Interlude 02
The world did not return to him the way it left him.
Instead it came back in pieces, little by little, until enough of them had gathered for him to register the awareness of his own existence.
He was aware. He existed. He could feel, see, but only white, and not white as a color exactly.
It felt more like blankness than anything else, a blankness so complete it had texture to it.
He looked down at himself, at his hands, the way a person does after waking from a dream they can't immediately shake, not because he doubted the hand was there, but because he needed the confirmation. The hand was there. It was also not entirely there. He could see through it.
Not clearly, though. It wasn't transparent the way glass is transparent.
It took him longer than expected to understand what he was looking at. The delay itself felt wrong. When it finally clicked, it seemed obvious.
He looked iridescent, like the ghost left behind by a camera exposure interrupted by movement. His outline lingered over the white, existing in two states at once. There, but not quite. A pale blue hue bled through the image, visible only because it wasn't the only splash of color in the room.
As he took stock of his own appearance, he gradually became aware of something else, the sense of being part of a larger pattern.
There were other people here. Not just one or two.
Many of them, each with a form like his, and more confusingly, occupying the same space he did, which should have been impossible, as proven by how deeply uncomfortable to look at the experience.
He instinctively stepped to avoid the overlap, and noted, with some irony, that he wasn't the only one making that choice.
Some stepped right, some forward or back, and many, like him, stepped right.
It happened again, giving way to a headache-inducing visual, until each superimposed form finally settled into a spot that didn't overlap with anyone else, which let him get a rough estimate of how many people were here. At least in the triple digits.
There was every kind of person in that crowd.
Men, women. Easterners, Westerners. Short, tall.
Young and elderly. A woman who looked to be of African descent stood to his left, her form iridescent but carrying a strong greenish hue.
Slightly to her right, an older man of European descent was testing the absurd possibility of passing through another person.
To his right, a woman appeared to be shouting.
Her mouth opened wide, her face carried every physical hallmark of a shout, but not even a muffled sound reached him.
Looking around at the moving mouths, the gesturing hands, the faces cycling through confusion and fear, he realized he couldn't hear any of them.
"四十四十," he attempted.
He could hear himself. Clearly no one around him did.
"Did I die."
It wasn't quite a question. It arrived more as a statement, the most available hypothesis for a man trained to start with what the evidence most directly suggested. He reached for his throat and found no pulse, then realized he wasn't even breathing.
At that moment, his most recent memory surfaced, the accident. He recalled it with a precision that surprised him: the headlights, the angle of approach, the speed of the impact, then the absolute silence that followed.
"I had to have died from that," he assessed, pragmatically. He was a surgeon. He knew exactly what a car moving at that speed did to a human body that couldn't get out of the way in time.
"No," a voice said. "You didn't."
He spun around, completely lost, as the voice seemed to bounce from every angle at once. Still, picking the speaker out from the iridescent ghosts wasn't hard. One figure was different, deliberately so.
Where every other form held some fixed approximation of an appearance, this one cycled through multiple forms at a dizzying pace: one moment the form was that of a little girl then the next that of a middle-aged man, before morphing into a youthful figure.
It took a second full cycle through hundreds of forms before he noticed his own face appear on it for a fraction of a second before the cycle moved on.
He understood then. The faces belonged to the people present. This thing was wearing their faces, and smiling at him through them.
"Who are you?" he asked.
"That's a good question," the shifting form said, its voice arriving from everywhere at once rather than from any direction a voice should reasonably come from, "one with unfortunately too many answers."
"Are you God?"
"That's a very typical question," it said, "with a simple answer. No. But to you, I might be the closest thing you'll ever actually see to something genuinely godly." The shifting faces' smiles widened. "A healthier way to think of me is as an angel. Yes. An angel. That fits well enough."
"I see." The way the entity said fitting sent a shiver down his spine. "You said I didn't die. Is that true?"
"It is. As we speak, your body is still completely intact."
He stared at it. "That's hard to believe. Considering what happened."
"You believing you died was a correct and understandable assessment," the entity said. "It would have been true, if I hadn't intervened to prevent it."
He frowned. "...What did you do, sir?"
"A fraction of a second before the impact would have resolved the question of your continued existence," the entity said, "I removed your soul from the equation.
Brought you here." It tilted its current face, his face, briefly toward the white expanse around them.
"Time moves differently in this place. The car and its momentum are still traveling toward you.
They just haven't turned you into mush yet. "
He let that settle. "So I'm—" He looked at the crowd of shifting, silent, iridescent forms filling the white space around him, all suspended in some version of the same state.
Hundreds of lives, he suspected, caught between one moment and the next, held outside of time while whatever this was played out.
"We're all stuck," he realized.
"Between life and that final outcome death is supposed to be. Yes. With no way out on your own." The entity let that land with a certain Machiavellian relish. "But I do."
The situation felt like the move before an inevitable checkmate, barring a miracle. "I have an offer for you," the angel said.
Hiro looked at the being, his legs steady, though he couldn't credit that to his own courage. He suspected he simply lacked whatever biological wiring was supposed to generate the dread this thing should have inspired in him.
"I'm listening," he said. "With respect."
The entity's expression cycled through several faces in rapid succession, each carrying something that might have been amusement.
"Don't strain yourself with formalities.
I called myself an angel because it's the nearest approximation, not because I expect the ceremony the title usually demands.
Relax. I'm no devil either. I have no interest in your suffering.
I don't have much interest in you specifically either, though I'm hoping that changes.
" It let that sit a moment, then added, "I'm offering you a chance at life. In another world."
Something shifted in his chest, not quite recognition, not quite dread. He'd read enough of the genre to recognize the shape of what was being described. "Are you suggesting reincarnation?"
"Reincarnation implies starting from scratch. This is more immediate than that. Think transmigration. You're needed operational right away, so I'll be placing your soul into a vessel that's ready to receive it."
"Operational," he repeated. "For what?"
The entity didn't answer. Something else did on his behalf.
A screen flickered into existence in front of him, clean-edged and translucent, unmistakably holographic.
As words bloomed across its surface, a woman's voice accompanied them, calm and practiced, the tone of someone who had repeated the same speech thousands of times and expected to repeat it thousands more.
[Common Interface]Greetings, P-00467 I3.54.225.452. I am the Soul Harvesting System Common Interface.
First and foremost, I congratulate you on the ground of your planet being selected for a Soul Harvest.
"Soul Harvest," he said. The words sat wrong in his mouth.
"On the ground of your ignorance," the voice continued, more conversationally now, speaking directly to him rather than reading from some script, though it still carried the tone of a customer service representative explaining a policy that wasn't up for debate, "I shall enlighten you."
What followed was the most calmly delivered description of an apocalypse he could imagine ever hearing.
The voice laid it out with the crisp efficiency of a briefing document: a system-driven event that would force humanity into a choice between death and participation in dungeons specifically designed to produce the same outcome, death, just through a potentially longer route.
The whole thing was laid out to him with the tone of a company announcement. Realizing the entity beside him had built it, he found himself looking at the being that called itself an angel with an entirely new kind of attention.
"As I said, I'm no devil," it said, apparently reading whatever his face or his thoughts had communicated.
"I have no investment in your suffering.
When the Soul Harvest happens, the acceptance path is what I'd prefer most of you take.
" It glanced at the crowd of silent, translucent forms around them.
"But I know enough about humanity to know that many of you won't. Which is why I need to be ready.
Which is why I need people like you to make sure the system is ready before I unleash it. "
"You want us to beta-test this system," Hiro said.
"You could say that."
He looked at the faces around them, not the entity's borrowed ones, the real ones.
Some were mid-argument with people he couldn't see.
Others had their hands pressed to their mouths.
Some stood very still, clearly running rapid calculations on a situation none of them had chosen or expected, an offer to be isekaied.
He'd read enough of the genre in his university years to know the shape this kind of story usually took.
A salaryman exhausted by his life, or a shut-in with nothing left to lose, would leave the world behind without hesitation for something new and mysterious.
Hiro couldn't make that decision so easily.
He'd just finished a nine-hour surgery that had gone right.
He had two weeks of leave approved. He had a fiancée waiting at home for him, minutes away from a bath they'd been looking forward to sharing.
The idea of leaving all of that behind, whether through death or something else, felt like a genuine loss.
"You have two choices," the entity said. "Refuse, and accept what's waiting for you on that road. I wouldn't recommend it. Or accept my offer, which I would strongly reccomand."
"You said earlier you'd prefer people accept their fate peacefully." He held the entity's rotating gaze. "Now you're telling me not to."
"Context matters," the angel said. "I was speaking about the Soul Harvest, an event that hasn't yet come to your world.
Die here, and you'll find yourself sent somewhere very unpleasant, for a long, long while.
" It paused, letting him guess “hell” was what he chose not to say.
"Which is why I wouldn't recommend it. Compared to that fate, what I'm offering is considerably more merciful. "
He considered it for all of a few seconds before deciding he believed it. Whatever the entity actually was, it was unquestionably powerful, and his gut told him that something with that kind of power had very little to gain from lying to someone as insignificant as him.
"I imagine," it said, with a note of sarcasm, since it clearly already knew what was on his mind, "that you're thinking about who and what you'd be leaving behind."
He neither confirmed nor denied it, which the entity, to his relief, didn't seem to mind.
"Then let me remind you about the wishing system," it continued, something in its shifting expression turning more serious.
Of course he remembered the wishing system. The secretary interface had already told him about it, part of the Soul Harvesting System that would eventually reach his wo—just then, realization hit him.
"The wishing system will be there as well. Alongside the Soul Harvesting System, in the world you're sending us to."
The entity nodded.
“You’re saying I could—”
"Demonstrate sufficient worth, gather sufficient resources, make your wish, and you'll be given your miracle. A pathway home, to a healthy body that miraculously survived a suspiciously fatal-looking crash."
The interface's screen flickered back into view, lending its own quiet endorsement to the offer.
He looked at the screen. He looked at the forms around him, some already blinking out of the white room one by one as their decisions were made.
He looked at the entity wearing everyone's face, then thought of Chen Yao. I told her I was coming home. He was everything but a liar.
"I'll give you what you want," he said. "I'm counting on your wishing system to give me my miracle."
"That will all depend on you."
The screen filled with text as the interface read aloud. Request acknowledged. Deploying Personal Interface. Calibrating Personal Interface.
A loading bar advanced across the screen in segments, unhurried.
Personal Interface Initialized.
Then, in rapid succession, four notifications appeared, skills and abilities with names and effects he couldn't yet access, locked behind something called Identification, each announcing itself with flat bureaucratic confidence.
He caught the names: Mitotic Echo. Somatic Restructuring. Longevity. Perfect Recall.
He felt the process pulling him toward that place before he saw it, the way the air before a storm carries a character distinct from ordinary air. The white around him began to change, thinning, as if the place itself were growing less committed to existing.
To anyone watching, it would have looked like he was being unmade. He knew better. He was being transferred. Even so, the process numbed him, drawing him into a heavy, dreamlike haze as his consciousness began to dissolve.
His final coherent thought, before whatever he was unraveled and was pieced back together somewhere Tutoria waited to receive him, was of a phone screen. His own. The last message he'd ever sent to the love of his life: Don't shower.