Hard choice - Part 1
The God of Death, Za, stretches herself out before standing up. Finally, it’s Friday!!! She didn’t like it, but she also knew her purpose. For more than the last sixty centuries she has been helping the souls of her most loved beings settle in their new home. Obviously, she didn’t have to do it herself. She could instantaneously conjure into existence as many helpers, but she enjoyed doing it. It’s an art… to bring the soul to realize he or she was not living anymore and being as gentle about it as possible… She realized that in those moments, the soul is fragile like a newborn baby… all these “helpers” … she rolled her eyes as she thought about them …dumb as a box of hammers… ugh… She was tired of reading reports about souls “losing their shit!” when a helper just “appeared” in front of the soul and started dragging it. That would pretty much deny that soul of that one chance to gracefully leave the realm of living. Poor sobs would then have to spend an eternity roaming those lands as ghosts before they get a second chance… “Losing their shit”!!! … who the fuck even writes a report like that !!! these helpers don’t even know how to write forget about how to deal with humans… who wouldn’t “lose their shit” if a floating figure with a scythe and a skull for a head just appeared in front of them out of the blue! It’s been a while they’ve had their training refreshers… I need to talk to the training department once I come back.
She inspects herself to make sure she is dressed properly. Last weekend Za had to dress as this girl who was part of a team competing in a hardcore white water canoeing championship. She had to convince a teammate to take a certain bend so that this person would fall down and meet a quick and clean end. If she didn’t do it, she knew, this person would die a terrible death a few minutes further from that bend. Now, with the war that is just dragging on, it had been a crazy week and she hadn’t gotten a chance to even revert to its original form. No, this wouldn’t work… I need to look like another soldier on the frontline. She picks a small device on which she projects various projections that come to her mind and the device shows different numbers related to trustworthiness, likeability, forgetfulness, etc. Finally, she lands on one and inspects it one last time from all sides. This should do quite well... Justin… Sanders… I like the sound of that...
The smell of dirt and gunpowder instantly hits his nostrils, and he feels the extra weight of his weapon and gear materializing around him. Well… quite far from the featherlight sportswear I have been in all this week…. This… I’ll have to get out of as soon as I am back… As he starts walking towards the Stradurj, he hears one of his deputies announce somewhere in the background, “Sire has chosen a most appropriate look as usual” Yea… keep up with the buttering… but you are not going anywhere unless you work as hard as you talk… A row of elite guard steps aside as he approaches the object and forms back up behind him.
Approaching the Stradurj always makes him feel a bit giddy. He knows he is approaching himself. Maybe a much truer and ancient form than his current self. One that exists in many higher dimensions at the same time. Yet viewing it as a separate object just feels weird. Like a head watching its headless body. It’s a spherical volume roughly the size of a human being. Its surface shimmers like the surface of an oil bubble. One could make out recognizable shapes if one looked closely. Light from higher dimensions reaching its surface and reducing itself to photons in current reality – the concept of distance travelled in higher dimensions manifesting itself to how redshifted the light appears. He feels the surface of this big spherical object in front of him. The air close to the surface is warm, even though the surface is cold to touch. It’s a weird feeling. Like touching the surface of a liquid… He can feel the surface, but he can also put his hand inside it. Well not really putting it inside… more like merging with it… like a drop of water coalescing with another… but in this case it’s me … coalescing with myself… he knew how it works, but he also knew having his primitive human brain fully understand this is quite impossible. He tried to suppress the sudden surge of panic he felt as he realized his hand vanish and dematerialize under the surface… Humans…
He knew what to do – He had done it millions of times. As he stepped into this spherical volume, he found himself in a dimension that was, is and will be, vast and infinite – all at once! Past, present, and future overlapping and constantly slipping behind each other. His human understanding of where, when, and how much lost their meaning. He could observe events at the scale of the universe when at the same time as he was aware of particle interactions at the quantum scale. He keenly became aware of every emotion that anything could have in the infinite volume in spacetime this higher dimensional object occupied. He felt happy, sad, cried, yelled, died, was born, was cut, burned, cared for, felt hungry, felt full, slept, woke up and another infinitude of emotions and experiences - all in the same instant. It felt like being under a waterfall of experiences. Yet, he found himself adrift – not in the direction of space, but towards a singular thought. Given the chaos its human body was experiencing every moment, it took him a while to realize this. Za knew his human form was going to have a hard time, but he also knew that he had to guide himself only by focusing his will. …it’s like breaking a horse… every time… sigh…
After a lesson in being completely lost in time, scale and space, Justin emerged on the other side. Hold it… Hold it… ah... fuck… He vomited. There was no way for the device to tell Za how any form it chose would fare a journey through the Stradurj. As he straightened, he looked around himself and found he still had it and felt pride. This was a room in a basement. Guiding oneself through higher dimensions while in human form was a challenge to say the least. He looked outside the window and saw his targets. A unit of men firing from behind a wall of sandbags. Time for work… He checked himself once more and stepped out.
Subscribe to be notified when the next story comes out.