To Sam, it all seemed a bit out-there. Still, he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the monitor. Had that cord dangling from the ammonite really connected it to the Beach? And what else did that imply?
<Five minutes to cardiac arrest.>
The AED’s voice rang out across the room. Heartman shut down the monitor and the view outside the window reappeared.
The heart-shaped lake was right outside. If that lake which had been gouged into the earth by a voidout was the same as Heartman’s heart, that made his heart itself a scar. The fact that he had chosen to settle near it and looked down on it every single day as he went about his unusual routine told Sam that this man was living in the past as well. Mama and Deadman were the same. They may have adopted the name of Bridges, but they were attempting to build Bridges toward the past.
“Each person has their own Beach. Just as an umbilical cord attaches one fetus to one mother, we are attached to one Beach. That’s the rule. But I’m the exception. My Beach is connected to others. As if it were the beneficiary of a coronary bypass. Maybe this twisted heart of mine made it possible. I just want to find them. I’ll be back soon, hopefully from where my family are,” Heartman said to Sam as he reclined in his chair.
“You probably think what I do is strange. That no matter how special my Beach is, that doesn’t mean that my wife and daughter are still there waiting on it. And you’re right. There’s still so much that we don’t even understand about this world, so how can we possibly expect to understand anything about the Beach? But I have a theory. When a ka departs its ha, it goes to the Beach, which forms a corridor between this life and the next. Under normal circumstances, a body is incinerated within forty-eight hours of its passing and before it can necrotize, so that the ka can pass over to the other side knowing that it has no ha to return to. Its attachment to this world disappears. But once a body necrotizes, the ka becomes bound to this world. But because it doesn’t actually have a body to come back to, it becomes a BT.
“In any case, the ka doesn’t spend a long time on the Beach. But there are exceptions. For example, those who didn’t die a natural death. Those whose bodies were wiped out in an instant without necrotizing or being incinerated don’t become BTs, but their attachment toward this world keeps their ka from leaving the Beach. You can laugh it away as the delusions of a mad man if you like, though, since no matter how many times I wander the Beach, I never find my wife and daughter.”
<Four minutes to cardiac arrest.>
The AED announced how long Heartman had left.
“My body will never go back to the way it was now. I’m willing to bet on that. But it all has to have some kind of meaning. The battlefields—the endless wars you found yourself trapped in—they’re from a time that actually existed. From a world war that took place over a hundred years ago. That war was a particularly nonsensical one. One in which weapons of mass destruction slaughtered people on a vast scale. The inherent meaning of each individual death was snatched away from those victims and they became nothing more than a number. They had no idea why they died. It’s the same for those who die in a voidout.
“If that strong attachment to this world and the yearning to stay connected to it created that battlefield, then that might support my theory about voidout victims becoming trapped on the Beach.”
<Three minutes until cardiac arrest.>
“Deadman told me that man, Clifford Unger, was in the US Special Forces,” Heartman went on. “He must have seen a lot of war in his time. His misery and hatred, combined with your BB acting as some sort of catalyst, may have brought these battlefields to our world. It’s just a theory, but perhaps that man who can summon BTs also summoned Cliff’s anger.”
“You think Higgs is pulling his strings?” Sam asked.
Sam found himself unconsciously gripping Cliff’s dog tag in his pocket. What if Higgs summoned Cliff and that battlefield to get in Sam’s way, now that he could repel the BTs?
<Two minutes to cardiac arrest.>
“I don’t know. But evidence does suggest that Higgs brought them here,” Heartman mused.
The window on the wall went into shade mode and the lake outside disappeared. The interior of the room slowly grew darker.
“Oh, before I forget, I have a favor to ask,” Heartman quickly interjected.
<One minute remaining. Please hold onto something secure.>
“Could you just… relax until I come back? Time stops on the Beach, but not in the Seam. Rest assured, it’ll only feel like three minutes to you,” Heartman explained. Heartman closed his eyes and the gramophone placed at an angle to his lounge chair began to play music. It was Chopin’s Funeral March again. “We’ll continue this shortly.”
The AED emitted a beep and the EKG flatlined.
As the Funeral March echoed quietly throughout the lab, Sam had no idea what to do. It was just him, Mama’s corpse, Heartman’s temporarily deceased body, and a gently snoozing BB. There wasn’t a single person who was truly alive or truly dead in the entire room. Although it was unclear what really defined who was alive and who was dead in the first place.
All Sam could do was settle himself on the sofa and wait for Heartman to come back. He was still holding onto Cliff’s dog tag. It was covered in scratches and listed his name, affiliation, and religion, but no matter how long Sam stared at it, he still didn’t understand anything about Cliff. He didn’t understand Cliff’s relationship with Lou, nor anything about the man’s life or death. If Higgs was harnessing Cliff’s anger and summoning the battlefield to get in the way of Sam’s mission, it seemed like a very roundabout method. There must have been other things that he could have done that would take less time and effort.
For someone who talked so big about bringing humanity’s extinction, why didn’t Higgs just use a nuke or voidouts or something to destroy all the cities and take out the Chiral Network knots? No matter how effective a repatriate’s blood and other bodily fluids were against BTs, they were just still byproducts of one body. It wasn’t like there was enough of Sam’s blood to get rid of every single BT. They still posed a massive threat.
Higgs had once been a respectable porter. Fragile’s comments and Bridges’ data backed that up. In fact, when he first started working with Fragile, his main motive had been to help other people. But that had all changed when he jumped ship and began working with someone else.
That meant this new partner must hold the key to everything. But neither Bridges nor Fragile knew who it was. Higgs had made good use of Fragile’s DOOMS and organization, so his partner must have offered him something even more powerful. Maybe Higgs’s true intentions lay beyond extinction. His proud proclamations about how he was the particle of God and the arrogance that went with that claim seemed to imply as much.
<Administering shock. Stand clear!>
Sam suddenly snapped back to his senses. The Funeral March music was gradually winding down.
“No luck.” Heartman sat up and wiped away his tears. He quickly tapped the hourglass on the table next to him and the still sand suddenly began to flow upwards.
Sam reflected on how this strange backward hourglass represented Heartman’s heart, which desired nothing more than to rewind the past.
“Oh, sorry. Where were we? I know it may seem like a nuisance, but I’m acclimated to it now. Most of life’s basic functions fit rather easily into a twenty-one-minute time slot. Sleep is the tricky one,” Heartman commented light-heartedly.