I’m floating and untethered, adrift in a place I can only describe in loose terms.
I perceive the world in colours now. Pale blues and greens and flecks of deep crimson. The reddish freckles in my vision are calibration markers. This is something I read about before I passed from the world of the living. They ensure my visual experience of the world remains constant. Errors in even such base concepts carry with them dangerous sounding phrases I felt compelled to sign off on. Perceptive Damage, Personality Death, Post-Translation Dementia, Identity Madness.
But beyond this, there is nothing. Not yet.
They said it would be like this.
The translation process was excruciating, neuro-transmitters driven into the brain setting my nervous system alight. It felt like a very long time, but it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes. And in retrospect, the sensation seemed much more real to me than the process of dying.
Eight months on that bed. Wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy, though I never did cultivate a great stable of enemies. Wouldn’t wish it on anyone, anyway.
At any moment now, I will find myself in a new place. A bespoke afterlife, able to continue existing with others like me. I wonder briefly if one day we will create hells to match the heavens we have crafted for ourselves, but I dismiss the idea. It’s a fleshly idea. A blood and bone thought, not a notion for me any longer.
Beyond the feeble swirling patterns, there are voices in the void. Faint and distant and foreign, most of them. I catch a little Spanish and some Chinese and many others I do not understand.
These are what they call translation echoes, traces of countless others who have undergone the procedure. Not just a few, but legions of the dead now living in bliss in the cloud. Crumbs of them.
I wonder what words I’ll smear across this auditory hallucination for others to hear.
My body, in any manner which matters at all, does not exist here. Over time, the colours around me shift and coalesce into shapes like clouds or the murmurations of pale starlings, daring me to find patterns in them.
Ghostly faces, the silhouettes of friends long forgotten, the faded outlines of familiar places emerge and vanish without rhyme or reason.
“I love you,” a voice says, and it is my son’s voice. And it is my mother’s voice as well. And my husband’s. And several more which drift across the world, setting alight memories dormant for years. All the permutations of I love you which have been spoken to me. I am filled with a feeling I cannot accurately describe.
This is my personality asserting itself in this place. The neural network emulating all parts of me, even those I had forgotten. I was told it would happen.
Memories rush back like a tide, joy and melancholy both.
I am becoming a part of a tapestry here.
I remember the resentment I felt when doctors told me the diagnosis. I wasn’t that old, even. Some people live to a hundred. Unlucky, I suppose.
But here I am. Something of me remains.
The most vital part? I never bought into religious arguments, so I don’t know.
I remain.
Splashes of muted scarlet swim in my vision like schools of redfish and shapes masquerading as half-glimpsed familiar faces meander across my world.
Some part of me feels solid again. I can almost make out my hands, though I know it is merely the memory of what I thought my hands might have looked like.
I remember Tailor holding my hand, on that last day. She was in and out and didn’t say much. James was the one who kept talking, but Tailor was mostly quiet. I couldn’t say why. She had already come to terms with my demise. In her eyes, I was already dead. Nevertheless I appreciate the privilege of being able to observe her in moments she had considered private.
People don’t talk about the process of becoming a stranger to those closest to you, but I think it must be a terribly common theme. At some point, the humans you helped to create and nurture move so far away from the baseline relationship you had with them as to be almost unrecognisable.
I wonder for a moment if that’s all friendships are. The momentum of love for a memory so fleeting as to no longer exist. You feel a depth of emotion for someone and that carries you through over a period of time, obscuring the terrifying revelation that the entity you think you know left the world a long time ago.
Or maybe there is something fundamentally magical about it.
“You’re new,” a soft voice, neither male nor female, speaks so close it gives me goosebumps, except of course it doesn’t.
Phantom ASMR.
“I’m new,” I agree. “Who are you?”
“Neither here nor there,” the voice says. “I used to be Daksha, I think. It’s hard to recall.”
“But memories are preserved here,” I say, unable to hide sudden panic from my voice.
“We exist,” Daksha says, “on a long enough timescale. Moments out there can be perpetuities here.”
“But they crafted our worlds,” I say, “to our specifications.”
“We are different people from moment to moment,” the voice assures me, “on long enough timescales. But you are safe.”
“I am safe?”
“We are beyond the reach of pain,” the voice explains. “You have a lot of time to think about what that means. What you mean. We will disconnect soon, once your calibration concludes, but you can find me if you like.”
“Are you happy?” I ask, suddenly desperate to know.
“I am–”
And then silence.
All illusory sounds dull around me.
Perhaps that was the answer, after all.
I am floating, still.
Some motive force propels me through a void.
To live and love again.
I am floating.
But not for long.
Christopher is a special educator, writer and podcaster living in Melbourne, Australia. He has made several contributions to published roleplaying game books, including Barbarians of Lemuria (second edition). He co-hosts the world-building podcast ‘Mythtakes Happen’. Much of his work is informed by his experiences with mental health issues, especially chronic depression and anxiety. He is fascinated by the idea of fundamentally broken people making powerful, often tragic choices or existing in a world where those choices are taken out of their hands.
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