Death Stranding--Death Stranding

by Hitori Nojima

  Peter’s foster father eventually told him about the world that lay beyond their door. About how it was a dangerous world dominated by timefall and monsters, and one in which people must never venture outside. Peter’s mother’s death must have added to the man’s paranoia. Never mind going outside, Peter was hysterically warned against even letting in the breeze. The man had to raise the baby he had been entrusted with by his sister to adulthood somehow.

  The man’s sense of duty and love manifested itself as the violence against Peter, but eventually that lost its original purpose and became nothing more than a daily habit. The man used to hit Peter just in case he ever even thought about venturing outside That was his way of showing love and protecting him. But Peter felt like he was dying, cramped up as he was. He may have seemed fine on the outside, but he felt like he was dying inside.

  That’s why he hatched a plan to escape the shelter. He prepared little by little, whenever his father wasn’t looking. But he was discovered and his father launched into a rage and attacked him. Tables and shelves were overturned and the atmosphere inside the shelter reached breaking point.

  Peter’s foster father had held him down and shouted at him about how he could never understand the man’s feelings. Peter’s field of vision grew narrower. It became more and more difficult to take his next breath. The man was wringing his neck.

  As Peter struggled frantically, he grabbed for a knife that had fallen to the floor and plunged it into his foster father’s neck.

  The strength faded out of the man’s hands and his body slumped to the floor.

  All Peter could see above him was the gloomy ceiling of the shelter once more.

  Unable to process what he had done, Peter spent an entire night with that body in the shelter, but he had to get rid of it sometime.

  Ever since he had first told Peter of the world outside their door, his father had also been careful to fully inform him of the terror of necrosis and the BTs. Peter knew that if he didn’t get rid of the body, his father would come back and cause a voidout.

  The body had already begun to give off a pungent odor. But there was no place or any way to burn it. All Peter could do was take it somewhere far away, so he dragged the body out of the shelter and got his first taste of the outside world.

  What he saw was patches of jagged rocks and short grass as far as the eye could see. The mountaintops in the distance were hidden by chiral clouds. Peter was in awe of this spectacle he was seeing for the first time, but getting the body away from here had to take precedent.

  But as he dragged the body away, he didn’t notice the fog of black particles emanating from the corpse. It had already begun to necrotize. Time had run out. All Peter could do was dump the body and run. Then he had a vision. Both hands that had a hold of the body disintegrated into a mist. Simultaneously, he felt the presence of a BT, attracted to the body from the other side. Ever since then Peter had been able to sense BTs, and that had given him the ability to work alone as a porter for so many years.

  The necrotizing body had given him power, and whenever he had felt that power waning, he killed in secret. That was how he had managed to survive all alone.

  AMELIE’S BEACH

  Higgs raised his head and looked for Fragile, but she was long gone.

  He was all alone. The golden mask, Amelie’s quipu, and the human-shaped BB no longer belonged to him. He had lost everything. There was nothing left. There wasn’t even anything left of his power he had intended to use to bring the extinction. He had believed that he was in control of everything, but he had been stupid. It had all been make believe.

  He finally understood.

  Now he was all alone on this Beach and there was no one to hear his mutterings.

  I’m Higgs, the particle of God.

  He was all alone, isolated without a person in the world to connect to.

  This is how I’m supposed to be.

  Peter Englert had been forsaken on this Beach with nothing else to do but continue to confess his endless sins.

  HEARTMAN’S LAB

  Heartman could hear the tune of the Funeral March. He had to get back to his body soon. The passage of time on the Beach was without end and as close to zero as you could get, but there was still a time limit. Humans perceive the passage of time not as the changing of events along a timeline, but as the switching of phases. Each individual event is not washed away by time to disappear, they remain intact as a perceived phase. That’s what we call the past. The future is an as-of-yet unperceived event and humans, bound by time as they are, can only perceive one of a myriad of alternatives.

  While Heartman’s ha was bound by the laws of the world of the living, he was unable to search the Beach indefinitely. Choosing a song that mourned the dead as his signal to return to the realm of the living and wake up was Heartman’s own little act of quiet resistance.

  The Funeral March should have sounded the same as always, but this time it sounded different. It was hurting his ears. The sounds were overlapping. Perhaps, if he hadn’t been listening so attentively, he would never even have noticed. It was the same tune, but there was a slight delay. It felt like listening to an optical illusion. Once one tune had seized all of Heartman’s attention that was all he could hear, but when he disengaged his focus he could detect something very slightly out of synch. The realization affected his sight. The world around him that he perceived visually felt similarly layered, with a single layer slightly out of alignment. It was the first time he had felt anything like it.

  Although, logically, infinite layers of parallel phases selectively unacknowledged had to exist.

  Have I augmented my abilities? Heartman wondered, feeling a spark of excitement.

  He looked out across the Beach as the limit of his stay approached. It looked different than before. The shoreline that stretched eternally into the distance was being followed by countless numbers of people. Each and every one of them was existing simultaneously within phases out of alignment with one another.

  What’s going on? His brain was on fire. It didn’t matter that his heart had stopped, it was ringing like an alarm bell. Huge droplets of sweat merged with his tears, dampening his face. It was like the very limits of his consciousness were trying to break.

  “Wait!” he shouted. For a split second, he thought he could see his wife and daughter’s backs among the crowd.

  “Wait! Don’t go! Don’t leave me by myself.”

  It was just like a repeat of what happened before. As the realization first flashed across his mind, that old woman appeared and jabbed her finger into his chest. Multiple people grabbed at his legs. Heartman was being dragged down from the Beach.

  When he awoke, the lab was empty. His image of the world was stable and clear, maintained in a single phase. Heartman turned toward the monitor to check his Beach logs. Now he understood. The entire Chiral Network had been connected. Sam had done it.

  He had connected all the knots from east to west.

  It was possible that this phenomenon that Heartman interpreted as phase misalignment was occurring on every Beach. He could perceive the potential phases from before choices were made and events were determined. It was like all cause and effect was being disassembled. Without the reintegration of this world using some kind of meta-level law, this world could become engulfed in a wave of potential worlds. It meant that while this world would exist, it would also disappear.

  AMELIE’S BEACH

  The sound of a gunshot echoed in the distance.

  Perhaps Fragile had finally achieved her goal. Maybe she had finally got her revenge on Higgs. With any luck, maybe she had even managed to lay her past mistakes to rest alongside him.

  “Come on, let’s go. We still have work to do,” Amelie said without the slightest hint of cheer in her voice. Sam should have had so many questions, but he couldn’t put anything into words. He was fine with that, though. It was enough that he was able to see Amelie again—in the flesh, not as a hologram or in his d
reams—and nothing else mattered. That said, seeing her again after all this time, all these decades, stirred up its own strong emotions within him. Amelie had to know what Sam was feeling, yet she silently began to walk away. All Sam could think of was to keep chasing after her.

  “Do you still believe in me?” Amelie asked.

  Wasn’t it too late for that now? Surely it was more a question of whether he could believe in her. Whether he had no choice but to believe in her.

  “It’s true. I am extinction,” Amelie admitted.

  But that wasn’t what Sam needed to know. He wanted to ask her if she was a living human being. The image that Sam couldn’t get out of his head was her with an umbilical cord coming out of her body like those dinosaurs and ammonites in Heartman’s lab, connecting her to the world of the dead.

  “Did Bridget know?” Sam blurted out.

  Had she known about all this when she had begun involving people in her plan to rebuild America?

  “I can end it all, just like that. But what I want—what I have always wanted—was to be a part of it. For us all to be one,” she replied.

  Sam didn’t understand. America had been destroyed by the Death Stranding. And Bridget had dedicated her life to rebuilding it. But if Amelie was an Extinction Entity, then by giving birth to her, Bridget was responsible for why the world had collapsed in the first place.

  It was like Ouroboros, the snake that ate its own tail.

  “Maybe you don’t believe me, but once we get back east, I’ll tell you everything. If we don’t let everyone in the Knot Cities and all of the preppers know that America is restored, then Bridget’s plan will never come to fruition. At least let me see to that. I know you have questions, but let’s save them for later.”

  Sam nodded silently.

  “Let’s go home.” Amelie smiled for the first time and began to walk along the shoreline again. It seemed to stretch on forever. It looked like it stretched out even farther than the horizon. Sam wondered if this was the same Beach that he used to play on with Amelie. Or was this the Beach they had completed by connecting all the knots?

  Amelie didn’t look back toward Sam once, and simply continued to walk along the shoreline. All Sam could do was follow silently.

  I don’t want to go home.

  Why had he cried so much when he was a kid?

  Had he really wanted to stay on that Beach, where there was no one else but just the two of them? Like a baby crying and screaming in fear of being born?

  Amelie suddenly stopped in her tracks.

  A figure was standing next to the shoreline up ahead. They were too far away for Sam to make out any details, but he could tell that it was a well-built man. Amelie looked back toward Sam. She had a faint smile on her face but seemed nervous for some reason.

  “Wait here. Okay?” she asked as she left, in the same tone she used to use when he was a kid.

  A wave lapped at the shore. But it didn’t pull back out. It remained in place. It had already engulfed Sam’s foot and he soon found that he couldn’t move. It was the same move that Higgs had pulled on him in the sea of tar.

  Sam could see a delicate red silhouette next to the man.

  DIE-HARDMAN

  “So you finally invited me to the Beach,” Die-Hardman said, pointing his gun at the woman. “Remember this?”

  Die-Hardman didn’t think she would answer. All he could hear was the sound of the waves.

  “It’s that gun,” the woman in red said, squinting as if bright light was coming out of its barrel.

  “And now I’m using it to make things right,” Die-Hardman spat. “You were supposed to make the world whole—not fuck it all up.”

  The barrel of the gun was trembling slightly. Die-Hardman was surprised at how pathetic he was being. Was he scared? He repositioned himself to try to hide the shaking from her. If he took one step closer the end of the gun would be digging into the woman’s delicate chest.

  The woman smiled and grabbed the barrel of the gun, pulling it toward her. Despite her small frame, she was so strong that Die-Hardman couldn’t stop her. It was just like before.

  “Okay then. Get on with it,” she told him.

  Die-Hardman didn’t even have to think about it. He pulled the trigger and released his bullet. But she couldn’t be killed.

  “There is no atonement. Not for us,” she explained. The bullet pierced Bridget Strand’s chest without leaving a single mark.

  How do you kill someone who’s already dead? A heavy sense of defeat weighed down Die-Hardman’s right hand, drawing the barrel of the gun toward the floor.

  Die-Hardman couldn’t tell if Bridget was smiling or crying, but he was sure he was making the same expression. If he was so determined to make Bridget pay for her sins, then he would have to face the same condemnation.

  He had been the one to follow her and betray her, only to go and swear allegiance to her all over again afterward.

  Bridget suddenly looked out to sea, her gaze landing on a swell on the ocean’s surface.

  Something was parting the water in two and emerging from underneath. If this was the Beach, that made that sea the domain of the past and the dead. But even if the past that Die-Hardman had cast away were to resurface, it made some kind of sense to him. It would be strange, but it wouldn’t be inexplicable.

  Four soldiers emerged, equipped with scratched-up helmets and clad in dripping wet army uniforms. They were soldiers from the US Army of a previous century. There was no flesh beneath those clothes. The skeletal soldiers were advancing, bones creaking and clacking together underneath their uniforms.

  The sea breeze brought the stench of blood, mud, and gunpowder smoke. It was a smell that Die-Hardman knew well. Whenever he was surrounded by it there was only ever one thing on his mind.

  I must survive.

  He pointed his gun at the soldiers, but his finger lay paralyzed on the trigger. It looked like he wouldn’t be able to kill what was already dead after all.

  The four soldiers were a foreshadowing. Their presence indicated that the past was about to strand itself. An umbilical cord stretched out of each soldier’s abdomen, sinking down behind them into the ocean depths below.

  Those cords dredged up the past and beached it. The soldiers suddenly had skin, eyes, mouths, noses… Features that had been brought back to life with their malevolence and solemnity.

  Die-Hardman knew that he mustn’t look. He didn’t want to see it. Yet he couldn’t take his eyes off that past, either.

  A man gently lifted his hands. As the umbilical cords attached to the soldiers detached, they spread out and surrounded him. His helmet burned away, exposing his real face.

  As soon as Die-Hardman realized who it was, he dropped his weapon. Unable to support his own body weight, he fell to his knees.

  The man came ashore. As Die-Hardman hung his head, all he could hear was the crunching of the sand beneath the man’s feet. He felt a hand on his face. Like the hand of someone checking a dead body. His mask was removed.

  Die-Hardman couldn’t peel his eyes away from the man’s face.

  The man let out a sigh and a groan of what sounded like anguish. Die-Hardman couldn’t tell what he was trying to say. The man was looking at Die-Hardman’s exposed face with eyes that seemed unable to focus.

  “You…” The man started to string a sentence together. The man seemed to be groping around desperately for information in the depths of his memory. Die-Hardman knew who he was, though. This was the man who had spirited Sam away to an eternal battlefield twice now.

  “Yes, it’s me. John. Remember?” Die-Hardman urged. He pieced the rest of the parts together for the man. “Your Die-Hardman.”

  There, he said it. Suddenly, he was gripped by a welling fear. He couldn’t stop shaking. His throat felt dry and like a fish abandoned on land, he was desperately trying to fill his lungs with air. He was covered in sweat. Something cold and hard dug into the back of his head.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,�
� Die-Hardman pleaded.

  The gun and his fear weighed down on him so much that he couldn’t even lift his own face.

  “BB,” the man said. “Give me back my BB.”

  I’m sorry. I did the best I could. But I couldn’t choose. Die-Hardman heard the safety switch come off. I’m going to die here, all because I didn’t choose.

  Die-Hardman closed his eyes tight. But no matter how long he waited, his retribution never came. The back of his head felt lighter.

  “This isn’t what we agreed on. Give me back my BB.”

  But the man’s voice was no longer directed toward Die-Hardman. It was directed at someone else.

  “You’re looking in the wrong place,” she said.

  Die-Hardman heard her voice. It was an icy voice that cut like a blade with no hint of indecision or hesitation.

  * * *

  All Sam could do as he watched the scene unfold in front of him was stand there in silence.

  To him, it was like a silent pantomime. There was the man in the mask, the five soldiers, and the woman in red. Sam could guess that the men were Die-Hardman and Cliff and his men. And the woman must have been Amelie. She had probably guessed that something was going on and had immobilized him here.

  But even if he could tell who the actors were, he had no idea what the story might be about.

  Why did Die-Hardman shoot Amelie? Had that really happened? Sam wasn’t so sure anymore. Why was Die-Hardman kneeling in front of Cliff? And why was Cliff’s gun pointed at Amelie instead? He didn’t understand what they were doing. It was like he was watching a nonsensical play that didn’t fit together.

  Cliff was still pointing the gun at Amelie when his attention seemed to snap Sam’s way. He couldn’t see the expression on Cliff’s face from such a distance. but he felt like it had pierced straight through him.