“Yes?”

“I can’t see my face. I can feel it, yes. But it will not show up. Not in the dreams. Not in the mirror. Not in the reflection of the water of the painting that the lieutenant made of me. Even amateurish as they are.”

“Are you in distress about it? Your facelessness?” she opens her notes.

Ah, right.

I am still only here because I provoked her curiosity.

So sell it, and sell it well. Compassion for a story. An uneven trade.

“Not physically. It does cause me some doubt.”

“What doubts?”

“You have my autopsy, yes?” I motion at a different stack of paper she got on the table.

“That would be correct. We are required to keep them, in case the resurrected-”

“I want to read them.” I reach out to grab them from her table. She holds me back just before I could.

Her brows furrow, as if to guess my intention. I shrug and sit back in my chair. She shakes her head.

“I was the one making the operation. I could recall it better than the notes I have written down, if there is any details you wanted to go over. That, and my handwriting is not something that should be shown in a polite setting.”

I chuckled. “Alright then. But really, though, doc, what I am interested in is not your diagnosis, but rather my form. A description told by onlookers is biased, and difficult to interpret. An autopsy is frank. Maybe biased, still, but I trust your expertise.”

I hold out my hand. With a sigh, the doctor handed me the papers.

“You have a right to them, and I won’t deny it. But do know that reading about your own death is not something one could easily forget.”

“Yeah.” I nodded, but flip the page over nonetheless.

“Hob ancestry. Suggested to be south sea descendent. Normally developed with signs of dysfunctional nourishment, dressed in the labour corps uniform, shorter than average height for conscripts. Grey fur around the jaw, the neck, both feet, and hands. Large maw with pronounced incisors. Six ears, with top left damaged and removed. Missing reference number plate. Cold body equal to storage temperature. Rigor has broken to an equal degree in all extremities. There are lacerations on the face and scalp, and dents on the skull base and facial bone. Fractured cranial vault. Huh.” I flipped the page to find a rougher, more detailed example of the wounds after that, which I decide against reading aloud, not that the doc wouldn’t already know.

“Good work, doc. That must have not been easy.”

“Your brain is the most difficult element to recover. The metal base of your skull was bent from some impact before, presumably from enemy missiles, and thus melted off, so understandable that some part of it was lost. But it will heal in time. The mind is a well-trained animal. It can learn to walk with one foot missing. A good chance that some of your natural instincts and functions would be affected under that circumstance, but as long as your soul remains conscious, rational thoughts and emotion will never leave you.”

I gazed at the paper, mulling over the words, before subtly touching the base of my head. A missing patch of hair, and a simmering heat underneath it. I could feel the uneven, jagged part of my bone underneath the soft, dull, almost leather-like feeling of the skin over my newly healed wound.

Modern, universal theories of medicine called it the metal, though there have been different names for it in other cultures throughout the ages, the sheen that cast over the bones of kin, developed only after they have gained the gasp to miracle work. Charred bronze. Perfected steel. Jaded copper. Dull gold. For every eye that gazes on it, the skeletal structure of kin takes on a different form, a different reflection, a different meaning, a different metal. If the body is an expression of oneself under the system for miracle work for an audience, then the bone, the *metal*, shall be the intimate secrets shared behind closed doors and inside one’s bed, known only to the scalpel, the grave digger, and the murderer. To this woman, people are brass of bone, the metal conductor to life and the music, a more useful kind of gold.

“Did you find out why I was…?”

“Resurrection gas. Your brain overheated, and it melted its way through the cranial base - your mind thought your body was dead and was trying to salvage the soul, to the point of breaking itself in doing so. The area was bombarded later, which pretty much decimated your unit.”

“Ironic.” I tapped on my head. “To have my own brain be the cause of my own undeath. Now my soul is only half there.”

“No, soul and soullessness are binary. It is yet scarred, but it is still there, inside your bones. Perhaps undeath is the wrong word to describe it, but scientists have been good with names. It just means that your soul yet here when it could have moved on from your own mind. Enough of a close call for it to be… confused, in a sense.”

“How did you come to the conclusion that I wasn’t a spy?” I flipped through the report. Nothing would incriminate me, but nothing that wouldn’t, either.

“It’d be a bold guess. A photograph of your corps’s regiment has a person of the same build. It is hard to identify your face, due to the quality of the photo and the state of your face, but the hairstyle and dental profile matched.”

“Huh. Does it stand out that much?”

“Yes. Most of our recruits for the labor corps are from the cloistered Huin empire. While their cultivation miracles do produce large canines such as yours, it does not extend into revealing a full maw, but rather like tusks.”

Your hand moved to the corner of your mouth, which reaches all the way to just shy of your cheekbones.

It bore no majestic nobility of the Huin, of whom image shaped after the river dragon and the sun rooster. It is instead the imprint of a cornered dog, the permanent snarl of a dead end. Feral and desperate enough to survive that it would fight to cripple its killer even in death, as are the struggles of all squabbling nations under the shadow of behemoths.

“Do I look scary, doc?” I grin at what felt to me would be a smile.

“Where’s that coming from? You look just fine to me. Don’t worry too much about the drivels they published in the newspaper. Kins are kins, and no practice of magic that doesn’t indulge in the shaping. Even I grows horn and cut them down each fall-”

She pointed toward her forehead, where the stub of what would be two bony oxen horns would have been.

“I file them down each morning until they dulled to a stub since the start of my teenage years. It isn’t something that you would see talked about for how mundane it is, but it is not painless or effortless work, but rather enjoyable in its own way.”

“Why don’t you just keep them?”

“Doorway. And it is a tad uncomfortable to sleep in. Also, a fully grown horn isn’t looked upon fondly in the polite circles that I frequent. Undignified and barbaric, and the effort to keep them dulled is seen as romantic, in a way. Tragic and noble, I suppose, to cast away part of yourself for the benefit of the companies you keep.”

Perhaps that is why this woman carries such open-mindedness about its shape. She was once the subject of such talks, too.

“Ah.” I nodded. “Might as well just remove them entirely, then?”

“I am proud of them.” the doctor caressed her ivory forehead, to the white feathers behind her ears and above her brows, and untied her hair, which trails forth and spilled out over her shoulder into a black and golden mane, with a hint of white from her age.

It reminds you of something. A word or two. Angelic. Demonic. Perhaps both.

This woman is a child of the buffalo. The second oldest kind of alien and the first of the colonized to the kingdom of the sun. A lineage born of conquest and subjugation.

“The lion, the swan, and the-”

“Buffalo. But most would not say that last part, and I have never been anywhere close to that part of my identity, yet it is still there, bleeding through my form and into the shape that I am. Miracles are cultural, and culture is identity. If we remove them, what would we be?”

“I don’t even remember my own past, doc. Any reason for the wonderwork to shape me into so, I couldn’t say for sure. See this?”

I pointed at the picture that came with the files. A group photo for a rabble of laborers, standing in messy lines, out in what seemed to be a hot midday noon waiting for orders. Among them, a face is smeared, hidden behind what seemed to be sunlight.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

A memory slipped by the creaks of your brain. Your stomach aches from the little food that was provided before the road, and your knees are weak from days being shut in a crowded train. The heat, ironically, makes you feel a chill running from the nape of your neck to the bottom of your toes. It would feel like hours before they let you leave to stand in line toward the station. A photographer passed by, befriended one of the laborers and asked to work his magic. There must have been something soulful about a bunch of hungry, sweaty lowlifes standing drenched in the sun.

Then, a solar wind blows past them. Up, up in the sky, shuttles embarked and sprinted toward the sun until they are a mere light snuffed out by the cosmos above. The trail of humans inches ever closer toward the promise of a better future, toward a sterile, space-faring, steel machine that would have them repeat their mistake yet anew on some other planets. The photographer leaves, and no one there would ever see what an image they would have made in the lens of the camera, for they would have been long gone by then. To Proxima Centauri.

“I remember a hint or two about how it was taken. It seems correct, in a way. Yet it is somehow wrong, too. I remembered that day. Hell, I remembered every day in my life, I am not that sort of amnesiac. But I am unsure what is here, with you, with me, and what is… elsewhere. They just mixed in together, like you tried to mix the content of two different books. This whole thing. This whole talk with you, doc. This whole world, this whole timeline. It felt fake. Feel like I am in some sort of purgatory, a state of limbo.”

I handed her back the paper, my thumb pressed on the paragraph that would describe the face of a stranger that is, apparently, me.

“I remembered my death. But it was not- not like this. I remember what my face looks like. It's plain, perhaps even ugly. It's boring. Jarring to look at. There was no magic in it. No miracle.”

“So, what is your explanation of it, then?”

“I would like to hear yours, first. Before we decided if I should get operated on, shouldn’t it be of a professional opinion?”

She nodded. “I have already decided before you wake up, in fact, but perhaps there was more to it. Undeath. Shiver. I believe you to be a ghoul - the sort of undeath that consumed, perhaps a better word would be cannibalized, their own soul in the process of resurrection. You were perhaps… already undeath before shell-shock takes you even further.”

“How so?”

“Sometimes, it takes nothing to begin the state of undeath. The soul is, in essence, a will to be animated after all. It can be eroded or shattered. By one great sorrow… or perhaps the cumulation of the same sadness, day after day.”

Which one was it?

None. You just always had it. There was just no more reason to it. There was nothing to be sad about. Everything is right within the world. You were just a piece of shit. That is who you are.

Both. One thing after another. A long line of mistakes. There was some point, before us, before time, where this creature could have called itself as *happy*. It doesn’t remember why. It shouldn’t. That moment is treasured. It should be for him to have. This thing here, it deserved none of it. It failed. It failed.

“Well. Shit. I was hoping for a more, you know, fun, happy-go-lucky sort of story.”

The doctor smiles. It was an understanding smile.

“It will be better.”

I, meanwhile, laughed my fucking ass off.

“I am at my worst. Fucking… yeah. It can’t get worse than this. So naturally, there’s nowhere to go but up from here, isn’t it? What is your verdict, doc?”

“You seemed to be…” she said, with a worried voice. “You are not in shellshock. No, it is something else. You should be back home, or wherever else than here. But I can’t discharge you. I’m sorry. I could try. But I know it wouldn’t work. If you asked to go back, the others will, too. And then, what will happen when it is allowed to reach the front line? That is what the commanders fear. For such *flight of cowardice* to reach the soldiers, too. Give me a few days, and I will see if I can fix your paperwork, and I could prescribe you things that would make you feel alive again.”

She is afraid that you might off yourself otherwise. And that would be on her conscience.

Heh, as if that option is even allowed in the first place. We. We are immortal.

“Nah. That’s fine, doc. I don’t care about feeling alive. I just wanted to know if… can I say my version of events, now?”

The doctor looks puzzled but doesn’t seem to be objecting.

“Yeah. Though, you could stop me at any time, since I am going to sound very… deranged. I think… I am… I was…”

A universe away.

“Not really here, is it? This is why I have these… voices. They would have to tell me how to feel. What to know. As if I am an observer to my own life. Controlling it at a step removed.”

The woman remains silent. She was not surprised.

“I don’t want to sound dismissive… but all of… THIS. This is not real. It must not be.”

You open your arms wide, wider. As if you could encompass the entire world with them.

“We were privileged. I was lucky to have my ticket to escape it. The war, the famine, the whole debacle of civilization collapsing under its own weight. And yet, I - we, felt so unfulfilled by the lack of it that we’d have to invent entire worlds to bring our little conflict to. I think this world is one of them. I think this, all this is meant to be fun. You know, like a board game. A simulation of suffering, reduced to movements between a grid.”

I shrug.

“I suppose it is tempting. I’ve lived a thousand life, none of which you could say is entirely meaningful, just a moment in time repeated again and again and again until it could turn out the way that I wanted. A world where I do not fail. Because you know what?”

You wanted it to be real. You wanted it so bad. Anything but waking up. Anything.

I had to stifle my humor in realizing it.

The humor of this whole thing?

“Yes. It is funny. Because if I only have one chance. One chance! I would have squandered it. I’ve never been able to succeed at anything on the first go. It is the thirteenth. The sixtieth. Sometimes, the hundredth. But never the first. Or the second. Or the tenth. Now that the fun of it all is over, what do I do now? Return?”

That hypothetical return. How does it go? What would it say to that listless body, lying in a bed that is also its grave, dreaming up a fantasy that would also be its release from a life that it did not want to live? Aint that just death, with another name? Would it be then the desecration of a corpse? There is nothing good within that oversized metal prison. That future that they charted up has been bogus from the start. There was no plan to succeed. Or perhaps, then, it wanted to return back to where it all started?

“I remember looking at it, in the sky. That round, ugly blue mug of an oversized rock, abandoned. The moon above it, shattered with tungsten rods and the cities that were crushed underneath them. And then, there was a red planet. That sweet, sweet red sky that I loved, torn asunder by a baleful glow of lightning between the radioactive winter clouds. It's home. I am glad to be away from home.”

Your skin aches just from remembering it, how it was said that the glow of it alone could have stripped flesh from your bone. How the hair on the back of your neck raised with every thunderstrike. And yet, your breathing is calm, calmer with every breath. Your heart is dull. That fright you felt cooled into a nonchalant, uncaring attitude with each passing day. No amount of fear, no promise of terrible pain would have stopped it. It has become… just another fact of life. No amount of survival instinct could have done anything about it, so… the body give up caring, in the end.

They have run out of advanced ways to kill each other, their tech destroyed and reduced to lesser and lesser means with each passing conflict… and so the oblivious option is to resort to a more crude, tried, and true method of radioactive destruction. The traditional sort of mutually assured destruction. It succeeded.

“An entire star system. Imagine it, the entire span of light of a sun, filled with trash and ruins so fucking much that, if we wait any longer, space flight would be impossible. Our ship, their solar sails, would be punctured before we could even exit the edge of the system. There was a sense of haste in leaving among people my age. We were afraid of living like this. Our parents stay. They found nothing wrong with it. We were called cowards, and I called them cowards, too, because that is what they are. I fashioned myself as a dreamer, instead. But it is true. What we are doing is just running away, staying or leaving.”

And luck blessed them again - they did it. They escaped. Only to begin another long line of mistakes. Our mistakes.

“There was no plan to succeed. I knew that yet hoped differently. We couldn’t even wait til we reaches our destination to desecrate it. We just do it on our only lifeline. We were not only content with abusing machines, we uplifted them so we could save the effort of thinking about what we wanted them to do. Because after all, we were… we were. What is the… how did we call ourselves? Kin? No…”

True names have no meaning. They are just titles. Recognition is their worth. And they…

“Oh…” I could feel the tears rising from the corner of my eyes, but the feeling lingers only for a moment. “They are extinct. I am… extinct.”

So there is no more word to describe them anymore. No one would have recognized it. To be something that is less than an object.

“What am I, now?”

“You are a living, breathing person.” the doctor reaches for a pat on my back. “Hey. It isn’t so bad. I don’t know what book you’ve read… what pessimist view they might have of the war… we are doing better. The war is ending, isn’t it? There is an armistice coming, I’ve heard.”

She raised me up. I took a deeper breath. Was all that I dreamed of, all that I could remember, interposing between this world and the next, merely illusions?

“I don’t know, doc. I couldn’t separate my memories of what this was or will become. I feel like it will never end. One minute I am a slave to the war machine, another I am a slave for greed, pleasure, and the rich. If the war ends, what will I do? I don’t want to return to normal life. I don’t like it. Even if the money will make me rich, what good will I do with them but squander it away, or hoard them like a dragon?”

“You can do better for the world. Charity is a well-honored tradition.”

“That, doc, is one of the biggest scams I could think of. There is no way my money could change anything. Even if I am richer than you. I will not be richer than those at the top of it. They will make more beggar than my money could help.”

“But those that did got the help they needed… wouldn’t it be better than none? Isn’t that what it is all about? A momentary relief?”

She handed me a box. I opened it. Small, brown pill-shaped containers shuffle around in it as I open the lid.

Smoke pills. A small high.

“I don’t smoke, doc.”

“There are stress relief compounds in there. Not enough to make you an addict, as long as you are careful with its usage. Once a day.”

“I thought I would need to fix my paperwork too?”

“They are my personal batch, for my own use. I have frights, too.” She shrugs. “I could get more, once the fighting died down. It won’t be long, I hope.”

“Thank you, doc.” I handed her back the box. “But I think I can handle it on my own, now. Have you got what you needed for your research on Shiver?”

“Yes. I have an inkling of something, but that can wait. It's late. Here.”

She threw me some cans of dry fried rice and mashed beans.

“You can’t get meals at this hour. Don’t want you to starve.”

“Heh. I can manage. Besides, I have an inkling that the lieu-”

Suddenly, from behind us, the curtain blew open in a dramatic fashion, showing the lieutenant, his hands carried proudly a pot of soup.

“WHO WANT DINNER!!!?”

“Uh, speak of the devils.” I shook my head. “Alright, dinner time I suppose.”