Chapter Text
Lumina was having a moment of indecision. Or maybe it would be more accurate to refer to it as a moral quandary? She didn’t think she was particularly moral or immoral, but she was currently considering killing a man. Which, all things considered, on the morality scale tended to dip way down into immoral, but on the other hand…
This man was going to die anyway.
And if he didn’t die now, then he would continue to suffer. Horribly. In no uncertain terms. Like, in an objectively, egregiously horrible manner.
Because, howling and raving and shaking below her vantage point crouched atop a fallen tree wedged into the roots of other trees overlooking a small slope, she could tell that this man had rabies. She placed her chin in her hands, elbows resting on her knees as she crouched, and gave a long dispirited sigh.
The man below her merely quivered, entirely unaware of her existence.
It’s the hydrophobia that really cements it, she thought with a frown and a detached frame of mind.
His body desperately needed water but each time he got close enough to the puddle left over from the rains a day ago in an attempt to actually drink it, he was unable to follow through and violently shuddered away from it. Because that was what rabies did. It took over the portion of the central nervous system that controls swallowing, speaking, breathing. The howling wasn’t because he was raving, it was because the virus caused violent spasms in the throat and larynx. Even thinking about drinking water could trigger a response.
Feeling very much like Atropos, one of the three goddesses of fate in Greek mythology, she watched over him, expressionlessly, poised to consider his thread of life, scissors hovering mere millimeters away. Ah, maybe that was a little dramatic, but…
Really, she didn’t like having to make this judgment at all. It would be a lot easier to just walk away and do nothing. Rabies was a terrible virus, and she was absolutely and utterly terrified of disease in this world without modern medicine.
…To be fair, she had been terrified of disease back in the old world even with modern medicine.
But regardless, it was a terror she felt significantly more vindicated about here, in this new world.
To be even more fair, however, rabies only spread through the salvatory glands and not so much through human-to-human contact, so long as he didn’t spit in her eye or some other mucus membrane or something, she’d probably be fine? Rabies victims weren’t zombies. After the challenge of making clothing from tanned animal skin, one of the first things she decided to make for herself was a pair of gloves. Because everything was Gross. There were a lot of things that she knew logically, factually, and intellectually weren’t Actually Gross but still made her Feel Gross anyway. Her stitching was pretty much abysmal garbage, and she had to force herself to accept she was simply bad at sewing, but having gloves, tall boots, a comfortable but simple dress and underclothes to protect her from the vast Grossness of the world was important to her.
Anyway, the gloves would probably be fine.
Experimentally, she tried to bite her flesh through the long elbow length gloves.
Yeah okay. It was fine.
…Probably.
….She rubbed her own saliva off her gloves, too. Because, well, Gross.
As she’d already thought before, it wasn’t like there were any documented cases of human-to-human transmission via bite wounds, but was sound rationality supported by evidence and facts going to stop her disease-fearing anxious self? No!
Moving on.
She was disturbingly confident in her ability to kill a man should she need to. The human body was somehow both so, so very fragile and so, so very resilient. But right now? With that man practically insensate to the world it would be very easy for a small and skinny girl like her to extinguish his life. His back was turned to her, he was on his knees, it would then be so easy to take him by surprise. She had a knife and it really would be a simple matter to thrust it into his throat and sever the carotid artery with grim precision. He’d bleed out in twenty minutes, tops, true assassination style. Bet on it.
Lumina recognized she was beginning to disassociate a bit, viewing herself and situation from the outside as if she were someone else. She acknowledged that she knew in her bones, breath, and spirit that she could kill a man. She knew this to be clear and true.
She could kill a man.
If she had to.
She just wasn’t so sure she could kill an innocent man, however.
But walking away and doing nothing was also a choice. Choosing to do nothing here would be choosing to let this guy suffer and she didn’t like that any better. His brain would continue to swell against his skull wracked with encephalitis, burning with fever, causing confusion and seizures and a glut of truly nasty stuff all while his body desperately needed water but the virus denied it, unfeeling and merciless. Then he’d slip into a coma, experience some kind of organ failure, and die.
Awful way to go, really.
Honestly, this situation sucked for everyone involved. He couldn’t consent to end of life care, she couldn’t provide palliative care where he could be surrounded by family and friends and be comfortable before his end, and she’d have to murder him because she was presently leaning towards that direction since it felt marginally, by the smallest of horrific increments, more kind? And?? It would?? Be murder. There was no consent here? He probably didn’t even have cognizance of where or who or what or anything?
But who knew! Just maybe he’d be like one of the twenty-nine documented cases of someone who got rabies, experienced the full onset of symptoms, and recovered naturally on their own! Twenty-nine out of… ehhhhh, 59,000 deaths per year (back when there was a human population), so like, not great odds, but still better than zero percent.
Instead, it’s just zero point zero zero something-something percent. So an infinitesimally small chance.
She sighed dismally into her hand.
“What am I going to do with you?” she murmured softly, eyelashes fluttering sorrowfully.
Her mind drifted.
Finding another person in this stone world really should be more shocking, but it wasn’t. He wasn’t the first person she’d come across. Probably wouldn’t be the last either. She’d found very minute, almost imperceptible traces of people as she’d made her journey down to southern Japan from the north. A few footpaths that had now become overgrown, a decrepit bridge over a tiny creek consisting of three sturdy logs lashed together with decaying fibers. Simple things that were old, dilapidated, and would leave no physical evidence in a handful of years, but were also unquestionably made by human hands. She didn’t know how long she’d been encased in stone, but if it was enough time for giant trees to pop up all around them and for the land to irrevocably alter, then it’s probably been like a million years, but really, who knew? Anyway, for these small traces of humanity to exist there had to have been people who woke up from the stone before her.
Wherever and whatever happened to those people now that their works had fallen into disuse, well… it wasn’t entirely too hard to guess.
She enjoyed the exploration of this new world with a freedom and buoyancy of spirit she never had in the old one. Gone entirely were days of people-related psychologically-entrenched trauma and paranoia! How awesome was that? She didn’t have to worry about anyone! She made her own schedule, she didn’t have to worry about crowds or stares, and she didn’t have to figure out how to interact socially with people her own age after missing almost eight entire years of school! It was just one good thing after another!
She did sorely miss her computer, however.
Despite that, she took to her new life with an inexpressible joy. Sure, it was dangerous and frustrating and she’d nearly died twice already, but she was able to hike mountains, follow rivers, and explore wherever she wanted. The wind in her hair, the stars above her head, her spirit bright and untethered. Her goal was simply to head south. In the back of her mind she sometimes wondered if she would even recognize home when she crossed it or see people she knew trapped in the stone, but always eventually let the thoughts pass by without examination.
And then she started finding the first few skeletons.
They weren’t ancient, but they were old. She usually found them singular and alone, but a few times she’s seen two skeletons at once in close proximity to each other, so they had probably died together. A man and a woman here, a woman and a child there. It was a little sad but also infinitely fascinating trying to put together how these people had lived and died before she’d come upon them.
Still very sad though. None of them had been very old in terms of lived age. She could tell based on how fused some of the bones were. Human bones ossified with age, with some portions only fusing around certain points in development. Being able to tell if someone was in their mid-thirties or if they were younger than her when they died made her feel…
…Unpleasant? Hm, no, that wasn’t quite it. Sad? Well, yes, but also…
Melancholic? That was closer and more specific.
Ah…
Oh. Okay. She got it now.
Lumina was experiencing loss. Grief. Sorrow.
Loss of a future snuffed out in an instant, both hers and a billion others. Loss of everyone she knew and a world she had known. Loss of dreams, of expectations, of a tangible, knowable place in the world. She hadn’t exactly made a place for herself in the old world, but she’d been getting better, and the potential had been there…
She recognized she didn’t exactly feel lonely or isolated living on her own in the wilds like she probably should, although she hadn’t exactly expected to. However, experiencing existential, soul-aching grief and loss triggered by dead people she didn’t know was different and also wasn’t quite something she was willing to fully unpack any time soon. That was a problem for future-Lumina to deal with. She’d compartmentalize and stuff it in the feelings box for now. Given her past experiences, she wasn’t exactly surprised at her psychological state being what it was. After all, she had lived th–ah. No. Choose a different thought, brain. Psychologically, she was simply just–no, that’s still an intrusive thought. Choose again, and choose better.
…
Whenever she found the lost, lonely remains of Those Before she would dig shallow graves and arrange their bones properly before burying them. It felt like the right thing to do. She wasn’t religious and didn’t know any prayers, but laying those skeletons to rest beneath the earth and building cairns to mark their passing simply felt fundamentally, intrinsically, and instinctually right. She couldn’t always find all the bones. Animals or time among the elements had taken them away, hidden from the world forever. In those cases, she did her best to find as many of the bones as she could before burial.
Skeletons didn’t really scare her. Getting sick and catching disease in this world without modern medicine terrified her. Skeletons? Not so much. And what truly interested her, the life passion that electrified her blood and made her heart pound against her chest like a violent prisoner fighting to escape, was figuring out how people died. It was profoundly fascinating, edifying, and, as a weird gremlin friend of hers sometimes liked to say, exhilarating. Even more exhilarating were the deaths that were sneaky. Murderers who covered up their crimes using science or intrigue–relying on the half-life of a drug disappearing from the body of a victim before investigators could identify it had even been there, or poisons that imitate cardiac arrest and other ‘natural deaths’, or “accidents” that, as things turned out, weren’t so accidental after all.
There were a million different ways to die and therefore a million different things she needed to study in order to identify the really, truly sneaky deaths. Subjects such as toxicology, or biology, or biochemistry, or cytopathology, electrophysiology, epidemiology, hemotology, herbology, neurology, pharmacology, virology–just so many many -ologies that you could use to easily kill people and be deviously sneaky about it!
It was really… So. Damn. Fascinating.
Ah. But in the old world you couldn’t just walk up to law enforcement and ask to see their most sneaky ongoing murder cases. Which was honestly a huge bummer. She’d had to make do with cold cases.
Once, in this new world, she’d found a man and woman’s skeletons and they were definitely totally unquestionably murdered. Blunt force trauma. To the skull. Both of them. Probably didn’t die on impact, but also probably didn’t last very long afterwards.
Was she worried there was a murderer running around this forest? Not really. Those bones had been maybe thirty years old at the very least, even if their owners hadn’t lived for quite that long. Ah… she made herself a little sad again. Welp. Disregarding that small, bitter thought, there wasn’t going to be a murderer waiting for thirty years to silence her after finding their victim’s remains. Also? There wasn’t a judicial system anymore given the general lack of an existing society, sooo…
All things considered, she felt pretty happy being one of the few people roaming around in the world playing forensic scientist, medical examiner, and grave digger with what was left behind. Content, even.
She had done a lot of thinking about the skeletons that had once been real people. Those people either, presumably, broke out of the stone or were born to people who had broken out of the stone. She wasn’t sure what the difference was between herself and the people who’d broken out of the stone and the ones who hadn’t.
It was probably a whole mess of catalytic cascade reactions in response to some kind of synthesis borne from… something? Some kind of outside stimulus maybe? But what…? Assuming the microstructure of the stone wasn’t something entirely alien, then what did it react to in order to cause the cascade?
Lumina hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking about that specific phenomena. She didn’t see the point, so she had decided not to waste time puzzling it out when her own survival was her top priority. What did she care about unraveling the secret of the stone? Let someone else do that if they wanted, or existed.
What her mind came back to again and again and what she thought was kind of amazing, was that after breaking out of the stone she now had sensation in her middle and ring finger on her left hand again. Back in The World Before, those fingers had been sliced off and had to be reattached with surgery, but the nerves never recovered from the initial cuts nor the surgical scarring and so she lost all sensation in those digits.
But now! Full sensation! In her fingers! Amazing!
So, whether it was the (presumed) cascade reaction during depetrification or the petrification phenomenon itself, it had somehow restored the nerves in her fingers. Which, first thing, how? And how was a bigger question that brought even more questions. For example, how did the petrification or the cascade reaction target those specific damaged nerves? How did it identify that they were even damaged? Did it somehow have a map of her exact genetic specifications before she’d suffered the nerve damage and pulled a factory reset on her body? Or did it have a generalized map that it would work its effects on and anyone who broke out of the stone would have the same blueprint?
If it was the latter, then what the hell kind of eugenics bullsh—
No, you know what. Whatever. It wasn’t a mystery she needed to solve right this moment. Or ever.
In a snap judgment, she had decided it was magic. Or aliens. Or magic aliens. Magic aliens with a focus on human eugeni—
In another snap judgment, she decided that, actually, it was the former and thought about it a little more.
The petrification or the subsequent cascade reaction in the undoing of the stone somehow “read” the original “code” and fixed whatever errors it found in order to form a working “program.” Which, now that she thought about it, probably wasn’t too farfetched. Compared to a hard drive, a gram of DNA could store so much more data. Literally 215 petabytes. It was enough to make external hard drives and their pitiful 2 terabytes of data storage cry. Humanity was doing that now—eh… was doing that from… before--since it had been getting harder and harder to make microminiturized data storage and electronics. It was exorbitantly expensive, but it could be done.
So either the petrification or the cas—maybe she should shorten this to ‘petri-cascade?’ Oh, but no, those things described completely separate phenomena and she couldn't be certain which one specifically had the rejuvenation effect.
…Petr(ification)-OR-cascade? Petror-cascade? Ehhhh, she hated that.
…
…So anyway, the petror-cascade probably read the information in RNA/DNA molecules. That’s 1,000,000,000 megabytes of data the phenomena could potentially sift through and assume administration over. Everyone’s DNA was a little different, obviously, so then theoretically you could restore a person back to their personal factory settings without an ‘everyman blueprint’.
Which. Like? Wow?
Did it work on congenital diseases? Genetic disorders? Autoimmune diseases? If it did, then how does it determine an ‘error’ from viable, perfectly executable ‘script’ when those errors are written in the ‘base code’ of that script? Factory resetting would still default to genetic abnormalities since the genetic abnormality existed in the original, default version of the code, wouldn’t it? If it could read DNA, then does it pull information from only an individual’s pre-existing values and variables, or did it pull and reformat from a database?
And the database concern still led back to eugenics… unless, of course, it was individualized and adaptational genetic treatment. If it truly was based on an individual, personalized DNA gene therapy then… who the hell made such a thing? Even a government would have a hard time getting the funding for such an all-encompassing, comprehensive system let alone all the work and manpower needed to produce such a thing to a satisfactory degree. Who unleashed this upon the entire world at once? How was it executed all at once anyway? What a massive undertaking.
Definitely, totally had to be aliens. Maybe.
So now all she had to determine is—
Nnnnope! Nope! No! She’s done with this! It’s all just unsubstantiated theory anyway! She’ll figure it out later! Maybe. Maybe not. Probably not.
…She’ll think about it.
…If she feels like it.
Right now, she had other priorities. She had broken out of the stone a year ago, naked, and upset about it. Now she was far less naked and far more upset about this whole late stage rabies situation instead. She couldn’t keep distracting herself from making a choice. For she recognized that is exactly what she was doing as she followed along with her train of thought. She had stalled for long enough. It was time.
She let out a breath and opened the eyes she didn’t realize she’d closed. Time stilled, time passed, time stilled again.
Then, finally, under the gazes of the litany of souls enshrined in stone around her, she made her decision.
Snap!
She paused.
…What was that?
Elsewhere, Gen Asagiri ambled out from the tree line to spot a village by the sea. From his vantage point, he could see a small crowd forming just outside near the bridges. An almost nostalgic scent lured him towards the crowd and he knew without seeing that he had found Tsukasa’s alleged dead man.
How intriguing. How fun!