—Amelie was born on the Beach. Or rather, her physical body—her ha—was born into this world, while her spiritual essence—her ka—was born on the Beach. Medically speaking, they weren’t sure what to call it. In the end, they settled on a diagnosis similar to what’s known as “locked-in syndrome,” a condition where the subject is mentally present, but physically unable to move their body—except for their eyes, sometimes.
—The president was able to communicate with Amelie’s soul on the Beach, but her body remained in the hospital as it was when she was born. The president didn’t even officially announce that she had a daughter, but, after around twenty years—thanks mainly to the president’s efforts—a miracle happened and she began to show progress. Amelie’s physical and spiritual selves gradually came together, and her body began to develop normally.
—It was right about then that they realized she was also a DOOMS sufferer and began to ascertain her incredible abilities. She can transport herself physically to her own Beach. Guess it makes sense—that world is more real to her than this one. She may have overcome her initial struggles, but she still spent most of her life on the other side. Eventually, the president came to feel that her daughter had been through enough. From that point onward, all communication with Amelie would be via hologram. I swore an oath to the president and to America. As far as I was concerned, her word was law. So when she said Amelie was her daughter and the best candidate to succeed her… I believed it.
—But when the archives were restored, I couldn’t resist testing out my access privileges. I knew that I was going behind the president’s back, but I just had to know. And that’s how I found out Bridget was diagnosed with uterine cancer in her twenties, and couldn’t have children. You see? Doesn’t add up, does it? There’s no way Amelie could be Bridget’s biological daughter. So where’d she come from? Who is she? Is she even real? How can we be sure that Amelie is an Extinction Entity… when we don’t even know if Amelie is Amelie? Hell, for all I know the EE theory might be bullshit. But if it’s not—if she’s the cause of the Death Stranding—then I have to accept her invitation. I’ve brought a special gun. It’s special to her, to me, to him. To all of us. That’s why I should be able to take it to the Beach. I’m gonna stop what she started… by stopping her—
Die-Hardman checked to see that the revolver in his hand was loaded and put it back down. Then he became silent and just stared at the gun. It looked like the message had frozen again, but Sam could see his lips trembling slightly.
—One last confession—
Die-Hardman looked up.
—I’m just a man. No powers. Nothing special. Don’t have DOOMS. I can’t repatriate like Sam either. Don’t know the first thing about dying. I never tried it. Yeah, I’ve been to hell. Every single battlefield was hell. But no matter how terrible it got, I never died. Because all I ever did was run from death. Well! I gotta go. She’s calling for me. Bridges, don’t let me down—
The message ended.
<After he recorded this, the director jumped to the Beach. Or rather, Amelie summoned him there.>
Sam felt uneasy. It was like the frozen hologram of Die-Hardman was staring at him. It was hard to accept the man now his mask had been removed and he had an unfamiliar face.
“He shot Bridget when I saw him. She didn’t die, but then Cliff showed up and got in the way,” Sam said, trying to remember what happened on the Beach, in part to figure out his own confusion. “No,” he continued, “I must have been mistaken about Bridget. Everything that happened on that Beach felt like an illusion. Even Cliff himself. I must have just holed myself up on my own Beach and imagined Amelie and Cliff.”
Lucy used to say similar things to him in their therapy sessions before she became aware of the Beach and went there herself.
<Sam, no matter how you want to spin this, I went to Cliff’s battlefield too. Unless I, myself, am a fragment of your imagination, Cliff was there. I experienced that battlefield. And I have friends who have experienced Amelie’s Beach. Right?>
<—Sam.> The voice on the other end changed.
“Fragile?” Sam asked. “Are you alright?”
Fragile said that she was, but a hint of exhaustion still lingered in her voice. At least she had woken up from her coma. That was reassuring.
<I had a little chat with Higgs back on the Beach. He said everything was part of her plan.>
What Fragile said didn’t register at first. The sounds she made eventually formed into words and the words strung together to form a sentence. Everything was part of her plan? What was that supposed to mean?
<She was their leader. The terrorist voidouts at Central Knot, Middle Knot, South Knot, and Edge Knot, the whole extinction agenda—Amelie was behind it all.>
Fragile seemed to be finding this difficult, and it didn’t seem like it was just because she was so worn out. Sam found it even harder. Sam felt like he was drowning all alone in his room. His lungs and brain were begging for oxygen. His fingers became so numb that he could no longer feel them. His arms turned pale like they belonged to a corpse.
<I know you don’t want to believe it. Even I wanted to believe that it was just Higgs trying to talk his way out of everything he’s done, but it lines up with what Die-Hardman said.
<Peter Englert used to be a porter. As a courier, he was absolutely obsessed with his deliveries. He was so serious that he used to tell me how transporting goods and connecting people was the one thing that kept him going. He had all the right attributes for the job. Talked to me about why he took on the name Higgs as an homage to the Higgs Field, that which gives mass to all particles within the universe. He said that the Higgs Field connected all particles, gave them substance and brought this world into existence. That’s why I joined forces with him in the first place. I wanted to rejoin the fragments of this broken world. I let him use my power. I entrusted him with everything. But Higgs turned on me after he met Amelie. I never knew what it was that changed him. All he said was that her powers put mine to shame. He said that if he could rely on her power, then connecting the entire world would no longer be just a dream. He didn’t need me anymore. Once he had Amelie and the Fragile Express system he had everything he needed. But he got so drunk on Amelie that he became her agent of extinction. He was no longer the Higgs who brought mass to the world, but a Homo Demens who lived to bring chaos and destroy it. All of our abilities—the ability to summon BTs and the ability to jump through the Beach—they were all given to us by her. She was the one who stopped me making jumps. Everything was down to Amelie, down to the Extinction Entity. But Higgs soon forgot all about that and began to delude himself into thinking that he was the mastermind. Even though Amelie was the architect of it all, Higgs was made to believe that he was the writer and the hero of the story.>
Sam realized he was clutching his dreamcatcher and let go of it in a hurry. What had Amelie imbued into this charm that could supposedly turn nightmares into dreams? Was the dream that Higgs tried to have a nightmare?
<Higgs showed me inside his pod. And there was no BB in there. Instead, it was the same doll Die-Hardman had. This is their “bridge baby.” They’re different from our BBs. Their methods and yours are completely different. Your BB links you to the world of the dead. Their doll links them to Amelie—the Extinction Entity—and her Beach. There’s this idea that the isolationists, separatists, and terrorists in the west brought back BB tech and Bridges was just following suit. It’s garbage. But it is true that when Higgs started using the BB, the separatists became more extreme, and that Bridges obtained BB technology as they prepared the first expedition. It seems like everything started from when we brought back BB tech. The two BBs may be different, but doesn’t it feel like they’re connecting something?>
<You know who else had dolls like this?> Deadman interjected. <Cliff. He was carrying them on the battlefields. Cliff, Higgs, the director—this doll may connect all three of them. Perhaps they were made to do the EE’s bidding through it? Bu
t all of them acted so differently. So if Amelie is an EE, what is her true intention? Is it to wipe out all of humanity? Is it to get revenge on America? Or is to rebuild it? What does she want with our Lou? What about the possibility that Bridget was an EE with that umbilical cord of hers?>
<I know we’re going round in circles here, Sam. But it’s too much to take on alone. It’s such a vast and complex picture that it’s impossible to see from a single perspective. We can’t see the whole thing without looking down from far above. But unless the timefall ever lets up or the chiral clouds clear, we’re trapped down here. All we can do is rely on you. We need you to go back to Amelie’s Beach and meet with her. Find out what an Extinction Entity really is. And find out what it is that she really plans on doing. At the very least, Amelie presents as a human and speaks like a person. I believe that she has feelings. I may not be right, and she may have pulled the wool over my eyes, but there has to be some meaning to the form that she exists in. We might even be able to glean some clues about how to stop the Last Stranding. She’s probably waiting for you as we speak.>
Amelie’s intentions, huh? Sam thought back to Fragile’s earlier bombshell. Even if Amelie was an Extinction Entity—even if she wasn’t human—they could still talk to her. Sam was going to go and find out what she was planning.
“I’ll be back soon, Fragile. I’ll leave it to you to get me there.”
Sam heard a faint laugh on the other end of the line. Sam could picture Fragile in his mind, forcing a smile.
<Alright, Sam. She’s waiting for you on the Beach, isn’t she?>
CAPITAL KNOT CITY // BRIDGES HQ
—John.
He looked over his shoulder but there was no one to be seen. Even though he knew he was hearing things, he still couldn’t help but search for the voice’s owner. The voice was only echoing in his own head, so the source had to be inside of him. Yet still he scanned the room around him in fear.
What if he wasn’t just hearing things? What if that was just what he wanted to believe? Once John had heard the report of Sam being sucked into the battlefield, he knew that his time had come.
Clifford Unger had returned. He had returned to this world to exact his revenge. He hoped—prayed—that it was all just an illusion. But that was nothing more than wishful thinking.
—John.
It was probably just paranoia right now, but John knew that a time would come one day when Cliff would be whispering his name in his ear for real. That was why he had to go straight to the source and put an end to all of this right now. He had to confront the source of his fear. Die-Hardman could go back to being just John and finally die. It had always been on his mind. And now the time was here. Cliff was using Amelie to invite him to the Beach.
What happened on that day had always remained vivid in Die-Hardman’s mind. He remembered it like it was yesterday. He was nervous as hell, but underneath that was a strange kind of euphoria. Not unlike the high he felt when he first went into combat years before—a nameless grunt stumbling around, surrounded by vets who’d seen it all before. Not that he’d stayed nameless for long. He turned out to be a born survivor, and before he knew it he’d earned himself a reputation and an audience with President Bridget Strand several months after her inauguration.
She’d looked him straight in the eye and told him that from that day one, he answered to her. That they were going to rebuild America together. It may have sounded daunting and intimidating, but he knew even then that wasn’t her intent. She spoke like someone who’d lived a dozen lifetimes, who’d made the most of each and every one.
After she’d said her piece, she smiled and took a step closer to him. Her necklace, a simple Y-shaped thing, caught the light, and for an instant he saw something impossible. The necklace was glowing, radiant, spreading across her body, chest to abdomen. Like something was being drawn out of her ha, he thought at the time, though he couldn’t say why. Every time he saw her with that necklace, he remembered the light.
* * *
“This child’s special,” Bridget proclaimed.
A life-support unit shaped like a pod was filled with artificial amniotic fluid, and the baby that had been safely removed from the womb of its brain-dead mother was curled up asleep inside. Bridget stared at the fetus from the other side of the glass.
This child was indeed a special child. If a mother suffered brain death at twenty-eight weeks, their fetus didn’t usually survive.
The president loved that child deeply. She used to fret about his health and care for him like he was her own. She was both Gaia and Medea. That’s why no matter how much love she had, she could still be so cruel.
John felt like he was going to get swallowed up by Bridget’s big eyes as she stared at the baby and looked away. The baby’s biological mother was being kept alive by life-support equipment and was laid on a bed beside the pod, still connected to the baby by an artificial umbilical cord, but he was already falling into the delusion that Bridget was the baby’s real mother.
“This child will be the bridge that connects us all,” Bridget told him. This baby, the prototype BB who would not only help rebuild America but might even save humanity one day, reacted to her voice and let out a tiny cry. Bridget caressed the pod and whispered, “It’s okay. You’re a special child.”
He was already special to John. But John had only realized that a long time after the child had been removed from his mother’s womb and the BB experiments had begun.
“You’ll be out of there in no time.” John heard a voice as he walked down the hallway. “And the second all this is over, I’m gonna take you wherever you wanna go.”
Before John even had time to try to remember who the voice belonged to, his attention was snatched away by the open doors to the laboratory—which was dressed up to look like a hospital room from the outside. Someone had been sloppy. You had to pass through multiple layers of security to access this floor! Only a few people would have been able to enter the room, but if anything had happened to the BB, John would never be able to face Bridget again.
John held his breath and snuck over to the open doorway to check it out. He could see someone’s back as they leaned over the pod. Even though his body was obscured by a shirt, John could tell the man was made of muscle.
“Look, BB. Brought you an astronaut.”
Without warning, and without a sound, the man leaning over the pod turned around. Astonished by such a clearly drilled action, John couldn’t take his eyes off the man’s face. The man had the same reaction.
“Can I help you?” the man asked. The man’s smile instantly jogged John’s memory. Whenever John had escaped the jaws of death, that smile was always there to greet him.
“Holy shit, John, is that you?!”
“Captain?” John exclaimed in surprise. “What are you doing here?”
The two men embraced each other. Die-Hardman, the man who made it back from any situation, and Cliff, the man who always made it back from the verge of death, had met once again.
“They don’t want a repeat of last year.” Cliff looked away from his wife and back toward John.
“Last year? The voidout in Manhattan?” John asked, careful to feign surprise. Cliff’s wife and baby certainly seemed to fit the bill for the mother and child from Manhattan. This time they had managed to create a special child, a Bridge Baby, without causing another accident. But to think that this was Cliff’s kid… Now the BB had a special meaning for John, too.
But the question of who the baby really belonged to began to spin around John’s head. Did it belong to Cliff? Or did it belong to Bridget and America? It was Bridget and the American
government who had saved the child from its mother’s womb. He was expected to become the savior of America. He was supposed to become a child that belonged to all mankind, to be sacrificed. Just like Jesus who died on the cross atop the hill of Golgotha. Who had been Jesus’ real father?
* * *
“This isn’t what we agreed on. You said you’d do everything in your power to save BB.”
Cliff hounded Bridget. It had been a few visits since Cliff and John had first reunited.
“We are. But we cannot release your son just yet,” Bridget answered coolly. There was no hesitation in her cold voice. “Believe me when I tell you—it’s for the best.”
“Says some woman in a mask who’s done nothing but lie to me,” Cliff snapped back.
What Cliff was saying was right, but John couldn’t take his side right now. It made him feel so frustrated and pathetic that he couldn’t help his friend.
One discovery John had made in the time since he first saw Cliff again was that Cliff knew nothing about the Bridge Babies. All Cliff had been told was that his wife was brain-dead and the premature fetus had been rescued and moved to the NICU. His wife’s corpse would have to be suitably disposed of due to similarities with the Manhattan case, but with the passage of time, they might be able to save the baby. To Cliff, the BB wasn’t a Bridge Baby at all, but his actual child.
“I have a duty to protect our country. Lies are an unfortunate necessity.” Bridget left the room, ignoring Cliff, who was about to say something back.
All John was able to do was scurry silently after her. He couldn’t bear Cliff’s stare.
* * *
“The president gave me the highest-level access privileges. I’ve used them to manipulate the security system,” John looked up from the terminal and explained to Cliff a few days after the president brushed him off.
“We have five minutes before it resets, sir. Five minutes to talk… off the record.”
After that day when John walked in on Cliff, Bridget had made a complaint about the defective autolock feature on the door. As a result, John’s authorization had been upgraded to the highest level.