Chapter Text
The island is deserted after the Zeniths' demise - dead machines litter the battlefield while corpses of Specters and their masters lay where they fell. Re-enabling the base's defenses have kept the scavengers away, leaving this place all to myself. Thus begins my inquiry.
—
The last thing she feels is pain, excruciating pain. It starts into her chest, slowly but steadily moving to her limbs. She can feel it up to every fingertip. There is nothing in her body that is not aching. It is such an unfamiliar feeling, after all these centuries, it almost crushes her for how real it feels. She tries to catch a breath, but it stuck in her throat. She realizes, despite herself, that she is dying. She's spent all her life fighting death; it feels almost surreal to be there, slowly bleeding out. She watches the world around her slowly fade as one flash of red hair crosses her peripheral vision. She tries to reach out to it almost instinctively, but her body is not responding anymore. She lost, and at this time, it’s definitive. A familiar feeling of regret echoes through her before her eyes finally close.
There's darkness surrounding her now. No, that’s incorrect, she thinks. There is nothing around her. She is nothing. It's weird and quite funny, she thinks, how the human mind cannot describe the concept of nothing in any other way than an infinite darkness. She is drifting in nothing and, at the same time, is part of it. She'd be smiling bitterly now if she still had a physical body; there was a time, before everything, when she thought of herself as someone more intelligent than the rest of the world, better in any possible way, capable of anything. Yet, here, what remains of her human mind cannot fully comprehend what's happening to and around her. It's humbling, in a way.
A sound sparks off in the distance, so far away she almost fails to hear it.
She decides just to ignore it, as she keeps her flow of thoughts: is she really dead? Humankind has spent ages speculating about what comes after death. Biologically, her body is undoubtedly decaying somewhere, even after all the treatments it went through. That's the only logical outcome: without an active conscience to keep the nanites collated meaningfully, they'd dismantle and dissipate in search of the following organic form they must take. That's how they've been programmed.
She thinks about all the artists who tried to portray hell. It seems that they were not even close. Because if there is life after death - assuming what she's experiencing in this moment can be considered life - then she must be in hell, right? She was so scared of death that she ended up giving away her humanity for it; of course she's in hell now. No, as much as the explanation resonates with her, she refuses to believe it. She never was much of a spiritual person in life, why would she be in death? Besides, hell, in all its variants, alludes to some torment, and it does not seem to reflect her reality so far.
Does it mean then she's just a bodyless conscience now? Is she damned to drift into the void forever, with no meaning, no purpose, alone? It feels not too dissimilar from how her most dreadful enemy, Nemesis, would have felt. Even in this ethereal state, nothing else scares her more than them. She realizes she does not know how long it has been since her battle with Aloy on top of the Zenith’s base. Time is such a human concept, she thinks. Here, wherever here is, she’s not even sure time exists. She’s not moving, yet she does not feel still either. She just exists. She wonders if the logic of the old world applies here as well, with time and space closely tied together, and she ends up asking herself if it even makes sense to wonder.
But if she exists, that means she is, is she not? The old concept of I think, therefore I am. She remembers how she used to find comfort in such philosophies when she was younger, still human. She clings to the feeling as firmly as she can. I think, therefore, I am, she repeats. She knows she’s trying to auto-convince herself. So far she knows she does, in fact, exist, but what is she now?
The distant sound she heard before is now more transparent and sends sparks of fear through her mind: it’s the sound of flowing water. Fear had been such a big part of her life that she had almost thought she had tamed it, keeping it hidden under layers of false hopes, carefully crafted lies, and hidden desires. For the first time in centuries, she feels naked, deprived of all the layers she had built up to protect herself.
Suddenly, she feels as if the dam holding all her human feelings has been opened. At the same time, the sound of flowing water surrounding her is crystal clear and almost unbearable. She remains still, stuck in complete panic, as she now sees the water flooding from the nowhere in a giant waterfall in front of her. She stops breathing even before the water level reaches her chest; now she feels the water rise around every inch of her, so strong her body is thrown into the unknown. She closes her eyes as if that could stop her from being taken away and thinks that, in the end, this really must be hell.
She does not know when she has re-opened her eyes. The feeling is similar to being in a dream. You know where you are, but you don’t know how you got there in the first place or why. And oh, how she knows where she is. She had hoped that the flowing water nightmare she had just witnessed would be the end of it, but it seems her personal inferno has something else in store for her.
She sees herself - or rather, the younger version of herself - hidden under a table in her parents’ anti-flood basement. She realizes this is one of her memories, but she’s living like a spectator. The feelings, though, are borrowed from the memory itself. She can feel it in her legs, from her copy crawled under the table, with naked legs on the cold, cement ground, directly into her sensory system. She feels the wetness of the tears her young copy is crying directly on her own cheeks. It’s a feeling almost forgotten to her, she realizes. This is probably the second to last time she has allowed herself to cry. The young Tilda is now shivering as she sees the water starting to flow through the walls that were supposed to keep her safe. The water drools from all the walls now, undaunted, and all she can do is cry out for help. Her parents were supposed to come pick her up once they figured out how to get away safely, and she wonders how much time has passed since they closed her here. She ponders if they just decided to leave her here for good and to start a new life without her. She would not judge them for it; she’s far from being the best daughter. She always acted entitled because she was more intelligent than most kids her age. She even argued with her parents repeatedly when they tried to convince her that she should learn humility and not just mathematics. If she survives this, she thinks, she’ll tell them she’s sorry and loves them and will try to improve.
Tilda feels the water level increasing as if she was in the room again. She feels her desperation as her younger version, once again, cries for help with all the strength her tiny lungs will allow her. She sees the child climb up one of the sofas in the room, trying to escape the water. She remembers how desperate she felt as she experiences it all once again. It took another 2 hours for the rescue team to arrive at her parent’s mansion and half an hour more to find the entrance to the anti-flood basement. In the meantime, the water level has been increasing in the room, slowly covering all the furniture her parents had put into it to make it look “a bit less like a cage and more like a safe place” as her father once said. She was smart enough to build a tower that would allow her to stay on top of the water, using all that meticulously picked furniture, since she read somewhere that water can also kill people by hypothermia, and she’s set on avoiding that; if water wants her, it has to get to her first. While doing so, she thinks her father would kill her if he saw her stack his precious Wassily chair on top of his Happy Jack sofa, but her survival instinct is stronger than her fear for him. She was in a fetal position on the chair by the time the rescue team managed to get into the room and bring her to safety.
She remembers how cold it felt when someone broke the news her parents were hit in one powerful wave of the flood before they could even leave the house. That was the first time she started developing that deep sense of regret, the moment she realized she should’ve died with them that day.
The memory ends as abruptly as it started. Her senses are still hers; for now, she still holds her human form. She feels an unpleasant sensation of dampness caused by being surrounded by water. Looking around, she realizes she’s standing on an infinite plane of still water covered by a greyish sky. The plane stretches over the horizon, meeting with the sky in an almost invisible line, so far she can’t even imagine how big this new here is. She remembers one book she read once, during her studies, about the possibility of water holding memories. She had never fully believed in it, though she found some philosophy in the theory. In this new world she’s in, she’s starting to reconsider her position.