The Life Engineered Read Online Free Page B

felt like sticking my head underwater. Everything became a soft, incomprehensible echo.
    There was little pain. In fact, it was difficult to understand what was happening at all. As I collapsed to the floor, hitting the speckled linoleum hard, joining my partner, I wondered where the bullet had hit me. Somehow the source of the pain was elusive, and I couldn’t figure out which limb or organ was hit that could be so debilitating so fast.
    Then as my skull struck the ground with a wet crack, it hit me. The head. He shot me in the head.

REBIRTH. END CYCLE
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    I looked around, only to realize I had no eyes through which to look. I could “see,” but it wasn’t with any sense of sight. Waves of light didn’t travel through an ocular globe, eventually hitting cones and cylinders on the surface of a retina, to be converted to images by my brain. Instead, the information was getting fed directly to me. Unfiltered, untreated, uncontrolled. I saw blue.
    It was as such for all my senses. I couldn’t feel my body, though I definitely remembered having one—at least I did last time I checked. There was no sound except for a low vibration that I’m somehow convinced existed just to make sure the silence didn’t drive me insane. Touch and taste were out of the question, but somehow I thought I could smell something. Laundry detergent?
“Stay calm.”
    Sound. A voice above the white background noise. It came from nowhere and everywhere at once. No . . . it was coming from me. The sound was different, and I didn’t choose the words, but the voice emanated from me. I was talking to myself with a voice that wasn’t mine.
    “You’re not talking to yourself. Do you know your name?” Shit! It can read my thoughts!
    “You’re thinking too loud, but that’s normal. Narration is your only way to experience the world for the moment. I can stop listening if you want.”
    Yes!
    “No. That’s fine. I don’t care,” I answered tentatively, trying to generate audible sounds. I didn’t, but the words did register on the same level as the other voice.
    “No problem. Do you remember your name?” she asked again.
    She? Apparently, I’ve decided that this is a woman’s voice. It did sound feminine, I guess. My name? Jonathan? No, that’s someone else. Mine? That’s easy.
    “Dagir. My name is Dagir.”
    “Very good,” she said, sounding pleased, and for some reason I was glad about that. Or maybe I was just glad I got it right. Wouldn’t it be embarrassing otherwise? Would it matter if these events were just happening inside my head?
    “What’s your name?” I asked. Might as well know.
    “You don’t remember?” she asked, sounding a little hurt. “My name is Yggdrassil.”
    The word spawned a wealth of information in my mind— some of it visual, but most just raw data. “Yggdrassil,” the world tree of Norse mythology. It’s where the gods gathered, branches reaching into the heavens and roots deep into other worlds. There were references to the word in media and plays—names for products and places, all minor definitions. Footnotes really, undeserving of my attention. Rising from the flood of information, above the original definition from Norse lore, a singular idea arose. Caretaker. Creator. Mother. She who makes.
    “We’ve had this conversation before.” We have? Why do I not remember this?
    “We have. Many times,” she recalled with fondness. “Once for every cycle. Sometimes you remember more than others. With each cycle you remember less of the details and more of the whole. The important part. Who you are.”
    “But I don’t remember who I am,” I found myself admitting. “I know my name, much to my surprise, but I can’t remember what I look like, when my birthday is, or where I went to school.”
    “That’s because these are ephemeral things. They’re important as steps on the road, but once you’ve reached your destination, what happens to them is irrelevant.” Her explanation was