“Well,” Nathan said—or rather, did not say, as he was in that liminal space where no physical constructs such as speech or bodies existed, “that could have gone better.”
Will you say that each time?
“I hope so,” he mused. “Aren’t we supposed to be always pursuing radical self-improvement? That’s what everyone on the internet says, except for the ones who say that making a mistake marks you as irredeemable forever unless you’re one of their cliquemates.”
And more seriously?
“Huh, I guess I have a vulnerability to the prying restatement of a question as a way to pierce through my reflexive disengagement from acts of vulnerability,” Nathan did not say, because while he was relatively self-aware for a man of his age, he was not quite that self-aware and also was in a context devoid of the act of saying anything per se.
“More seriously, I hope so,” he repeated more seriously. “But definitely not. I expect that a lot of lives will end with me being pretty happy about how I lived, and I’ll say something like ‘That was fun’ when I come back here.”
You did not allow me a great deal of time.
“It’s okay that you didn’t get much done,” Nathan reassured the not-a-voice. “That’s totally on me. I mean, I didn’t even give you a day! I died… a few hours after I was born? Wow. I suck, don’t I.”
Statistical data made available to me suggests that your performance in your second life was well above the median for second lives.
“That’s… really kinda sad. What, did they all run into a town of a premodern setting, scream their heads off about how they were going to revolutionize the world, and then get summarily executed for being raving madmen?”
This would be compatible with the descriptions and magnitudes I have access to. A further complication might be introduced by the lack of cross-cultural communication capacity.
“Oh right! The fish that I had you integrate into my brain. Say, how does that stand up relative to the other ways of getting language proficiencies? Being able to grab complete fluency in something after hearing or reading a couple of sentences seems incredibly strong. And I was getting a weirdly large amount of, well, cultural context? I knew the coinage, the name of the country, the whole thing about the uprising of the House Abhorrent after they were illegally and unethically targeted by the Crown for using necromancy in perfectly reasonable ways, I knew the ways that the Hall was involved in the mitigation efforts that dealt with the creeping wastelands in almost every direction that resulted from that civil war… just seems like a lot, really. Especially since I also got that trauma suppression, which, thank fuck.”
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Your rescuer, Natasha of the superhuman-scale mechanized bipedal magitechnological power armor, must have chosen with great deliberation.
“You can just call it a mecha,” Nathan protested. “And that doesn’t answer my question. ‘Must have’ could mean that you have no idea about whether she did or not but that you think it’s the likely inference, or it could mean that you know exactly how good a choice it was and you’re giving her credit for making it.”
Yes. The communication between them paused for a moment, a beat of humorous meta-silence in a place without speech. It is the former.
“Well, okay, that’s what I expected. But it is pretty great. I’m not sure I can think of any sort of language difficulty that this isn’t going to solve, and it’s apparently also going to protect me from, like, word-based memetic threats? Which seems really esoteric but I’m sure I’ll run into it at some point.”
You are excited.
“This just finally started feeling real,” Nathan explained, reigning himself in with some effort, though not very much despite that effort. “Or maybe the retroactive trauma reduction kicked in and I’m not dissociating as much? I guess those two things can be linked, obviously.”
I do not understand how you can manifest hypomania without a physical substrate.
“Okay, listen,” he began, then paused. “First, fair point. Second, how am I doing anything without a body? How do I exist at all? As far as I was aware yesterday, I was, you know, a human being with only physical components. A brain, an overall endocrine system, whatever role the gut flora plays, sure; but this? I don’t see why moods make any less sense than existing in the first place.”
This suggests that rapid-cycling hypomania followed by depressive episodes is an integrated part of your personality and sense of self. You would be wise to consider this an avenue for self-improvement.
“Yeah, and have you come up with a name for yourself?”
No. And so, we might each of us have direction.
“Sure. Yeah, okay.”
Time grows short. You must choose how to invest your gains, and where you wish to live in your next life.
“I… okay,” he said slowly. “What would you choose?” There was a long lack of response. “Well? Got any advice, any picks, any preferences?”
Situational awareness, came the not-a-voice. Yours is atrocious. You cannot rely on our companion at all moments; it will not be in a suitable form, much of the time.
“It has a name, you know.”
Saucer, the voice agreed regretfully, resignedly. As for a location, perhaps one without a focus on combat or warfare? One where you will not die within a matter of hours?
“Hmph. You’re not wrong.” Nathan stretched, in a purely conceptual way. “Fine. Something with, I dunno, space and stuff. Maybe with nanotech? But not an active warzone. As an adult again, mind you, I don’t want to do a baby arc. That sounds tedious and awful.”
So be it.
And thus was Nathan born again.