Maso imagined his heart beating. He pretended that he could still hear it, trying to will it back into existence: Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
RuntimeError: Unrecognized player. This is likely a bug. Would you like to reregister?
Within the Origin, there was no afterlife. Not in a mechanical sense: whether or not the mind went somewhere after death just wasn't something people thought about. Instead, human brains were preserved through dimensional collapse once one's mind began to decay.
There was a balance to it. If the process was done too soon, it was possible that the person could have still brought value to society - but if it was delayed too long, the preserved mind could be overly damaged by age.
The present practice skewed older, hoping that cures for a variety of diseases would be found by the time the brain could be extruded. This tendency had, over time, led to a greater fear of of death. The Origin was a mostly safe planet, preferring to kill its people slowly through poisoned water and subtle gases in the air rather than through sudden disasters like volcanic eruptions or the rumoured floods of HL-13. It was rare for a worker to die without the chance to preserve themselves.
That rarity made the worst case scenario all the more horrifying, an irrational paranoia that plagued the Origin's population.
This was a part of the reason interstellar travel was unpopular. The deep-seated fear of losing one's birthright: the honour of seeing humanity's future, when the day eventually came to be restored, a hundred or thousand years in the future.
Maso had never properly understood that fear.
User input requested. Please indicate a desire to register.
Yet now, with no heart to beat or sweat to drip down his face, Maso finally felt it.
The desire to register must be provided for your reintroduction into the system.
He was dead. He had died, and he'd discovered the answer that his parents may have, a dozen years before.
Registration will be quick and painless. The lack of registration is likely to cause boredom and a possible descent into madness (n=437).
There was an afterlife, and it was a glob of poorly-kerned words set against pitch darkness.
More words were added as he watched, unable to look away or close his eyes. They described instructions, information, one paragraph even going into detail on the creature that had killed him.
You were slain by "Level 83 Plains Dragon". Daily Tip: It is recommended to avoid regions where the average level of enemies is significantly higher than your own.
This was mockery, Maso realized. The afterlife was making fun of him.
He refused to give in. And so, he did nothing.
Awaiting user input...
Time passed, although Maso couldn't tell how long. Ignoring the text in front of him, he retreated deeper into his mind: below physical diagnostics, beyond surface level thoughts, down into a deeper introspection than he'd ever achieved before.
Somewhere within his brain, something activated.
Diagnostics online.
Scanning for errors.
Several input streams are offline. To regain full functionality, please unblock, heal, or reattach your: Eyes. Nose. Ears. Spine.
All network connections are offline.
Brain interface is fully online.
Status: Augment at full capacity. All external nodes disconnected or offline.
His neural augment. The chip in his brain that provided links to the dozens of augments within and attached to his body, an advanced piece of technology that had been superseded a hundred times since he'd had it implanted at thirteen.
Most neural augments provided information to their user through vision overlays and other sensory cues. It was what soldiers were trained to do, the theory being that the human mind was better at reacting to that kind of data than mental nudges. This deep into his mind, however, it was easy to hear the augment's voice, the lowest level of communication only used by scientists and high-level warriors.
Maso didn't know how to deal with the concept of an afterlife, but he did know how to understand diagnostic data. If his augment was still running, this was the real world: he hadn't died. If he was still alive, then there was a chance he could accomplish his goals. And if he had no body, then the only way forward to was to understand why.
"I'll register," Maso said. He knew he didn't have a mouth, that the nerve connections were severed - and he couldn't have heard his own voice either.
The void responded all the same.
Registration in progress.
An image of a multicoloured circle appeared, rotating slowly. He wanted more information, especially now that the text he hadn't read had disappeared, but there was nothing to do except wait.
What's your name?
"Maso," he said, again unable to hear his own voice. He doubted he was speaking at all.
What's your profession?
"I'm a soldier. Fifth rank," he added, with a bit of unintended pride.
Only soldiers of the seventh rank and above were permitted to go as solo escorts for terraform teams. Maso had been an exception, hand-picked by some unknown high-ranking entity. The order had mentioned his skill and dedication, but he couldn't help wondering why that hadn't just led to him being promoted.
What's your favourite colour?
"Huh?"
His favourite colour? What did that even mean? Colours didn't really have any benefits in and of themselves. It was true that different coloured clothes could have practical combat applications (he did have a deep black battle suit in case of a fight in space, after all), but without any context, colours were just... information.
Well, perhaps he was overthinking the question. Colour was intrinsically tied to light. Perhaps the question was meant to ask which colour of light he preferred. That was also a silly question: yellow light was the best for one's eyes, and that was simply fact.
Maso gave it as an answer anyways: "Yellow."
What's your favourite element?
Another ridiculous question. At least it was possible to have some kind of opinion on this.
"Osmium," he said. His mother had worn an osmium necklace, one that his father had given her before Maso was born. He couldn't recall its value, but it had shone nicely when the light hit it in just the right way.
There was a pause after his response, longer than before. Then:
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
Character creation complete. Generating a suitable body...
The text disappeared after a moment, and nothing replaced it.
Maso was left to ponder the message. If he wasn't actually dead, if something was generating him a new body, then that was a concept he was familiar with. It was a process that had already been developed on the Origin. Only brains were stored by dimensional collapse, so when the time came for extrusion, it would be necessary to regenerate the body from the brain's stored genetic information. This had turned out (perhaps unsurprisingly) to be a far simpler process than extrusion, and so the research was already long completed.
The similarity to his home technology was odd, though. Had they happened upon some old research planet, abandoned a century ago and somehow forgotten by the core tracking systems on the Origin? Such a thing wasn't necessarily impossible - the drawbacks to their networked intelligences were already well-known. However, if systems this complex were already constructed on the planet, then it stood to reason that communication systems should have also existed.
He wasn't given any more time to consider the problem. Still without the sensation of having eyes, his perception was suddenly flooded with light, a naked human appearing in front of him.
Please accept or decline this result.
What? Was that supposed to be his body? He'd been prepared for some minor differences: a lifetime of intense training and exposure to a toxic atmosphere had undeniably led to an appearance that no longer matched his genetic code.
But there was simply no way his DNA allowed for large, pointed ears, sharp green eyes, or skin that was so pale that it was nearly white.
It didn't appear to be a real body regardless. The skin was too smooth, the eyes too bright, the features too perfect to be anything but some kind of simulation.
Maso answered regardless: what choice did he have?
"I'm not that tall."
The image changed. The eyes were a tad darker now, the ears somehow larger, long blond hair curving around them into a complicated braid. The body's leg muscles were more defined, but the arms were leaner. Most of the changes were so subtle he wouldn't have noticed if he hadn't been observing the previous body just a moment before, and the closer he looked, the more he realized that everything was different, many of the changes imperceptibly slight.
It still didn't look remotely like him.
Please accept or decline this result.
Why am I bothering with this? It was ridiculous to think that a new, unique body would just be crafted for him out of thin air. Maso still wasn't sure whether or not he was alive, debating his appearance with some planet's outdated core system was a worthless distraction.
"I accept."
Registration complete. Please be advised that it will take (2) standard weeks for your reconstitution. Please indicate whether you would prefer to elide the waiting period, or make use of the integrated educational materials.
Educational materials? Maso was never one to shy away from training. "I'll do the second one."
The body and text disappeared, and he was faced with what appeared to be some kind of interface. At the top were what appeared to be several dozen introductory materials, with names like Foraging for Food for Fighters or The Elf's Guide to Civilized Regions. A thought brought up the text from one: Geography of the Known World, which flooded his perception.
With nothing else to do, Maso started reading.
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In the void, there was no way to tell the passage of time. Maso knew he wasn't a particularly fast reader; he learned best by doing, which was why he'd spent thousands of hours in Immersives, custom simulations built by networked intelligences that almost perfectly adhered to reality. He wasn't sure how much time he had taken to read the first three texts he'd decided on.
More time than should have been necessary, at least. They were all unbelievably boring.
Their target planet was apparently named 'Faitia', and it was home to a variety of humanoid species. 'Humans', with reference pictures that looked strange but human enough to Maso, the people uniformly tall and with sharp facial features.
Then there were 'dwarves', although they barely looked different, perhaps somewhat shorter than the humans of the Origin but not noticeably so. Otherwise, the dwarves in the reference images had long, braided beards and thick muscles, but as far as Maso was aware neither of those traits were really genetically impossible for humans. Perhaps the writer of the text knew something he did not.
The elves, an unscientific species that preferred living "in nature", were similar to the image that had been generated of his body previously. Tall and slender, they were again hardly what Maso would consider a separate species entirely, with their main defining feature being pointed ears and perhaps their extraordinarily pale complexions.
In any case, the species that followed were much different.
Lilieth, the tree people, slow and rarely seen, but "highly durable and capable of great magic." What 'magic' was, of course, had yet to be explained. At least it was supposedly 'great', so Maso had that to look forward to.
Avalla, giant crows intelligent enough to have trade agreements and their own technologies. A plague had ripped through their population only a decade ago, and they'd since disappeared, the majority retreating fully into their mountainous homes. Only the most critical transactions still occurred, with small groups of representatives bringing rare spices to human cities in return for miscellaneous goods they couldn't obtain otherwise.
Kwairi, somewhat incorporeal beings with no known means of reproduction. Fast and apparently "possessed of a deep evil", they had terrorized rural areas and killed both livestock and farmers. A great push had been made centuries ago to remove them, and was said to have mostly succeeded.
Upon reading that, Maso had immediately abandoned Species and Subspecies: An Incomplete Listing and started reading a different article on history. If things had been happening "centuries ago" on this planet, then there were serious gaps in his knowledge. Expeditions this far out hadn't even been possible centuries ago, and although it was known that strange things could happen with the perception of time around high-tier travel, he didn't think that this fit.
That being said, he was far from an expert on the matter.
Maso skimmed through a variety of texts in an attempt to understand. Was this actually an alien race? Had he not been interacting with a previously-deployed networked intelligence, but rather some alien entity, communicating with his mind in a manner unknown to the Origin's research?
Was he actually dead, after all?
The introductory materials didn't really have an answer. Paladins and Priests: A Refresher on Religious Magic spoke of strange rituals and chants that allowed one to channel the power of an unknown deity, but had little detail on what that actually meant on a philosophical level. Sure, it was potentially useful to know that chanting "ada rea alí" four times could cause lightning to strike at a target, but why?
Was there really a deity listening for that specific combination of words? A higher being that enjoyed smiting the enemies of those with a high enough "level" in "religiosity"?
Was it some kind of internal effect, similar to an augment, that could actually create a bolt of lightning on a whim?
Was it simply an atmospheric condition of this planet, that lightning was shockingly common, and the author hadn't bothered to check if the effect could be repeated?
Maso tried another text.
A History of Faitia was mostly political in nature, with long (and extremely dry) explanations of the diplomatic tensions between the Lilieth and the Elves. It may have been more interesting if it described how a tree would wage war, but the text skipped any action, preferring to describe the month-long peace talks that would take place between years of sporadic battles deep in the forests. The 'human' species had little attention paid to it by the author, alongside the dwarves, who only merited mention when brought in to develop new communication technologies for the Lilieth.
Maso gave up halfway through.
Common Enemies and How To Crush Them was entirely useless. The creatures described within were uniformly ridiculous and unrealistic, with not a single one bearing any resemblance to the practical, bio-engineered creations that roamed the outer layers of the Origin. It was true that this planet appeared to have a radically different composition, but Maso doubted it was significant enough to support gelatinous, jumping cubes or ants the size of an apartment.
Maso was partway through Tinkering with Two Hands, a surprisingly technical guide to the primitive tools used by dwarves to mine out their mountain homes, when the black void returned.
Reconstitution complete.
He barely had time to ponder whether or not he had to accept, before he felt something.
It was like a needle, subtly piercing the back of his skull. Did he still have a skull? It was hard to place the feeling, without being able to see, missing any other sense of self.
Another piercing, then another, followed the first. Then it suddenly came, a pain like he'd never felt before, like needles had been inserted into everything that made him him, as if there was nothing left to feel but pain.
A sensation so severe, it took him moments, seconds, to stop reeling. Even as the pain continued, Maso forced himself back deeper into his mind, frantically creating thoughts at the lowest level he could.
activate neural blocker
It felt like being flayed alive, but he was a brain in a jar and he couldn't even see it.
activate neural blocker
Like bathing in acid, feeling his skull melt away.
activate neural blocker
Then the pain was gone, and there was no sensation to replace it.
Neural blocker activated. Alarm set for +08:00 to deactivate.
Maso tried to sigh in relief, but there was no indication it had any effect.
The void remained, the text still visible.
"What's happening?" Maso tried asking.
There was no indication that he'd been heard, if he'd even made a sound.
And then the text disappeared, and an uncountable number of things happened at once.
The black void was no longer black, and Maso suddenly felt that he could see it, strangely different than before.
The silence was gone, and there were a thousand sounds blaring at him from both sides, a cacophony of voices and thumps and whines and a ringing in his ears - his ears? - that was fading every second.
There was a sudden knowledge that he could feel again, even beyond the protections of the neural blocker, a vague sensation of being larger than he'd been before. An internal feeling, a sense of rightness, that he'd been missing in the void.
Maso opened his eyes.
"You're not Rùndi!"