Second Soul

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. Nor can they see the dance of a slow death as your body convulses and chameleons into the most perfect shade of blue. No one tells you how your body swells and doubles its size, your blood boiling and evaporating through your pores. They never said that you will have 14 seconds before you pass out, that you will feel your saliva start to sizzle on your tongue. Don't hold your breath, your lungs may just rupture.

They had said to 'not bother screaming' as they so carelessly tossed me from the Sanctum into the cassum of the unknown. 'No one will hear you, no one will care.' A colored cyborg that has no place on Holy Ground. So I hold my tongue as the release is pulled and I'm catapulted, like so much trash before me, into the void. Little time to remember, even less time to think. Yet time seems to stretch on infinitely upon an endless loop. Lengthening in intensity the nerve endings that have already lost the battle to warn the brain that which it already knows.

All of this elegant and perfectly tailored to the last miserable seconds of this piteous life and to the completion of the worlds most inequitable ungodly death.

***

My consciousness drifted weightlessly; body-less and light. They had always said that ‘the end wasn’t the end’, but I had never truly believed it. Couldn’t bring myself to think passed the here and now, passed the physical form that needed nourishment, affection and felt acute pain. Though no true feelings came to mind as the me I once was aimlessly floated to and fro uncontrollably through unseen matter. It was odd. All memories were there yet unacceptable, all emotions going at once, yet muted.

I was supposed to be doing something; struggling to go somewhere, but it was all together lost.

Opening my eyes, I could see what could only be defined as rolling energy tumbling wildly around and through me. Little to no patterns of recognition through all the vibrations. A thrum of magnetic fields reverberating circled around me, the heart-beat of the Planet come to being. Enlightenment upon my destination finally took hold, keeping me locked within time and space in this dimensional shift. Not able to focus, not able to think. Color wasn’t color and shades did not exist, but the instinctive loose memory of various shapes and palettes made the understanding of the meaning behind the names apparent, even if the actual titles of such things escaped me.

Reaching for the closest non-committal object with the lingering form of my fingers, what I found at the tips had shocked me. The object was solid; familiar and warm, soft and roughened. The whisper of a thought drifted through my memories.

This is a Native to Earth.

A cyborg from the Great War.

Yet not the same as these memories.

Different, yet the same.

Me.

This thing is me.

Lost, heavy, forceful senses and memories flooded my being as everything that I once was pushed itself through all barriers into my head. An impudent magnetism propelling my being unwittingly forward. Pain unlike that which has ever been experienced ran along every nerve fiber, pushing me into this empty shell. A deep earth-shattering scream ruptured from my lips, soul deep and all-encompassing.

As sudden as the overtaxing memories and bone-crushing sensations appeared, they vanished without trace, leaving the stark emptiness of eternity to claim my soul for it’s own, or so I fervently hoped. I was never one to pray, to ask the divine for any form of heavenly deliverance, but in this case I acquiesce; Life is not worth this level of sufferance.

For all that is fair, and even more that is unfair please... please just let me fade.