Chapter 1

It’s funny, being dead.

It was a lot colder than I expected.

My eyes opened and I sat upright, breathing in sharply.

Fuck, I thought. I’m in a hospital and I’m going to in medical debt for the rest of my natural life.

Which, while it did seem to be what society wanted for any would be hero to be saddled with, did not seem to be the case at the moment. Because while I was on a sleek flat metal bed, I was in no hospital like I’d ever seen. The walls were smooth, rounded, and sterile – the kind of place that you’d put into an advertisement for the slickest new computer. I rubbed my palm against my cheek, then looked down at myself.

Well.

Being naked was not exactly un-expected, considering my last coherent memory was shoulder checking a little girl out of the way of one of those child mulching SUVs that people loved to drive these days for reasons that still escaped me. But...

“Hello?” I asked. My voice echoed off the walls as I slid from the bed and stood. A soft wooshing noise behind me jerked my head around and I yelped as I saw the bed receding into the floor, smoothly as if it had never been. The floor itself flowed like water, bubbling and shimmering back together again. I stood there for several long seconds before stamping my heel down on where the bed had been before. My brows furrowed inwards and I looked up, then around again. The room had no doors. It was a bubble of silvery metal.

I was not a claustrophobic person. I had never been scared of enclosed spaces. But I was beginning to feel why other people might be as I realized just how little anything I looked at appeared to be a door. “Hello?” I called again, but the only sound that echoed back was my own voice. My hand cupped over my crotch, and I sheepishly waddled over to the wall.

In the silvery metal, I could see my own face.

Great, I said. It’s still me.

I ignored the twinge of bitterness as I rapped my knuckles against it, then put my ear there. It was cold, and utterly silent. I stepped back, then started to rub my hands along the walls – both of them. I felt for any seam, any join, anything that might be a-

My hands crossed an invisible, intangible threshold and the wall before me melted aside. It flowed into the floor and I yelped and sprang backwards from it. There was now a door leading into yet more sterile corridors. I stood there ... and the floor bubbled, then sloughed upwards. The view was as intricate and impressive as watching a sandcastle form itself out of the waves – the silvery liquid caked itself up and formed into geometric lattices that locked together again and again until finally, they smoothed out into the silvery perfect wall again.

“Okay,” I whispered. I tried waving my hand before the bit of wall again.

Again, the wall melted away and there was a door.

This time, I didn’t hesitate or step back. I lunged through and spun around in time to see the wall seal up again, the metal bubbling into place and settling. I rubbed my shoulders, and felt a shiver creep along my spine as I turned around and around. The corridor I was in was not solitary, not straight. It intersected with others, creating what was clearly a gridwork. A maze.

“Yay,” I whispered. “This is ... this is just fantastic.”

I started to walk. My bare feet slapped on the ground and I slowly stopped even thinking about the fact I was naked – save for the tingling on my back, the itching sensation that someone was watching me. And the chill. Other than that, I could just focus on the surreal, empty building I found myself in. I started counting corridors – then lost count after fifteen. I didn’t take turns, save when I was forced to by reaching a T-intersection. I just kept walking.

After what felt like an hour but was likely closer to ten minuets, I started trying various doors. I didn’t know that they were doors – I just saw more smooth silvery walls. But I kept trying to place my palm and sweep it along walls. Every few minutes, I did manage to find a wall that did melt open into a doorway, revealing more empty rooms. There were chambers the same shape and form as what I had started in – but others had odd objects in them. One had glass tubes along the walls, each one about the size of a human being. Others had humming, buzzing crystals mounted in plinths set in the center of them. Others still were long, curved chambers that felt as if they were meant to have... something inside of them, but were bare.

And every few corridors, I let out another shout.

“Hello?”

My voice was the only response.

Hello.

Hello.

Hello.

I kept expecting to hear a sound other than my own footsteps, my own voice echoing off the walls, the faint hiss and slurp of the metal doors opening, something. But even my brain refused to play tricks on me – I was alone.

I kept walking. I kept testing rooms. I started to wonder if this was some kind of purgatory – maybe I had actually died, and this was just where dead people ended up. But if that was the case ... well, okay, I had tried to be a good Christian my whole life. In these modern days, what that meant seemed to be pretty fucking various depending on which Christian you asked – Catholic, Protestant, Episcopalian, classical Greek Orthodox. I was sure there were variations or types I’d never heard of, but my parents had raised me in the same protestant church that they had been going too their whole life, and...

Well, since I was both dead and, also, not in an oblivion of nothingness, they must have been partially right somewhere, right?

I shook my head. “God, if this is the afterlife, it fucking sucks!” I hesitated. “Sorry, by the way.”

More silence.

Then, suddenly, I came to a corridor that was different.

I didn’t know how long I had been walking, I just knew that I came around a bend and stood at a corridor that had a window. Brilliant sunlight shone through it, and my heart leaped as I rushed towards the window. I didn’t care if I flashed a million people at once, I mashed myself up against the glass and goggled out at the landscape. Whatever I was in, it towered high into the air ... and was surrounded by buildings. The buildings stretched out in every direction I could see. It was like something out of Star Wars or Star Trek – endless buildings and cityscapes, stretching out and out and out, until the horizon stole them away from me. The sun overhead was the same hue as the sun I remembered, and the sky was the same soft blue. The city, though, was all sterile silver, brilliant whites, highlighted by brilliant and crisp reds and yellow – paint that almost looked like it was meant to accentuate the edges and corners of buildings rather than break up the starkness.

But there was something else about the city.

It was ... completely still. There was not a single moving shadow. Not a single fluttering bird. Not an errant bit of trash. Not even a single flying car.

I slapped my palm against the glass. It was utterly solid. I started to slap my palms along the wall across from it and one of the concealed doors that I found opened into a chamber that was about the size of an elevator, even if it was rounded at the edges and had no buttons. But I had to try. I stood in the doorway ... and...

And found I couldn’t move. It wasn’t that anything held me in place. It was just that my muscles were locked there. My bones trembled and my jaw tightened and I couldn’t stop imagining what would happen to me if the elevator doors didn’t open from the inside – if the controls failed. If I was trapped in a coffin, in an endless empty city, screaming for...

“Okay, just do it,” I hissed.

I took a step forward.

Then another.

The doors shut behind me. A strange, source-less illumination surrounded me, but no buttons became apparent. I prayed to God, then said: “Exit.”

Nothing happened. I was about to start screaming, panic choking me, when the chamber quivered around me, then my belly lurched and I felt the motion of the chamber. We were cruising down, steadily. I sagged against the wall, my eyes closed. “Thank fucking god,” I whispered. “Oh thank you, Jesus.”

The elevator stopped after what felt like two eternities. The door opened and I practically flung myself out – and found that the exit was an antechamber to the building that I had been ... awakened in? There was more sterile silver, white and black ... but this actually looked like a place I could understand. There were curved circular planters, with trees in them. Actual honest to goodness trees. Branches feathered out from them, and leaves twinkled on their boughs. I practically ran to them, gasping and panting and ... yes, honest to God, crying. Tears beaded at my eyes, just at the sight of something that was alive and real and-

My palm went through the tree. My eyes goggled wide as I stumbled, then fell forward. My knees hit the dirt, and I realized it felt wrong. It was soft and spongy. For a few years, in high school, I had been in marching band. During my tour of duty, I had marched on grass, I had marched on streets, but I had never ever forgotten the strangeness of marching on AstroTurf. The dirt was fake. And my hand was swinging through a hazy, buzzing, crackling distortion of a hologram. I didn’t need to be a scientist to recognize it – I had seen enough science fiction, and played enough video games.