Prologue

  I can’t say I lived as long as I would have liked, but my life was fulfilling nonetheless. I’ve had ample time to come to terms with my inevitable death. I guess that’s the upside of terminal illness: you have time to get your affairs in order.

  Lung Cancer. I was diagnosed a few years back, and it had reached a fatal stage. The doctors weren’t able to do much to slow the progress anymore. Thus, I spent my remaining days at home. My son had moved back in with my wife and me to help out, a fact I felt conflicted about. On the one hand, it was comforting to know I would have them both by my side until the end, but on the other, I don’t particularly like feeling like a burden.

  I lay in my bed, with my wife and son next to me, not that I could physically see them by that point. I could feel them there, but their voices were muffled and distant. I knew my time had run out.

  As my laboured breathing finally came to an end, I reflected on myself. I had lived happily and created a loving family; my only regret was that I could not spend more time with them.

  I drifted off, my senses fading entirely… until they came back in a sudden rush.

  I felt light. No, that doesn’t sound right. It’s more like I was completely weightless.

  Looking down, I saw my wife and son, as well as my own lifeless body.

  An out-of-body experience? Had I become a ghost?

  I didn't know. I was surely dead, but I never believed in anything so convenient as an afterlife of any kind. I looked around, thinking maybe a cloaked skeleton with a scythe would tell me what was going on, or perhaps an angelic figure would guide me to heaven.

  But there was nothing.

  Before I had time to ponder this further, I felt myself being yanked away. The sight of my room shrank impossibly quickly. I saw my house, then my neighbourhood, then the entire country, and finally the world itself. It all shrank away in mere seconds.

  Some unfathomable force was pulling me through space at a staggering speed.

  I tried to focus on my surroundings, but it was simply beyond me, even as an incorporeal soul. All I could do was wait until I came to a stop.

  I could not track time in my condition, but I estimate this continued for an hour before something changed.

  There was an immense blue… thing flowing through space. The only way I could think to describe it was as an immense river. Planets and stars were still rushing past me at breakneck speeds, but the river only slowly grew in size. This alone told me the anomalous stream must be larger than I could comprehend. I could see neither end of it, like it stretched eternally.

  Eventually, I came into contact with the river, and things finally changed. I could feel a consciousness around me—no, multiple consciousnesses.

  Inside the stream, I understood what I was looking at: They were souls. Small spherical pale blue lights, so numerous and packed together that, from a distance, they looked like a single entity.

  I could surmise that my own form was the same as those around me, just one of many.

  How many? That was a question I couldn’t shake. From the size of this stream, there would be more souls here than the entire population of Earth many times over.

  “Hey! Hey! Talk to me, buddy!”

  A voice? I looked around, though I don’t know what I expected to see. There were only more identical souls flying in the same direction as always.

  “Don’t use your eyes, they don’t exist anyway.”

  That made sense. I already figured my senses worked differently while I was being pulled here. But it’s easy to acknowledge such a thing; it’s another thing entirely to spontaneously adapt to a new way of using your sight.

  “Ah, is it too much for you? You’ll get it eventually, let’s chat instead, that much I can teach you.”

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  The unknown voice explained how our souls could communicate with intention rather than words. Soon enough, I got the hang of it, and they explained our situation.

  “As you have probably guessed, we’re dead. And there ain’t no higher being looking to guide us anywhere. For now, don’t let yourself be pulled by the stream, swim against the flow with me, and try to talk to conscious souls as much as you can.”

  I followed their instructions, and they asked many questions about the world I came from. This helped us ascertain something.

  This other soul died 30 years before me, and they confirmed they were also from Earth. They were shocked by the time delay, saying they thought it had been only a few months at most.

  They explained that most souls that came here lacked self-awareness. We guessed that since we had both died expected deaths, we were able to maintain our sense of self or something. It was just guesswork as we hadn’t yet found anyone else to ask.

  …

  …

  “Hey! Buddy!”

  Hm?

  I’m not sure what happened, but I had fallen back into the stream's flow at some point, mindlessly swimming with the quiet souls.

  “Damn. Looks like we lost ourselves for a while there.”

  The familiar soul was projecting frustration, along with an undeniable sense of fear.

  This was the risk of the “soul stream” as we came to refer to it. At any moment, you could lose yourself for an indeterminate period.

  Time passed. How much I do not know. There were a few times when one or both of us would lose ourselves again.

  Both? Who was I referring to?

  It was just me here—me, and these mindless souls that do nothing but swim.

  Sometimes I found souls that swam at a different pace, ones that responded to my voice. They usually got lost soon enough, though. Really, I just used them to try to figure out how long I had been here.

  60 years. I had been dead longer than I had been alive. My son would be an old man by now.

  Son? What did he look like again?

  …

  …

  Ah. I fell into the stream’s flow again.

  Who knows how much more time passed while I was out?

  I had spoken to some other souls, but most were too scared to help much, so I left them to the flow.

  Maybe I should also resign myself to the flow and fade away into peaceful oblivion...

  Why do I keep fighting this anyway? There was undoubtedly a reason; maybe I just wanted to find someone alive from my time, but why would I want them trapped in this endless stream that erodes your mind?

  I pondered the meaning of the Soul Stream—a pointless endeavour to keep my mind active for a time.

  The souls in front of me turned green and broke apart into dust.

  That’s new.

  The stream had been severed. I fought against the flow as I often did, not out of fear of joining them, just out of curiosity.

  I watched the souls breaking apart and scattering into space as they reached the severed point.

  Freedom. They were lucky to be there at that time.

  I decided to meet my end a second time, hopefully for real this time.

  But as I willed myself into the severing point, I stopped. For the first time since I died, my form was not in motion.

  Which of course meant the stream was passing me by, and soon enough, I was outside of it,

  “...What is this?”

  A voice. A real voice. Not another soul projecting their thoughts into my own. This was a dark, deep, feminine voice. Rumbling like thunder.

  “MiStAkE. EgO aLiVe. LaTcHeD oN.”

  Another voice, raspy and strained. Similar to my own during my final moments.

  “An ego that still lives even now, I see. Interesting”

  The third voice was regal and refined, with the dignity of a being used to standing above others.

  It was frustrating that I could not speak to them. I tried the way I did with the other souls, but they weren’t reacting to me. What’s more, I couldn't even see them properly. I was drifting in the empty abyss of space, assuredly alone if not for the presence of these voices surrounding me.

  “Bring it. They will be of use to us.”

  That first dark voice spoke again.

  “WhErE tO pUt It?”

  “It is still latched onto you, correct? You can manifest it. We shall induct and teach them from there.”

  “...WeEeAaAk… bUt… WiLl TrY.”

  Silence. Darkness. Then…Wetness? A lot of screaming. My head hurt; it felt like it was being compressed from all sides.

  Pain? This was the first time I felt such a thing since dying… it was almost pleasant.

  “Congratulations! It’s a boy!”

  …Huh?