“I die for three minutes and live for twenty-one. The cycle of my life is much like yours, except for the fact that yours is split into twenty-four-hour periods, while mine is split into twenty-four minutes. But when I’m dead on the Beach, time seems to go on forever. Because time doesn’t exist on the Beach. It’s like how time passes when you’re asleep. But this cycle is my reality. Consider the BTs that return from the past and the timefall that accelerates the degradation of everything it touches. How can our sense of time cope with such irrational phenomena?
“How do you think we got here? I believe that it was because of our awareness of time. We can imagine a future beyond ourselves. We know that even the Neanderthals buried their dead and laid flowers. We humans can see a tomorrow. We conceived concepts like eternity and an afterlife, helping our societies to outlast us as individuals. And in order for societies to outlast the lifespan of the individual, we conceived of an afterlife, and a future beyond ourselves…
“Alas, the Death Stranding threatens to undo all our progress. Take me, for example. I want to find my family on the Beach and pass together with them into the world of the dead. This phenomenon has managed to produce a man as strange as me. Honestly, the twenty-one minutes I spend here—all downtime, nothing more. Time spent waiting to go back to the search. My body may be present, but my soul is on the Beach. I’m already dead…”
Sam thought that it was most likely a piece of fiction that Heartman had concocted for himself. It was to explain his truth and share it with others. If someone only talked about their own story to themselves, they’d go nuts. They’d withdraw into themselves, becoming the king of a kingdom they were the only inhabitant of. That’s why we all need someone to share our story with. That’s what making a connection is (maybe Heartman, Mama, and Lockne and Deadman too were all struggling to try and create: a place for themselves in this world). Maybe Bridget’s plan to rebuild America was nothing more than a narrative, either. Immediately after the thought struck him, the cuff link on Sam’s right wrist began to feel much heavier. He ended up blurting out anything to escape its weight.
“I know that feeling. Lost my family in an accident,” he said, not really knowing what family he meant, in all honesty. Was he talking about Lucy? Bridget and Amelie? Or about the photograph he had lost. Perhaps he was even talking about the parents he had never even met.
“Well! I never expected you to open up to me,” Heartman commented, inverting the hourglass. Through some sort of sorcery, the flow of the sand turned and began falling from the upper compartment to the lower one. The amount of sand sat in the top never lessened. Yet it still piled up below. “I’m the same as you.”
MOUNTAIN KNOT CITY OUTSKIRTS // SATELLITE CITY
“Don’t worry, it’s alright. Trust me,” a voice told Heartman.
Even if he closed his eyelids, the light raining down still managed to hurt his eyes. He was wearing a mask and vaguely aware that the anesthesia would make him drop off any moment now. The doctors had told him that the surgery would take the better part of a day, but when he next opened his eyes it would all already be over. Ten hours would pass in the blink of an eye. He experienced the exact same phenomenon whenever his consciousness switched to its Beach phase. But when he spoke of this phase to others, they always likened it to a near-death experience. The structure of his story and the motifs within were shared by many people. They always described looking down at themselves from above. That they heard their name called when they attempted to cross a river, only to find themselves alive again when they turned back. That they were going to meet the friends and family that had passed on before them. Or that they were passing through a tunnel with a light at the end. The records Heartman saw always mentioned the same details, over and over again. Then, after the Death Stranding, all of that was replaced with talk of the Beach. A beach and the ocean. All near-death experiences became the same.
Around the same time that the dead started to return from the Beach, some people began to be born with the ability to sense the world of the dead, and some people emerged with the transcendental ability to use the Beach to move through physical space. There were even those who were forced back to this world when they died—who, in effect, were immortal. They were called repatriates. A theory was even floated that suggested using the Beach to create a pathway for a network. The Beach evolved into a physical concept. It may not have existed in this dimension, but it existed in a state that could be utilized in the physical world.
“You’ll be drifting off soon. Just a little longer.” The surgeon’s voice already sounded very far away.
Then Heartman was floating above his body, looking at it lying there with its chest clamped open. What was going on? Was he having a near-death experience? The EKG wasn’t showing anything out of the ordinary. His other vital signs all read normal. Was he dreaming? Even though he had been anesthetized?
The doctors continued to move calmly and efficiently. They looked like engineers fixing a soft biological machine.
It had been a few years since the problem with his heart was first detected. Since he found out that his heart had been stopping in his sleep. He had no idea. He was asleep! His wife suspected it was sleep apnea, but Heartman didn’t really care. It wasn’t like he was going to die, and besides, he didn’t have time to be going and seeing doctors back then. He put aside his wife’s concerns and threw himself into his work. He had been scouted by Bridges and he was busy grappling with all his data on mass extinctions.
It was around that time when he began to have the same dream over and over again. He knew what they were. They were dreams of extinction. Everyone with DOOMS had them. At the time, he had no idea that he had that condition. He knew he was a genius, but not this. He didn’t even believe in the Beach. He had assumed Bridges was simply after his intelligence, but it seemed they had detected his DOOMS, too. Bridget even told him as much herself.
After the Death Stranding, people were rushing to figure out what had happened. It was completely unprecedented. They didn’t even have a name for it.
Eventually, the annihilation events came to be known as voidouts. The monsters that came from the other side were named BTs, and they came from the world of the dead via “the Beach.” The phenomenon itself was named the Death Stranding. Naming all these elements was the first step toward objective study and discussion.
The first Death Stranding wasn’t a voidout between the living and the dead, but a voidout between colliding matter and antimatter. Eventually, the theory mutated. It was us. Our dead became the BTs. It was the BTs that were responsible for the voidout. But why was it only humans that became BTs? Because the only ones who could perceive death and an afterlife were human beings. It was our astounding human consciousness that had detected the Beach and summoned the BTs forth. The tragedy of extinction was switched into the glory of being the chosen ones. It was elitism on a global scale. Only the ones who could overcome such a tragedy could go forth to the promised land. It was pure arrogance.
That’s why Heartman hadn’t believed in the Beach. Mankind was still intent on continuing to climb the stairs of evolution, when in fact we had already reached the landing long ago. New existences were already beginning to catch up with us from the other side. And if BTs were one of them, then we would just have to step down from that pedestal. Heartman hadn’t accepted Bridges’ invitation in order to save mankind or rebuild America. He just wanted to prove his theory.