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Seeing a god has been a fantasy and longing so many had chased for millennia but never got to experience.
Meeting a god in its radiance was said to alter not only how reality was perceived but reality itself.
Being invited into a god´s realm, into its light, and trusted with joining its creation must be a treasure unimaginable, the deepest honour one could have bestowed upon them.
Standing in a blood ocean in front of the god that created it by destroying all of humanity with its careless curiosity, Simon had to pee.
The rush and the heat, the fear and the hurry, his heart in danger of no longer beating for him but becoming a part of something else had taken a toll on him by spreading him thin between what he could not yet understand.
What he did understand was that his bladder was more demanding than this new god; The Light could never rule all of him. What a nice thought in the face of adversity.
The privilege of community is a mild discomfort, a more welcome outcome giving his circumstances. Standing alone makes one ache for this discomfort, to experience any other feeling than the chaos of unchecked worries running amok. Standing alone in front of a god wasn´t something he preferred to rotting in the submarine - but the wideness of it, the space fit for him to explore and breathe in wider than his arms and eyes could reach can feel like freedom to the desperate.
Simon oozed desperation and perspiration. And this god revelled in the puddle of its faithful and faithless alike.
While The Light was preaching, the bacteria in Simon´s body multiplied, forming another life inside so otherly than this god. An Infection of a known kind was building up in him, a piece of home other than his splintered pendant. Other than his melting skin.
He never thought he would yearn for the pain of a urinary tract infection.
The ocean called for Simon to join them. How could he ever be apart from his people, how could he not run back into what is left of their lives like volcanic glass into wild waves.
They were not yet lost, their temperature and circulation still aligned to minimise the shock of fusion. There wouldn't be a crack nor a sound, just an eternal embrace he could sink into if he agreed to regain the mild discomfort of unity.
The remaining C.O.I. would join them eventually, once their tumors would rupture them and become another body in far too few seats.
Was fighting against merging with this god's mistake even possible? Time alone could lead Simon to the inevitable and render his rebellion, his zest for human life, useless either way.
His freedom would never be him.
All he was then was a bacteria welcome to join their infection, whether he took the medicine now or later wouldn't change this fate.
Thankfully, his bladder was even less religious than him, and eager for privacy. Still, he told The Light what it wanted to hear.
The sapling pendant clung to the universe being home to more than the blood ocean. There was no other way for it to eventually take, however desperately Simon would try to shield it in his failing hands from the amalgamation lusting for its weakness and defeat.
He would give anything for life but his own.
Simon´s brain was operating in black and red, already forgetting some core structures of what made a human – or an organism.
What was he against a universe of rot? Wasn´t the difference between life and this just a formality?
He might not be a ruling entity but, as his bladder reminded him standing in front of a god, Simon was the best and only water source there was in this sea of plasma and waste and therefore, a chance for the regrowth of terrestrial life. That had to count for something.
He had to contribute other than to a body count.
He could make something real this god could not destroy because it grew in its sight but not under its carelessness.
How he hid the thought from the all-eluminating eye he could not say. Instincts don´t often fall on tongues.
The pendant wrapped tighter around his wrist clinging so dearly to Simon´s old life, onto the universe he used to call home, made it feel like they had started sharing a heartbeat.
You will forget. There is no use for singular thought in The Light.
Thrown from the rift back into reality, another phenomenon got hold of him: Hunger.
There are cravings and pleasures, temptations and desperation in food but its absence, a need unmet, always turned to hunger as a solution.
The Light´s hunger for knowledge and chaos stripped humanity of themselves and their survivors of resources.
There was nothing left to eat, rendering Simon along with his peers useless as a food source. You cannot feed on what hasn´t been fed.
You agree, The Light reassured him. Hunger has to be satiated.
We can feed you. Let us feast.
The past of humanity pleaded to him from their wet grave like a fledgling blown from its nest. They were doomed and gone, new only because something looked at them without understanding; their only memory that of needing to feed, to flock, to fall.
If this god could have claimed them, why couldn't he? A worthwhile distribution in Light's eye could be sorted anew by Simon´s hands. While he still had them.
But how?
Something had escaped his mind. The voices distorted him.
Time was a blur, and while his bladder kept filling, Ava joined him desperate and stubborn, welded into their fate like him.
Simon liked her voice. It remained human while the human remains gurgled and swirled through his ears as if he was losing consciousness.
Which of them both would become teeth first? Did this new god know what enamel was other than decay?
Ava was to Simon what sugar was to hunger, only firm long enough to make them believe in gain and gone just as quickly. The idea of a companion until solitude came knocking a hole in your guts.
He dived for the black box, living their shared dream of human contribution to rebuilding their kin.
If only he could do more, he thought as the blood he had to spit out eroded his teeth and tugged on the life jacket. If only he could face one horror with another.
The answer he found, as the new god and its creations came rushing down upon him, poorly hid in his bladder and remembered what his mind could not.
Simon swapped his realisation for a question: If the wrongdoing of a god can be disease, can´t an infection grow to similar proportions?
Why not fight hunger with hunger?
He never remembered the colour of his urine to be a topic of conversation growing up. They kept themselves well to eventually make for fertile soil as to decay the neatest, to feed and grow the most after returning to the universe that made them. Well spirited, well fed, well watered. Well blamed.
Now even his piss was subpar but it was all he had.
Coloured like amber and rushed out in pain it carried a small amount of infection with it. A relief came over him a god could never understand, and then a sensation tales often considered the doing of many gods: burning agony.
Simon cursed and gave the colour of the water he made a new name after the flames that raged in the lone part of the body still his: ember.
Some of his blood must have ended in his bladder while he grew apart and towards the voices calling for him from the deep.
He only briefly knew The Last Tree and this nostalgia, this shared nature, had to be enough to believe in the sapling taking to all he had to give.
It was the only pure thing left to feed and grow the infection into another horror.
Voices and lips and fading stars and severed vocal cords and blood demanded his attention. It cannot work. You do not know anything. Don´t you want to see? I would have given anything to see the old world again. There is no hope. Don´t you agree? Why not me? Why not become we? Join. Fuse. Die. Run. Help.
Simon rinsed the cup of rubbing alcohol out with his urine, peeling a coagulated layer of blood away with his fingernail. The sub had sprouted vines and veins upon him and grew him to the control panel.
Why not become? You killed it with the radiation. We will take it. What does a murderer know about redemption? Why try? Why not become?
Simon forced the pendant open, willing to cut himself while keeping its content from harm. A row of teeth grew from his temple, severing his left optic nerve. The green quality of the browned sapling became one-dimensional as half the world slipped away.
Why not become?
Simon poured ember into the cup and used a glass shard to carve an opening into the seed before submerging it so the tree and the infection could meet.
The ocean washed against his groin and stomach and severed what muscles they wanted to fuse with. The roots of the sub held him upright. The radio played the sound of rushing blood.
Why not become?
„Why not?“ Simon said and tossed the thermos to screw the plastic god-tight. The blood fled from it as his water splattered out and scolded the sea of scars before it was welcomed as their own.
The infection nestled into the tree´s core.
It´s our breath that kept you alive, it will breathe us too. We will claim it as our own. You can´t send it up too, it won´t float. It will build anew. We will build anew. Why not? Agreed?
The Butcher got to give life, and it didn´t have to be his own.
One nature against the other, however small. He had to try even if he didn´t believe, even if he couldn´t.
Wasn´t that what science was? Observing what happened after putting something in motion?
Pity the only note he could make was in himself. Just like the data from the SM-8, his last act of humanity was to become lost media.
Simon placed the cup with the sapling steeped in ember hope in the broken console panel as blood leapt at the plastic rim.
He no longer needed to know where he was in this ocean because he was right here and so was everything else. Petting a chunk of metal felt familiar by now, gone the embarrassment over apologising to this coffin turned bed turned home after losing his temper.
„Take good care of it, will you?“
It will be alright, Ava said.
The Iron Lung groaned and crumbled around him as the blood ocean bubbled and the teeth mountain sang towards him and The Light shifted an inevitable future into his singularity.
What a life, he thought to himself and almost smiled as the marrow of old fused with his hollow bones.
The Child, The Coward, The Butcher, The Witness, The Water, The Hope, The End.
A Beginning.