Work Text:
The blast was not ideal, for I was forced to trigger it early, but it accomplished what it was meant to do. I was making contact with the side of the cliff at a survivable velocity. The next problem was that because I was more stunned from the explosion than calculated, I did not have sufficient control over my body and senses to orient myself in an ideal falling position.
My control over my body did not improve, but my senses became suddenly irrelevant as I found myself crisply aware of my descent from a third-person perspective. I could see every detail clearly – well, sight is not the correct term for it. Within the range of the immediate surroundings, I was omniscient. I could perceive everything as if I were studying the most precise hologram ever conceived, progressing frame-by-frame through time, able to sense every piece of information without having to rotate the model. This information included the fact that the body I was observing appeared to be growing unresponsive even as my awareness and consciousness seemed to sharpen.
I could predict every next millisecond of the fall as it occurred. I could conceptualize how my body should respond to minimize the damage taken, but could not reach or control my body in the slightest. I was aware of a feeling of detachment from the organism I saw bleeding and breaking with each impact, followed by a sense of horror that I did not know what I was when I was not residing in my brain and controlling my body.
I distinctly knew that I had been disconnected from my brain somehow – the brain that had been engineered to the highest competency, that had entirely given definition to my conception of myself as a living entity and was the source of everything I liked and valued about myself, comprising my identity nearly on its own – and I realized that I was something else entirely, unrelated to that exceptional brain, and in fact could not be further removed from it.
I realized with mounting dismay that not only did I have no control over that body, but I also did not care what happened to it and the brain I knew was mine and had cared so deeply about mere moments ago. I wondered how I was able to think without my prefrontal cortex and feel emotions without my limbic system with such all-encompassing clarity, but even as I formed these thoughts, I became fearful of what was happening to me.
I was a being with no body or attachment. I was nowhere at no point in time. There was nothing around me and no destination to reach for. I cannot explain this sensation of nothingness. It went beyond darkness, beyond silence, beyond anything the senses can register and interpret. It was the very concept of nothing.
I was terrified and in pain, but it was not the pain of my body; that had long since been forgotten. It was the pain of nothing burning away my very existence, never running out of fuel because the progression of time did not exist. It was eternal and all-encompassing, for there was no physical or metaphysical thing that existed outside of it. I would simply burn as a constant, forever, with no reason or direction of change.
In my despair, I thought this might be the consequence of a life poorly spent, that I was being punished for being cruel and foolish, for all the lives I had taken. I have always been an imperfect man with nebulous moral intuitions at best. I never knew who or what to look to for guidance, and in this moment, I did not know, either. But I had a question, so I asked it fervently and remorsefully, not expecting to be graced with a response.
What should I do? Please, tell me. Help me.
Then, there was something. I cannot explain it other than that it was positive, broader than light, warmth, pleasure, or love, and far too vast to conceptualize. Yet, when I experienced it, I conceptualized it easily, and I realized for the first time in my life the limitations of the exceptional mortal brain I had been so proud of.
I was encompassed within the presence, along with another entity that seemed to be 99, the elderly defective clone who looked after us in our early years. I felt younger, perhaps only a young child, though I was still without my body, and indeed the experience of seeing 99’s hunched visage and feeling his warm hands touching me were only my mind’s interpretation of what was fundamentally an immaterial phenomenon.
He spoke comforting concepts to me without physically vocalizing and using language. I communicated my distress to him in a similar manner, and my distress flowed away from me until it was no more, replaced by a profound calm and a strange, beautiful, and bottomlessly deep sense of love, not specifically for 99, but for everything.
I have never quite understood the Jedi’s relationship with the Force, but I imagine based on their nonspecific descriptions that it might be similar to that feeling that I experienced in 99’s arms beyond death. It was a sense of being one of many atoms that together comprise a star. It was the most peculiar conception of oneness with everything, of being aware of a vast something that permeates the universe.
99 and I watched together, in that intangible, conceptual manner typical of that reality after death, of understanding rather than physically seeing, as Dr. Hemlock ordered for my body to be put in a controlled cold death to preserve it until it could be resuscitated at Tantiss several rotations later. I found myself wishing not to return to that body, not because it was suffering, but because I was content where I was. 99 told me that I would, in fact, return to my body soon, and that I would suffer greatly there, but assured me that it was for the best.
He showed me my purpose in its entirety. I would not be able to remember it after I returned to my body, but I would remember the fact that he showed it to me and the fact that I understood it completely. I understood truth in its purest form, and I took the experience of that understanding, though not the contents, with me back to the physical world.
Tech became aware, only very slightly aware, of himself and his body. He was inside his brain again, and he felt particularly resistant to that fact. It was limiting and incomplete, especially as it still struggled with its limited oxygen supply and the cocktail of substances it was under the influence of.
It felt like only a second ago that he had understood everything with perfect clarity, but now that he was tethered to the physical universe again, he was confused about everything and unable to perceive anything other than a nebulous sense of pain, discomfort, and perhaps distant voices he didn’t recognize.
Even still, he remembered his third-person-perspective visions of his fall and the subsequent freezing and transportation of his body. He remembered Hemlock’s voice, the fact that he was supposed to be taken to Tantiss, and the idea that he had a purpose to fulfill that was not given to him by Hemlock, his family, nor himself, but rather intrinsic and self-evident, though he couldn’t grasp it right now.
He was only awake for a short time and felt himself fading. Another thought wanted to come through, but it was too much for his brain as it drifted off again.
His body had long since given up, but in his mind, Tech was screaming. His body might be crying, though he couldn’t tell anymore. His eyes were closed, as he wished to shut out everything, but he couldn’t shut out the signals of blinding white pain that continued as an inexorable constant even as Hemlock had stopped stimulating his nerves.
It had been four – no, five? – rotations since the interrogations began, and he was already losing count. He couldn’t take it anymore. He thought he had been stronger than this, but apparently, having his body broken in dozens of places and rendered utterly useless had a more profound impact on his willpower than he expected. But it wasn’t only that.
It was that visceral memory, even as all his other memories blurred together, of that detachment from his body and the subsequent nothingness. The intangible burning. It was much too close to his inability to use his body now and the constant agony his physical form was in.
Even as it worsened his pain, he moved his arm, desperate to feel his connection to his body, to gain the smallest reassurance that he still had control over the flesh that belonged to him, even while it died slowly, even while the doctors installed things into his brain, even while his nerves betrayed him with endless bouts of pain that even Hemlock didn’t have the power to properly subdue as temporary relief.
Hemlock asked a question, but it was far beyond him to comprehend it.
Let me die. Let me die. Perhaps if he thought it with enough emphasis and repetition, it would reach his mouth.
“I know you wanted to euthanize me.”
The doctor stared down at Tech with slightly shifting eyes, his expression a mixture of unprepared shock, conflict, and shame. It was a rather human reaction, more than one might expect in a place like Tantiss, but Tech had long since learned that ordinary humans were fully capable of staffing places like this.
There was a lot for the doctor to be shocked about. The fact that he was lucid at all, for one, after a seemingly endless stretch of insurmountable brain fog and half-consciousness. The fact that he was calm when he had been in grave emotional distress for just as long. The fact that he knew something he should not have been anywhere near alert enough to register when it happened.
“How… how did you know?” the doctor asked quietly, stealing a glance around as if paranoid that Hemlock might walk in and hear them.
“I saw the syringe you prepared. …I was more lucid than you may have thought.”
The doctor was at a loss and could only manage to apologize once under his breath, though, given the situation, it wasn’t clear whether he was apologizing for wanting to euthanize him or for not following through with it.
“I know that I have begged for death many times… but I must not die yet.”
The doctor reached over and made some adjustment outside of Tech’s field of view. “Why? What’s the point? It’s obvious that even now, you’re fighting to stay conscious through the pain and medication.”
“The point… I do not know, but… that is not important.”
By this point, the doctor had gained control over his features and shielded himself with the air of a skeptical man of science, datapad in hand as if he were about to take notes. “You hardly remember yourself nor your friends. You have no future in this place. We use your brain as we please, and you cannot use it to do anything yourself because of the state of your limbs. What are you holding on for?”
“The fact that my purpose has not concluded.”
“What purpose?”
“I do not know, but I am absolutely certain that there is one.”
The doctor scrutinized him carefully. “Where is this faith coming from?”
He didn’t know much about Tech, not even his CT number, but the few words they had exchanged before were enough for him to know that Tech was a man of facts and of the physical universe. So what was this absolute purpose? A religion? An intangible philosophy? Ideology? Love? Love for whom, if he had forgotten?
“It is not something you will understand as one who has not faced death,” Tech said simply, not intending to explain any further.
That was the most he had spoken in a long time, and it left him having to close his eyes and catch his breath as his weakened lungs stretched painfully against his broken ribs. How sorely he wished to have some semblance of autonomy back. It was uncommon for him to be able to talk at all, and he couldn’t remember the last time he could even slightly move a body part without his nerves punishing him severely.
But bones didn’t stay broken forever, and as long as he was alive, he had a chance to serve his purpose in the future, even if he had forgotten it. Even as he forgot everything else, the old man who welcomed him beyond death made sure he remembered that fact. He didn’t always believe in it – most of the time, he was suffering too acutely to believe in anything – but he always remembered it, and it was the one thing that always existed in his universe.
A purpose he would understand someday.