The Hero's mask which I had worn was now gone. It had been shattered and ground to dust with the bones of my face. I had healed, but it could not.

Ideals were like that. Even lower, the lies we told ourselves would break as they came up against their inevitable cost. My compromise with Ironbolt was like that.

Against the reality of how they would treat me, like an infinitely disposable meatbag, the lie shattered. Because, that's what truth is. Anything which calls out our bullshit and our mistakes.

It falsified my path to show me one truer. One where I could live according to my own conscience, free of the burden of others' misery. It was not dying that was the problem, I knew. It was living that was rare.

With the sand between my toes and the vast blue horizon in front of me, I knew I was alive. That had turned out harder to know than I appreciated. Now, as the sound of Ironbolt's jet grew louder, I decided that I would never lose this feeling again.

It was the ability to control my own fate that I had lacked. Not for the purpose of any particular future. I had no desires but to be left alone. I saw at last what was more true than anything else, by definition.

I was free only for its own sake. There was no other purpose. It was... an ouroboros.

Turning to face the jet as it hovered over the sandy dunes, I spread my arms. It had to be Ironbolt in the jet, I reasoned. He would have to land if he wanted to take me alive. More than enough opportunity to give him a piece of my mind.

Yet, the ship was only hovering, contemplative. Something shifted on its underbelly as I watched.

It was a rocket moving into firing position.

All at once, I figured out too late who was really at the helm of the jet. It was Tulpa, doing something he thought would earn him favor with Maximal. Something which he could never be held legally accountable for, as everything which had happened in the last two days was far off the record.

He carried out the law, going so far as to ignore the authority immediately above himself to do so. What a bastard.

I jumped to the side just as the rocket launched. Faster than Ironbolt himself, it impacted the sand with fiery fury. Its explosion was stupendously massive, rocking the ground like it was water. I couldn't possibly have hoped to avoid it.

After all that I had been through in the last few days, feeling the shockwave and fire tear my body apart was almost painless. My legs scattered to the wind along with one of my arms, while the contents of my head liquified with the pressure.

It only took a few seconds for my thought processes to return, faster than ever before. No visions of nature danced over my reality. Instead, only cool hate filled my mind.

I landed face first in the sand and turned myself over. The bleeding had stopped almost intantly, and whatever organs remained intact, retracted into my body. The Power of my healing put me back into working order as fast as possible, but that was it. There were simply no raw materials to reconstruct my arm and legs. I was helpless where I lay, more a pile of gore than a man.

"Is that all you've got!?" I bellowed all the same. The jet swung around to hang over the waters, and I knew that Tulpa could hear me. "You coward!"

He projected his voice through the speakers. "You were warned this would happen. You think you're above it all, but you're nothing. When you get in society's way, you will lose every time, Walter."

"You're wrong," I said. "You're all drones and I know the reason why you're so afraid!" I saw the second rocket load into place. He could never hear me, but I accepted what was about to come. I raged against the machine. "You're afraid of me, because I'm free. You're afraid because I... Because we could be so much more than slaves."

Tulpa responded. He killed me without remorse.

The rocket burst forth in a dazzle too quick to marvel at, before releasing a final crash of destruction. Total darkness swept with the wave of fire to devour the whole world. In the abyss of my own crater, I strained out of thought and time.

Only by the faintest consciousness was I aware of time passing. Eternities went by like that, it seemed.

But, like the first primordial cells clawing their way out of chaos and into being, thought returned. With excrutiating difficulty, a single memory recovered itself from my ruined corpse.

I never believed in an afterlife.

Yet, here I was, after my own death. Living without a body was impossible, I believed. That could only mean one thing. Though deep and far beyond an existence that any human would recognize, I lived. 

Emotions began to boil beneath the terrible weight of the darkness. Anger, resentment, and finally satisfaction. Within the sightless, soundless void, I had put together enough of myself to regain awareness. Some part of me survived.

Not enough to put back together my eyes, but enough to think. Enough to continue becoming what I wanted to become. I had a body of some kind, but I had no idea what it was. If I had moved, I reasoned, from the absence of consciousness now to its reconstruction, one more thing was certain.

My body was growing. I was feeding.

More than that. I was immortal; resurrected from perhaps only the smear of blood on the sand. That fact was my ultimate vengeance. Nothing they did could stop me now. Life found a way to subvert all their control.

It was suddenly as if I could see again, without eyes, a network of veins and energy sprawling out. It was soaked through with light and flowing like the rivers, wherever gravity pulled it. Indifferent to everything around it, the form moved through the blackness.

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I strained to see my body. I had no control over the form it took, but as I felt out, the knowledge of it was there for the taking. Every cell within attested to its own existence. There were not many, I realized, but they were happy; elated that I had survived. A kind of happiness measured in reaction. Increasing work.

Satisfaction, they told me, was not hard to come by. One only had to be growing steadily to find it, no matter the circumstance. It was a chemical, they said. A signal of affirmation.

My own cells could speak to me. Each one had so much personality as it went about its life, and each life lasted a hundred years. All sense of my own frame of time had been lost, and they engrossed me with their own.

Time was a human construct. In the space where my consciousness floated, there was only balance. Marking the cycles of days and minutes, balances of energy fluctuated to maintain an ideal state. A structure was supported by this. A luminous and amorphous polyp, moving freely like a star falling through space.

Without thought or intention, cells achieved goals, reacting to the feedback they encountered. The creature ate when it was hungry. It moved as it felt that the reaction was proper according to internal signals. It was all effortless action, the maintaining of goals, yet taken far beyond what any person would call a will.

Was this me, I wondered? Was I like this?

"Would that be such a bad thing?" I heard the voices respond. They echoed with me through the dark. It was not threatening or foreign, but familiar like an old friend.

"My life is hard," I told them. "I must be something different from these cells. Even the difficult things they do... even stress for them is a simple fact which warrants a response. But me? I don't know how to act."

"You are too aware of the future to react to the knowledge which we give you. You are in a permanent state of preparation, tormented by your higher consciousness. Your life is plagued by the feeling... of never having arrived. Of something always left undone."

How long had it been, I asked myself. Days, weeks, months? Had it been eons? The question increasingly unnerved me as I thought, and I understood what the voice meant. "Aren't I supposed to strive?" I asked it.

"Fear and exert. Rest and overcome. Learn from failure... but never strive. You already know what to do. Extricate the parasites of exterior control. They sunder you in two, when you are one. Let your agony be no more than the scent of beauty. Its enjoining call. Let your pride be praise. Achieve glory that you might become who you are."

That word turned my stomach, harkening back to Hickory's sick philosophy. More and more, I judged and doubted. There were too many contradictions and too many demands, to my eye. I wanted to be free, but I couldn't accept this idea of Ego. "How do I get out of this place?" I demanded.

No answer came at first. The background chatter of my body continued on, a million parts acting as one. Cells interlinked within cells, whispering. I felt a shift of form in them, like a crying out for change. That was suffering.

A motion began in one cell, and arced like lightning to the rest. The sense of touch began to arise in my extremities then, and it spread.

Massive structural changes compounded through the flesh, with everything that came before being cannibalized to facilitate. The new structure resembled the last, but only in spirit. Rebirth, they chanted. Rebirth was necessary.

Boneless and strange, I still saw darkness. Only this time, the cells attested of vision. This darkness, I saw with my own physical eye.

Some glimmers of light filled the dark, floating as if in deep space. I could see my arms as they moved around me, fluid like water. I counted eight in total, strong and sleek.

There was more light above, so that was the way I went. Movement came naturally. I only had to ask my limbs how they wanted to go, and they showed me proudly.

On the way up, I encountered a small creature. Hungry as the cells were, I let them reach out to have it. Without my objection, it was a thoughtless motion to stuff it in my mouth and consume. Again, more satisfaction filled the flesh.

I couldn't evolve so soon yet, but every calorie helped. Between the Power to do so and the Power to utilize the energy perfectly, it wouldn't be long. The cells were excited for it. 

The world above was much brighter and bluer. It was vast and open like a desert, but teeming with strange and ghostly noises coming from afar. 

Beauty was everywhere, like an intoxicant urging me to keep moving. Positive emotion, the flesh said, was affirmation. Negative was inhibitory.

With everything coming to me so easily, there was only the moment of exertion. I kept moving and it was as if I could see the joy it brought, no more an emotion of my own than the sting in my muscles. Facts of biology, chemical and endocrine alike, constructed a will to which I was only an observer. A will to the balancing of stress hormones, hanging above boredom and below suffering. A will to satisfaction.

I could see the processes as they went, down to the construction and folding of proteins, according to instruction. Between swimming and eating, my thoughts were sparse. It took energy to think, and thinking was unnecessary. I half believed that my Power would have evolved away my own mind, had I not been so insistent about its use.

Yet most of the time, it wasn't particularly helpful. I saw that now.

Weeks passed that way, measured by the rise and fall of the sun. Much of my time was spent hunting in the dark below me. I doubled in size, like clockwork, and each time opened new possibilities in prey.

I asked myself where I was going. My direction had been chosen by instinct, but it was unclear what would follow. I routinely killed and ate sharks, now. I could cheat, adapting to both high and low-pressure environments within a matter of hours of encountering them. My Power had no end form in mind, it simply addressed the problems which I gave to it.

I was an invertebrate nightmare of the ocean, unrecognizable as any known species. Sometimes I would encounter ships, and remember by seeing those aboard... I was human too, once.

Perhaps I was a Kizmet, now. An animal with Powers. A natural calamity waiting to happen, like a kraken approaching shore. I only grew larger in the meantime.

I'd had no family in the world before, as a single child with dead parents. My grandparents had raised me, but they too passed not long ago. Few friends, as well. Still, even as I felt such completion and satisfaction, no future or past, there was sadness. I couldn't tell if it was me or the cells, but loneliness gnawed at me. For the humanity which I had lost, I felt a specter of grief and that horrible sense of incompletion.

No, I decided. It had not been lost. It had been taken from me.

I had been thrown from the gates of heaven, down crashing into the animal abyss. At once, I remembered; it had been my dream to sail. To spend my time reading books that I loved and having all the freedom I desired to practice my art. For all the endless beauty of nature, there was no art to capture and purify it. Art, which distilled the subjective experience, was lacking.

It could be no reason by itself to return, however. Art would not have been sufficient to tempt me to land. There was a stronger reason emerging.

As weeks turned to months, whales and the largest of animals turned to easy prey. I continued to grow, but it was no end unto itself. There was no pride in driving such creatures to extinction. Too soon, I would have nothing left to do and nothing left to become. Size, it seemed, wasn't everything.

It had been a time to breathe and think. A time to see my humanity for what it was, and allow the last vestiges of my shackles melt away. Yet, I remained tied to my desire for freedom and for open space. Potential. Without desire, I didn't know what I'd do but lay down and die.

"The ocean has become known," I said. "We will turn to a more a chaotic world."

"Good," I heard the voices, as if it was witness and judge. "It is good."

The time had come to return to the world. I had died and traveled the primordial realm of life's early origins, but it was worth nothing to me if it did not shed light on the world I knew as home. I had to return to my humanity, new. I had to show myself that nothing was kept from me.

By now I knew each continent by heart. I set my course for North America.