.

A lot had happened since they first met. Her friend from Bridges I, Mama, had fallen victim to a terrorist attack, and Middle Knot City had been wiped off the map in a nuclear blast. Terrorism was rife in this area, too. Ever since Bridges I had come here espousing about how they were going to rebuild America, they had met violent resistance from the separatists, who claimed that Bridges were “invaders” coming for their freedom. They were out there waiting, minds made up and guns in hand. But the porter still came regularly.

The strange substance the porter had asked her about was the tar that was bubbling up from under the ground. Although, to be more accurate, it was more tar-like. And just as the porter had guessed, it interested EV greatly. It was one of the inexplicable phenomena that had begun to occur after the Death Stranding. No one knew its structure, its properties, or where it originally came from, but EV had heard a theory that it welled up out of places connected to the Beach. And if she could investigate that, it might bring her one step closer to understanding the origin of the Death Stranding. The only thing standing in her way was the threat of terrorism if she went out west to investigate.

“Then I’ll bring some back for you,” the porter offered.

EV thought he was kidding. There was a possibility that this substance was connected to the Beach. It wasn’t safe to go near without the proper expertise and equipment. Collecting something like that was the job of Bridges.

After EV saw the porter off she forgot about the porter’s offer, brushing it off as a casual joke.

Then, three months later, the porter returned. Together with a case of the tar.

But even through the hologram, EV could tell that the man’s vibe and appearance had dramatically changed. In the past, the porter had been a diligent young worker embarking on an apprenticeship, but now he seemed more like a shellshocked soldier. EV had never actually seen a soldier in real life, but the cylindrical device on his shoulder somehow also reminded her of them. There was a separate round container equipped to the left-hand side of his chest.

“This is a Bridge Baby. It can access the Beach,” the man explained, caressing the pod attentively. “It was all thanks to this that I was able to get that for you.”

The man pointed at the case of tar. His voice sounded hoarse and exhausted. The case contained five reinforced glass cylinders. Each one was filled with a black liquid.

“A scientist like you might make fun of me for saying this, but this world isn’t what it seems to be. What we see with the naked eye is but one part. It’s really made up of layer after layer after layer. When I use this Bridge Baby, I can see one of the layers that my eyes can’t. When I went to collect this stuff, I got the shock of my life. There were holes everywhere. And I don’t mean in the ground, I mean in the empty space around everything else. There’s a hole there, too.” The porter pointed at the space above her head and EV ducked.

“It’s okay. It’s so small that I barely even noticed it, but the holes the tar comes out from are much bigger. They’re big enough for a human to pass through. I bet they lead back to the Beach.”

EV imagined a cartoon of Swiss cheese in her head. She wondered if those holes were traces of a dimension that mankind’s perception and thought didn’t extend to. And this equipment could visualize them?

“I was able to get the tar using this Bridge Baby to avoid the holes,” the porter continued. A smile spasmed across the porter’s face for the first time since he’d arrived.

EV was trying to decide how to thank the man when he stopped her.

“I don’t need your gratitude. Just tell me what you think this stuff is,” he said.

Of course she would. EV’s face broke into a smile, but the porter’s expression remained deadly serious. It was starting to give her the creeps.

“This tar began to appear after the Death Stranding. You know that much, don’t you?” EV asked. “Just like the timefall, the Beach, the cryptobiotes and the BTs. Chiral matter, too. Now, none of these things are good for humans. They all make it harder for us to survive. So, think back to when life first emerged on this planet, when the atmosphere was full of methane and carbon. It was completely different to how it is now. Then, one type of life called cyanobacteria emerged. It was an algae that fed on photosynthesis, and much like the algae of modern times, produced enormous quantities of oxygen. So much so that it filled the entire atmosphere with it. Unfortunately, much of the other life on this planet had evolved to rely on the carbon and methane. Oxygen was toxic to it. So, what couldn’t adapt to this new environment went extinct.

“Tar and timefall are the defining features of the post-Stranding ecosystem. As you just heard, sudden environmental changes such as these invariably lead to the extinction of organisms that fail to adapt. Those that do adapt do so by virtue of ‘enhancers’—the regions of DNA that grant successful organisms their advantages. These genetic factors are the key to evolution. But there are genes which have the opposite effect, those which disadvantage organisms. ‘Extinction factors,’ as they have been called. Some people say that the existence of these traits is proof that mankind is headed for extinction, but I don’t think so. Sure, extinction factors are supposedly responsible for the extinction nightmares suffered by those with DOOMS. In fact, that’s why they call it DOOMS—after ruin and the Last Judgment. But that doesn’t mean that the existence of those with DOOMS has to usher in the extinction of mankind. On the contrary, perhaps those who can perceive extinction, can help us avoid it. Extinction factors are a broad concept that present across biology, psychology, and sociology. Their presence in these areas suggests that humans may already be adapting to this change in the environment.

“In the end, enhancers and extinction factors are the seeds of advancement and obsolescence. Such factors may lie dormant within us all, a choice waiting to be made. For every being since the advent of life itself.

“On the other hand, there’s also a theory that hypothesizes the existence of something that blows past the millions of years that natural evolution and extinction takes—Extinction Entities. The Beach connects the worlds of the living and the dead, and the BTs came here via the Beach. Then, through contact with the living, they cause voidouts that turn everything back to nothing. In other words, BTs exist to drive humanity to extinction. Some people may disagree, but I believe that it is the BTs who are the Extinction Entities.”

“Extinction Entities? Do those really exist?” the porter asked. After listening to EV quietly for a while, the color in the porter’s face suddenly changed. “Then I guess extinction is a fate that we can’t escape. But if it’s already set in motion, why do we still struggle? Why do we crawl shamefully all over the earth delivering cargo, just to keep us here that little bit longer?”

The change in the porter’s tone was so drastic, it was like he had suddenly switched personalities with someone. EV couldn’t look at him any longer. It was like he was possessed.

“The same species can’t remain dominant forever. Humanity can’t be the only ones to survive extinction. Do you think the ammonites and the dinosaurs resisted extinction like we do? Of course not! They graciously accepted their destinies. They weren’t just unintelligent enough to avoid it. Humanity goes around recording and sharing our past to help us predict our future, and because of that we just assume that we can change our destiny. That we can overcome something like the Death Stranding. But it’s all lies. This world doesn’t need us anymore. It’s trying to evict us to make room for the next species. And the harder we try and the harder we struggle against it, the more we sully it. Being holed up in here, I bet you have no idea how beautiful the outside world is, do you? How harsh it is? The world didn’t change into what it is now for mankind’s sake. It’s trying to change for the life that comes next.”

The porter was talking so fervently he was foaming at the mouth. EV didn’t have anything she could say back to him.

EV believed there was a way out of this situation. Wasn’t that why she came here in the first place? Wasn’t that why she continued this research all alone?

But, contrary to the porter’s beliefs, EV knew the outside world. She had seen and experienced it through her fieldwork and when she first came here with Bridges I. That was why she couldn’t refute him. She, herself, had been struck so many times by the virgin beauty of this world. And the ugliness of the cities that had been erected in its nooks and crannies.

“Why don’t we just let ourselves go extinct? We don’t have the right or the means to prevent it anyway. We should at least bow out gracefully. The ammonites and the dinosaurs managed it well enough. At least we’d be left with a little dignity. I heard about the Extinction Entities, too. Someone told me that an Extinction Entity is the one creating these BTs and connecting them with this world. And ever since I got this new equipment, I’ve come to believe that they really exist,” the porter went on, showing EV the equipment on his chest. “This is a bridge that connects this world and that world. Our boss gave me this. He said that we are no longer just for transporting cargo. We’re to bring ‘extinction’ over from that world and vacate our position on this one for the next generation of life.”

EV had no answers for the man. She was afraid. The porter in front of her was no longer the porter she had once known. It was like he had been brainwashed by some cult. He was trapped in this extreme thinking that perceived extinction as being of primary importance. What if the equipment he had on his chest was what was feeding him these lies? But even if that thing attached to him wasn’t brainwashing him, could the porter really be right in claiming that it wasn’t the BTs that were the Extinction Entities, but something that existed on an even higher plane? There were certainly others who thought so, she couldn’t refute him on that point either. Even if he had put the pieces of the puzzle together wrong, what could they do if the concepts they signified were real?

EV came back to her senses when the porter broke down crying like a child.

“What’s happening to me?! Every night I have the same dream. It’s always a dream of extinction. They frighten me,” he sobbed. “I’m all alone on the Beach and even if I scream, no one answers. No matter how far I walk, the view never changes. Even though I know it’s a dream, I feel like an infinite amount of time is passing and I can’t breathe. I try to kill myself. Time and time again. But no matter what I do, it never works. Something comes toward me from beyond the sea instead. I try to see what it is, but I can’t. I’m so petrified that I can’t even run away. I’m so afraid that I try to kill myself before it can get to me, but that never works either. I’m so scared. Then it kills me.”

The porter sniffled and looked up at EV. It looked like his expression was back to normal. The real him was back. At least, that was what EV wanted to believe.

“This thing, this equipment, it whispers to me. It tells me that I’m only afraid because I can’t see what the thing I dream about is. It tells me that it’ll show me what it looks like, that it’ll tell me what extinction really looks like. Then I won’t be afraid anymore. It tells me that I won’t be afraid of dying or extinction anymore,” the porter blabbered on.

EV nodded. She explained that the reason why the Death Stranding was such a terrifying phenomenon was because no one understood it. No one knew why the BTs, the Beach, the timefall, or the tar appeared, and that was why they feared it and walled themselves away in their cities. That was why people like EV had to keep on digging.

The porter feebly shook his head at her words. “But you’ve not been given the answers yet. And even if you spend years studying this tar I’ve brought you, we’re all doomed to die before you ever understand anything.” The porter stood up, followed by EV. “Promise me if you do find anything out about that tar, EV, that you’ll tell me.”

EV wanted him to wait. She understood what he was saying, but she wanted him to know that she was determined to find the clues that would help them sidestep extinction. But before she could open her mouth, the porter had disappeared. The hologram equipment that the pair used to converse had been switched off, but he should still have been physically present nearby. EV hurried up to the ground level entrance. As the doors to ground level opened, she was enveloped in the light pouring in from outside. She squinted in the brightness.

“Wait!” she screamed. But the porter had already left her shelter and was walking away. All she could see was his back. “Wait!” she shouted again. But the porter didn’t do so much as even turn his head.

A few days later, reports of a terrorist attack came through from a colony outside of Mountain Knot City. A voidout had killed Heartman’s wife and daughter, and left Heartman himself wandering the border between life and death.

EV carried on with her work. It had been two years since that conversation with the porter, but she still hadn’t managed to fulfil her promise to him. Not because she hadn’t seen him, but because she hadn’t uncovered a single thing.

EV’s job wasn’t just to analyze the tar, but when she thought about it, that jet-black substance had been the only thing on her mind for some time now.

Now that Sam Porter had embarked on his quest to connect the Chiral Network, and the scientists in the east had been able to gradually restore some of the archives, EV had sent away for any data pertaining to Extinction Entities and the tar.

But since her area hadn’t been connected yet, she had to rely upon the meagre telecommunications systems she was currently equipped with, and she was getting impatient. Forget movies, she couldn’t even receive large images. All she could do was rely on a network of waystations to receive text data. But even when she received data in text format, she had lost count of the number of times it had arrived broken or with bits missing.

There was also the issue of the tar. The tar that had been bubbling up in the west had been more active recently, but she didn’t know why. She hadn’t even managed to find out where the tar was coming from in the first place, so there was nothing she could do.

Not only had the scattered bubbling springs of tar begun to increase in number, they were also getting larger and now formed a line that ran north to south. The points where the tar was bubbling forth had started to form a small river, and the area had become known as the tar belt. It continued to expand and had even swallowed up some nearby waystations that were supposed to be used for the Chiral Network. It was impossible to predict what the tar would do next, so they couldn’t get too close.

To EV, Sam Porter was the messiah who would restore the waystation and finally connect her up to the Chiral Network. And he was due any day now.

Then the day finally arrived.

When she thought about it, it had indeed been quite a while since she had last received a visitor. It was because once EV found out that Fragile Express, the porter company that her porter friend had worked for, had effectively come under the control of Higgs, she had no choice but to rely on the few porters from Bridges or freelancers instead. When people did drop by it made her feel less nervous. But not this time. Sam was bringing the Q-pid and EV couldn’t contain her excitement.

As soon as Sam entered the shelter, the delivery terminal activated and a hologram was projected into the air.

The projection showed the silhouette of a slender girl. She was a scientist named EV. He noticed her expression stiffen. Sam wasn’t surprised, he hardly had the easiest face to look at. He hadn’t looked in the mirror lately, but he assumed he was covered in blood, sweat, and mud like usual. Sam wasn’t in the mood for greetings or explaining himself. The woman should have been notified that Sam was on his way, since even though this was a shelter, it was still under the control of Bridges. He was a visiting colleague, after all. Sam cleared security, but the woman’s face was still stiff.

When Sam traced her gaze, he noticed that her attention was fixed on Lou.

“It is you, isn’t it, Sam?” The woman’s voice was trembling slightly. It looked like she was scared of the pod.

“I was instructed to come here by Heartman and Bridges. My name is Sam Porter Bridges. I’d like you to let me activate the Chiral Network here. Do you have a problem with that?”

The woman shook her head, but her expression didn’t change in the slightest and she continued staring at Lou. Not bothering to ask her why, Sam took out the Q-pid and held it up. That was when the woman’s face finally relaxed.

“Go ahead, Sam, I’ve been waiting for you. Please connect me right away.”

EV thanked Sam and he connected her shelter to the UCA.

“I’m sorry, Sam, but can I ask you something? That thing on your chest… what is it for?”

Sam faltered for a second at the abrupt question. Did she mean in the practical sense, or the theoretical sense? Sam supposed he could sum it up by explaining that the BB was used for sensing BT, but he knew the BB was more than just that. Still, did he need to explain so much to this scientist who was seeing a BB for the first time?

EV watched Sam try to come up with an answer and seemed to accept it when he couldn’t. It was like she had guessed that there wasn’t really an answer either way.

“I used to know a porter who carried one of those things,” she told him.

Sam felt his own face stiffen this time, as he remembered the terrorist group he had encountered on his way here.

“He told me that when he used it, he could see all kinds of things. He said it had told him that humanity was destined for extinction. Does yours do the same, Sam?”

“No. This little one is my partner. Lou tells me when I’m in danger. If I didn’t have this BB, I would never have made it all the way here alone,” Sam answered.

If what the woman said was true, it meant that the thing attached to the porter’s chest was no BB, it just happened to look like one. Then it struck him. The equipment that Higgs and the other terrorists had strapped to their chests might not have been BBs either. Or at the very least, they weren’t the same as Lou. Maybe that was why Lou was so upset when they had encountered them.

“The porter I knew cried,” EV recalled. “He said he was scared. He said that he was having dreams of extinction and had become unable to resist them any longer. He confessed that to me… then he never came back.”

Lou gave a cry. It wasn’t out of fear, but out of sadness. This had never happened before. Lou was looking up at Sam from inside the pod. Sam looked into Lou’s eyes, but he couldn’t tell where Lou’s sadness was coming from.

When Sam looked back up, EV’s hologram had disappeared. Perhaps she had finally given up on getting any answers at all out of him. Maybe she was just satisfied now she was hooked up to the Chiral Network. In any case, Sam’s work here was done. It didn’t matter how EV felt about things. Sam was worried about his crying BB and turned to leave. Something Sam couldn’t put his finger on lingered in this place. Harsh noise echoed around the room. Sam turned back around to see the image of an unfamiliar man projected where EV’s hologram had once stood. He was wearing a hood low over his eyes, so Sam couldn’t really tell what the man looked like. He wasn’t so tall, but Sam could tell that he was made from lean muscle. It was a body that looked like it had been honed through daily labor. The worn and faded suit the man was wearing bore the name “Fragile Express.” On his left shoulder was an Odradek and on his chest was a BB. Both were slightly different to the ones that Sam used, but matched the ones the terrorists possessed. That meant that a terrorist was lurking in the basement. Was this a setup? Sam instinctively grabbed for the ID strand around his waist. It was the only thing he had to hand that could be used as a weapon.

“This is goodbye,” the man began. “My body no longer belongs to me. I’m not afraid anymore.”

The man’s Odradek began to rotate, but Lou didn’t react in the slightest. This was a recording. It was probably a message meant for EV. So, this was the porter she had been talking about?

“We cannot run away from our destiny and our destiny is extinction. Extinction will open the door to a brand-new world. That’s why I have to take out that city.”

What did he just say? Was he declaring an act of terrorism? Sam sensed someone’s presence appear behind the hologram. The door that led to the basement floor opened. Standing there was EV. Her face was pale as she rushed up the steps toward Sam.

“EV, I believe that what you’re doing is noble,” the porter’s hologram continued to speak. “You think that studying the past will lead to a better future. I used to think so too, back when I was a porter. You know, America was already gone by the time I was born. I don’t really have any memories from when I was kid. Don’t even remember what my parents looked like. All I remember is the face of Fragile’s pop.”

EV stood next to Sam, looking at the man.

“That man took me in and raised me. He told me all about how America used to be. He said America was so free before it all came crumbling down. He told me it had its problems that he wasn’t proud of, but that the spirit of the ancestors who had founded the country still lived on. He told me we should look at the destruction of America as a fresh start. That we would build America again with our own hands. Even after the man died and Fragile took over the organization, that never changed.” The porter fell silent. He was looking up, as though he was searching for something. Sam and EV watched attentively. “But we’re never going to get America back. Bridges’ Chiral Network is only going to build an invisible wall around it. That’s not the real America. Or so Higgs says.”

Sam’s jaw stiffened at the mention of Higgs’s name.

“No matter how much we struggle, while we’re human we’re never going to be able to build a perfect country on this earth. We can spout whatever grand ideas we like, any country we create will be nothing more than a sham. Higgs says that if we really want to make the perfect country, then we have to stop being human. That’s why extinction is coming for us.”

How ridiculous. Sam’s inner voice of reason told him that this man was just rambling to justify his act of terrorism. But there was a part of Sam that couldn’t deny what the madman was saying.

“See you, EV. I’m going to wipe out a colony near Mountain Knot City. It’s okay, I promise you they won’t suffer. The voidout will send them to the other side instantaneously. Then they’ll travel to the land of the dead and finally be released from the curse of being human. It’s all part of the Extinction Entity’s plan.”

The hologram froze like it was stuck in time. EV weakly shook her head and stared at Sam. She looked like she wanted Sam to comfort her, but there was nothing that Sam could do.

Lou cried out, breaking the silence. Lou’s cries didn’t sound as sad as before, but Sam could still feel so much emotion in them that they hurt. Lou’s cries were so full of fear and anger that it was almost like they would shatter the pod. As if in response to Lou’s cries, the image displayed by the hologram began to crumble, decomposing into fine particles.

But then the diffusing particles began to clump back together again. An invisible force was binding them together to create a different image entirely. Over its face was a hood, within it a dully glowing golden mask. There was an Odradek on the figure’s shoulder and a pod on their chest.

It was Higgs. Sam couldn’t see the eyes under the mask, but he just knew that the man’s gaze was right on him. It was such an intense stare that it didn’t seem like it could belong to a hologram. This didn’t appear to be a recording. In fact, to Sam it seemed almost certainly to be some kind of interactively generated image.

“Thank you, Sam, for connecting up the Chiral Network for me.” Higgs bowed his head dramatically.

“It’s simply breathtaking. Now I understand why you were in such a hurry to finish it. I can restore the memories of the past. Color me surprised. I had no idea that was possible.

“The Chiral Network runs through the Beach, and the Beach connects to the realm of the dead and all the lost history found within it. That’s a big deal. At best, I thought it would only be able to piece together and restore digital data.”

It was clear that Higgs was trying to goad Sam with his overdramatic gestures and tone. Sam gritted his teeth and exerted as much self-control as possible. Lou seemed to pick up on his anger and drew into a tight ball.

“Keep it up, Sam. The idea of the UCA coming back doesn’t exactly instill me with joy, but this… this is great. And if I have this, I won’t have to make all that effort to jump through the Beach anymore just to find you, I can just give you another call.”

Higgs reached straight out at Sam. Sam pulled back instinctively, but Higgs’s arms stretched right through the BB pod, piercing through Lou, and into his chest. Sam was frozen stiff and couldn’t move. Higgs broke into a cruel laugh.

“Don’t be scared. I’m just a hologram. Just a virtual image. It’s not like you’re being touched by a person. Guess the Chiral Network is perfect for someone with your condition. Good luck.”

Higgs withdrew his arms but something shone at his fingertips. Sam reasoned in his head that it had to be a trick of the hologram, but soon he couldn’t keep his shaking at bay. Higgs hung the item that had flashed around his own neck. It was a golden accessory—Amelie’s quipu.

Sam was in excruciating pain as he felt like his heart was being crushed in his chest, and he couldn’t make a sound. His head spun and he fell to his knees.

“I’ll be waiting for you on the Beach,” Higgs said as he disappeared. Still on his knees, Sam looked up to see that there was nothing left where the man had just been standing. The pain in his chest had also vanished like it was never really there in the first place.

EV looked at Sam. Her face was drained of color.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

Sam nodded and got up.

“How about you? It seems like this place is connected to Higgs now.”

“I’m fine,” EV answered. “Just a little shaken up. I never expected something so terrifying to come through the Chiral Network. But at least that wasn’t all it brought. Now I know that we can restore the past that wasn’t recorded onto media.” She was talking about the recording of the porter. “I had a feeling that he had gotten himself involved in terrorism, but it still hurt to hear it from the horse’s mouth. To be honest with you, Sam, I can’t deny the things that he said, even though I’m certain he was brainwashed by Higgs. But I suppose the important thing is not trying to disprove my friend’s points, but to find a way to overcome them. And that includes all the things that Higgs said, too. We must keep expanding the Chiral Network and identify the EE to do that. I’m not afraid of what that means. Sure, this situation is frightening. But I don’t have time to be scared.”

Sam reassured EV that he understood. The theory of extinction that Higgs whispered into his followers’ ears was a doctrine touted by the Extinction Entity. But Bridges’ idea of America was nothing more than doctrine either. The only way to break free from them both was to give up on being human. Extinction and prolonging life were just opposite sides of the same coin.

“Sure, this situation is frightening. But I don’t have time to be scared.”

EV’s words echoed around Sam’s head, so Sam decided to get out of there while he could still hear them. Any excess noise now, and her determination and the confidence it gave him might just vanish. Sam put his pack back on and left the shelter without saying another word.

Three days had passed.

Sam had been worried about the rugged terrain and fickle mountain weather, but apart from that, it had been smooth sailing. Now he had connected all three shelters, all that was left for him to do was to reconstruct the waystation near the tar belt. EV had sent him a message while he had been walking.

She informed him that she had managed to restore several research reports into past mass extinctions. One report caught Sam’s eye. It was data that suggested that extinct species other than ammonites and mammoths had been found with umbilical cord-like protrusions extending out of their bodies, including specimens of dinosaurs and trilobites. EV also mentioned the claims that these extinct animals were EEs themselves.

A little while after Sam received EV’s message, he got a call from Heartman too, just as he was getting close to where the waystation was going to be.

Time before his heart gives out again, or time before extinction comes for us?