He had immersed himself in data about mass extinctions to prove the universal truth of extinction. The whole reason that he joined Bridges was to discover the few records of extinction that still remained. He had come here together with his wife, who was also a member of Bridges, and his infant daughter. They were the only ones who had joined the expedition as a family. They were lavished with attention and admiration as a symbol of connections. But Heartman’s dreams of extinction and his heart defect became more and more severe.
Heartman knew that the reason he had these dreams of extinction was because of his heart defect. They were just nightmares that reflected how unwell he was. That’s why he underwent the surgery. To prove he was right. There weren’t any operating theaters in the colony he was based at for his research, so he was transferred to an ICU in Mountain Knot City.
The surgery itself went well. For a few days after the surgery, he would have to rely on an artificial heart, but that was all part of the plan. His wife and daughter were relieved and asked if he would be home soon. He said yes.
Heartman and his family lived in a satellite city outside of Mountain Knot City. A place where a voidout-based terror attack would later snuff out the lives of his wife and daughter after they returned home.
Heartman understood what had happened in his core, it didn’t matter whether people believed it or not. He had been asleep right up until the explosion. Then, as if still in a dream, two flashes of light burst before his eyes, one after the other. They were so intense that he couldn’t perceive any other color in the world. He could feel the hospital room vibrating and the thunderous rumble of its foundations shaking. When color did eventually return, the hospital room lights were still out.
It must have been a blackout. Heartman was all alone in his room and there didn’t seem to be a soul out in the hall, either. Heartman tried to call for help, but nothing came out. His chest was tight and he couldn’t breathe. All he could feel was a sharp pain like a knife had been plunged into his heart. He tried frantically pressing the emergency button, but it was no use because the system was down.
The artificial heart had stopped working, and once more he found himself floating, looking down at a body close to death in the dark.
When he tried to sit up he found himself on the Beach.
It was a sandy beach. The waves were lapping at the shore. But it was also strewn with the stranded carcasses of whales, dolphins, and other sea-dwelling creatures that Heartman didn’t recognize. It was just how the people who had near-death experiences described. It seemed so incredibly realistic. He couldn’t believe that he could dream something so vividly. His stomach lurched. If he could see the Beach this vividly, then it couldn’t be some subjective concept in his imagination, it must actually exist. But to accept that fact, Heartman would have to let go of everything he had always believed in.
He suddenly noticed several lines of footsteps leading toward the sea. Yet he still tried to write them off as manifestations of his own imagination. That was also why he saw people walking in the very same direction when he gazed in the direction in which the footsteps led. It had been his own head that produced these figures.
They were the kas of the people who had died in the voidout. He didn’t know any of them, he just saw hundreds of backs silently heading away from him toward the ocean. If he had known them, they would have been more than blank behinds. They would have been the backs of someone with a name.
Heartman stood up and looked across the crowd of people. Someone was stumbling toward the sea to the side of him. She was a small old lady. Heartman had never seen her before, he didn’t know her name, nor did he know her face. The woman looked up at him, but her eyes were unfocused, and Heartman doubted whether she could even see him at all.
She simply stood there before raising a finger to her lips as if to shush him. Without acknowledging the confused Heartman himself, she prodded the AED on his chest. The pain went through him like an electric shock. That’s when he saw them—his wife and daughter—and it dawned on him that they too had fallen victim to the voidout.
Heartman tried to shout out, but the pain in his chest wouldn’t let him. Their backs were becoming more and more distant, like they were being washed away by a sea of people.
When Heartman stretched out his arm another jolt of pain shot through him. When he realized that the pain wasn’t in his head and was proof that he was still alive, Heartman began to despair.
“Wait! Don’t leave without me!”
He could finally speak. But they didn’t hear. Another pain shot through Heartman’s chest. The intervals between the shocks were getting shorter and shorter, and becoming more systematic. His heart was starting again. His body back in that hospital room was trying to call him home. He couldn’t shout anymore and his legs wouldn’t move. He wanted nothing more than to chase after his wife and daughter, but he couldn’t get any closer to the sea.
None of these strangers were having a problem reaching the sea, so why did it feel like he was the only one stuck in the sand and unable to move? He didn’t belong here. His place was still elsewhere.
Heartman would never forget the voice of the doctor proclaiming he had saved him. That same voice might as well have proclaimed that he would never see his family again.
It had been twenty-one minutes before the ward’s backup generator finally kicked in. The artificial heart had started working again and an AED had been used to shock it back to life.
It was because of that heart that he had been ripped away from his family. Heartman had nowhere to direct his sadness, so instead he turned to anger because, at the very least, he had a target to be angry at. It wasn’t even toward the terrorist attack that had caused the voidout in the first place. He was angry at his heart that had ripped his family apart, and the Beach itself. Everything had changed.
Once he knew that the Beach existed, he decided to focus all his anger into understanding how it worked. That anger transformed his heart. He became able to share the Beach of others. That’s when this cycle of twenty-one minutes of life and three minutes of death began.
Heartman went to the Beach each time and searched for traces of his wife and daughter. Then, when he came back to this world, he continued his research into the Beach. He had managed to make a few discoveries. For one, he realized that when he was having dreams of extinction, his ka was already on the Beach. He had simply perceived it as a dream before because he had been unable to accept the very existence of the Beach. He came to believe that he had dreamed of the big five extinction events and lived these past extinctions vicariously in his nightmares. And that the accident in the hospital room hadn’t been his first trip to the Beach. When he looked back in time, he calculated that he had been there an unfathomable number of times. His combined research into extinction and the Beach became his guiding light. And once he knew everything there was to know, he would finally be able to reunite with his family.
<Five minutes to cardiac arrest.>
The AED interrupted Heartman’s long monologue as he shared his past with Sam.
Heartman sighed and wiped the tears from his eyes. Sam knew that this time they weren’t just some reaction to chiral matter. If Heartman wasn’t going to give up on finding his family, maybe Sam shouldn’t have given up on searching for Lucy.
But he knew that he didn’t have the tenacity of Heartman. (Is that truly how you feel?)
If Sam hadn’t given up on Lucy and Lou, then maybe he could have asked for Amelie’s help in searching the Beach for them or something. But Sam had missed his chance, and ran from Bridges. (You didn’t even think of that?) It was inevitable that they would chase him once he started running.