The following is a pseudo sequel to Misjump. This story did/does not happen ingame. Just Passing Through
I'm floating in my chaotic serenity, closing my eyes, waiting for it. My frigate didn't last long, and I can feel the excitement tickle every nerve ending across my body as I know what comes next. The sudden rush of inertia as my ovular prison is ejected into space hits me, and for a moment... I feel fear. I know what I'm doing, why I'm here... but I don't want it.
The body is programmed to fear death, they say. Something about the way we're hardwired up in the attic that makes us realize the end of our life is naturally a bad thing. After all our training, it's still something most of us can scarcely deal with. I know friends who go a little more stir crazy every time it happens. It's the little things you notice in them too. A twitch of the hand, or shiver of the eye. You know something deep down in them got seriously fucked up, and it only gets worse.
Adrenaline floods my brain as the capsule tries to warn me of an active lock. I don't bother warping out.
Yellow box.
Red box.
Suddenly, I feel cold. For an instant, everything in the world is terrible, then everything in the world is nothing. Nothing becomes everything. Logic, language, emotion, humanity, reality... it all becomes a jumbled mess of vague feelings. It's as if everything that ever made any sense to me becomes as colors are to the blind. Then I feel it, like a glowing warmth. I can't figure out if it's around me or within me. I can't figure out where it is... but I recognize the feeling.
I know that feeling. I try as hard as I can to stay there... to stay in between. I want to know so badly, I need to know. Like weights around my ankles, I can feel reality pulling me back.
I can taste my own tongue. It tastes weird. I hate new clones. The muffled voices start to take shape... they start to make sense. Noises become patterns, patterns become words, words become speech. Flashes of color and light make sense to me now as vision, and as I begin to grow weary of the whole world shaking around me and that dreadful sound... I realize it's me. I'm convulsing and screaming so hard I choke on the lack of air. Welcome back to the living, they say.
I didn't want to come back.
See, you mistake me now... you think I'm suicidal. No, I'm not suicidal. Well, technically I am I suppose. I am getting myself killed, but it's for a reason. It's not that I want to die, and it isn't so much that I don't want to come back. It's for that split moment, where the world becomes something I've left behind. It's that very place the rest of you refuse to acknowledge exists. There's something in between, you see... between one life and the next. If you told me it's Heaven, I'd laugh until I cry. It's not Heaven or Hell. I wish I could explain it to you, but it's something that our languages just don't have the words for. You think I'm crazy, but did you really think there is absolutely nothing in between?
I'm going back.
She's out there still. She's alive. For those precious moments of non-existence where I become little more than an idea, I can feel her.
I wonder if she knows who I am. I wonder if she feels the same way I do out there. Maybe she's become something else entirely. Maybe every time I cross that bridge, I leave a part of me behind to stay with her. I think I would like that. I think she would like that.
So as I clear the docking rings again in this pitiful eggshell of a starship, I know what I have to do. She wouldn't want me to stop trying. She wouldn't want to be stuck out there alone.
So I'll keep looking in the space between spaces.
When they ask me why I do it, why I go there every time... I know what I'll say.
I'll tell them, "I'm just passing through."
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