Afterlife
Ever thought of what happens after death? Well, a bunch of bullets scattered my guts throughout the mining site, and here am I.
---
For an indefinite amount of time, he walked. An infinite surface of silver, a dark blue sky; reflected in his irises, the horizon, glowing a mesmerizing golden hue.
The silver floor, akin to some mythical living crystal, refracts all colors of the light spectrum. Akin to cracks of a mirror, veins extend throughout the dark silver; they morph continuously, like the flow of water, with the intricacy of a fractal pattern.
Orion slowly shifted his gaze towards his reflection on the floor: there, wearing white robes, stood a young man with golden irises and black hair.
Wherever he stepped, flashes of lightning spread through the veins on the surface. Lost in thought, Orion kept his eyes glued on the reflected starlight.
---
How long I've been here?
Everything here is just a projection in my mind.
It's been so long; my physical body must have decomposed long ago.
I wonder how much time passed in the real world. Would I miraculously wake up from a 20-year coma in a medical bay; would I then remember the time spent here?
What if the experiences of my last eons happened within the final instances before my brain death? The last breath before oblivion; will, at some point, my existence come to an abrupt end?
...
Time; as the days turn into years, the years become millennia, and millennia, akin to grains of sand, become just one of many. Looking back feels like an instant; counting each second, at some point, big numbers lose meaning.
The flow of time is endless.
At first, this was a long dream from which I couldn't wake up. My body was cut in half by a beam of bullets; the end of all my biological processes, death. At some point, I became aware of what happened, yet such thoughts drowned in the river of time.
Forgetfulness, a constant sense of deja-vu; dreams repeating over and over, like a broken record. Perhaps that was death; perhaps my consciousness should have faded there. But it didn't happen.
Someplace in the timeline, I learned how to program myself. Somehow, at first unconsciously, then knowingly, I reformed my intelligence into a program; I became akin to a supercomputer.
Unlike a computer, I'm free from the material world, unrestricted by hardware; here, I am the fundamental law of physics. Even using primitive algorithms, nothing ever stood in my path towards computational singularity.
Where a conventional computer needs a thousand years, I need but an instant. My mind became a world where I wield the absolute powers of creation.
---
Orion paused his steps, standing in front of a mirror image of himself. Confused, Orion instantly strengthened the connection to all of his parallel thought processes.
That clone wasn't his doing.
Redirecting his will into the search for a breach in the source code, Orion found himself annoyed by the sense of loss coming from some of his parallel minds. Somewhere in his universe sandbox simulator, he lost a whole fleet of fighters.
"Who are you." He asked, using all methods of communication that came to mind. Countless voices, digital, analog signals, overlapping different languages.
Perhaps, as a primitive attempt of intimidation, his intent sounded akin to a god looking down a mortal. Yet, it didn't seem to have any effect, while, in turn, the foreign entity made him feel fear with its mere presence.
There were no anomalies in his code; in fact, the log of all simulated photons that entered his sight showed that there wasn't anything special ahead.
A robotic yet smooth male voice answered his question in a familiar ancient language: English.
"I am you."
...
"You are but a fragment of me, while I am the remains of what we once were."
"I lost my memory. An accident must have reduced me to this. The fragmented memory in my possession terminates around 5.14 googol years into the heat death stages of our universe."
'What does all of that mean to me?' thought Orion.
"Just like you put parallel minds into that universe simulator, you were something similar to me."
"Even though I can't cohesively recall the past, I know we were beings that transcended time. Yet right now, I'm but empty code. A flawed residual intelligence. Our consciousness is within you."
Orion perceived as information started to upload into his memory.
"Remember not to get lost on the never-ending pursuit of technology and evolution: we were born to live."
"Drifting through the void, I found a suitable body for both you and Elaina; a fun universe for you to explore awaits. Live for her, just as she lived for us. Nurture her; we owe her everything just as she owes us back."
Before Orion could ask anything, a projection of a past he never experienced blocked his view.
---
'Creating you was the best choice I have ever made.' - He thought.
He fondly looked at the woman that laid on his laps. The delicate beauty slept peacefully with her straight brown hair sprawled all over.
Orion felt overwhelmed by the emotions flooding out of the memory. Times of peace, resting with his partner, enjoying each other's company. From the information transmitted to him, this was the real world. These were times before his life as Orion on the nuclear wasteland of a post-war Earth.
---
The information he was receiving was shocking; yet, this was not his first million years, so Orion calmly assessed the situation.
He knew a foreign entity was likely to have induced such acceptance into his thought process. Perhaps he was helpless to resist the influence of a being from a higher tier of existence. It was hard not to believe with all the evidence that suddenly appeared in his memory. That foreign entity, or rather, the shard of a past self, shut down, leaving behind remains of heavily encrypted data.
He didn't have anything to live for; he had nothing to fear. Even if all of this was some intricate scheme, he didn't mind. His past self was showing him a reason to live, and he had no reason to refuse.
---
His field of view on the memory projection moved away from the beauty: Orion's attention was instantly stolen by what lay beyond the wall of glass in front. He certainly wasn't expecting to see the accretion disk of a giant black hole.
--- Side story ---
It all began as an experiment. Then it became me playing god. This universe I created ultimately serves to satiate my boredom.
Using mortal bodies, I built an empire of clones. Spawning parallel minds handicapped to the habilities of the human brain, I developed my mind while having fun with aliens.
What is the silliest way to wage war against a hive-mind biological aberration? Of course, to send a million fighter spacecraft piloted by my clones manually. It never gets old.
Some of my deaths are tragically gruesome, but it just isn't fun to end it all at the press of a button. What would be the difference then if I were to erase their data from the terminal?
---
[Spatial anchors detected; exiting warp drive.]
Feeling the roar of the inertia generators in the back, I can see thousands like me maintaining formation by my side. No words needed: we plunge into the enemy lines, going around their array of biological space stations.
These things are gruesome; I hate them. The mechanical path is way more refined.
What the heck are these abominations?
With the precision of a machine, Orion evades swarms of guided projectiles. Firing his electromagnetic impulse cannons left and right, he finds time to admire a lightning-like chain reaction turning thousands of these bugs into ash.
The vessel shakes as various laser-like weapons concentrate their fire on him. Laughing, he maneuvers around enemy vessels akin to a drifting car but at ten times the speed of sound.
Yet, his smirk disappears when he suddenly finds his mind pulled away from the body.
The arrow-shaped vehicle, spinning out of control, plunges through everything on its way: when the shields fail, a glorious spectacle of bright and colorful metallic gases unfolds.
Those were painfully expensive fireworks.