Satisfying Curiosity

‘So physical sensations don’t translate when I’m just a passenger,’ Rick thought.

The young man—no, Rick’s test subject—was laying on the ground, groaning in pain and choking on blood from a punctured lung, not to mention the host of other broken bones in his body beyond the ribs. But Rick didn’t feel a thing, marking it a successful, though dangerous, test.

Looking at the thread of belief stretching off into the distance, he saw no changes in it. After briefly considering a test involving what happens if he was a passenger in a body when it died, he discarded the idea as the test was simply too dangerous. With a thought, he willed his consciousness to begin the arduous journey back to his own body, leaving one last sentence behind for the boy.

“You’ve worked hard. Rest now, and if you survive this, I’ll visit you again,” he said, pushing it into the teenager’s mind with a few hundred pulses of light. Whether the boy heard it or not, he didn’t really care.