Hitori Nojima - Death Stranding - The Official Novelization, Volume Two

“Where’s the other thing you were supposed to bring? Ah, found it. Behold.”

Heartman showed Sam a small case that he had removed from the depths of the bag. From it, Heartman took out a transparent cylindrical container that Sam had never seen before. It seemed to be made of reinforced plastic and filled with some kind of liquid. Inside floated something that looked like a string. Were Bridges up to something again?

Sam remembered how Deadman and Die-Hardman had made him carry Lou all the way to the incinerator without telling him anything. Once again, he had found himself lugging cargo he was kept oblivious to. Back then it had been with Bridget’s corpse, and this time it was with Mama’s. He was furious at Bridges for once again using him as an unintentional errand boy. Sam’s anger must have been showing on his face, because Heartman wiggled his index finger at him to placate him and indicated toward the container.

“It appears to be an umbilical cord, yes?”

Sam didn’t even bother responding. He supposed that it did, but it also looked like the remains of some kind of weird creature. One that lived on a planet with an entirely different kind of ecosystem.

“Human, by the looks of it. I think?” Heartman remarked, showing Sam his cuff link and throwing him a meaningful look. Heartman was telling him to play along. Sam didn’t know what Heartman was up to, but he could understood that much. The situation seemed awfully similar to when Deadman had raised his suspicions about the director.

“It doesn’t look biological. I can’t say for sure without looking into it further, but I don’t think this was an ordinary conduit between fetus and placenta. It looks more like a BT’s tether.”

Heartman showed Sam the container up closer. Once he got a good look at it, Sam could see a substance like fine particles writhing around upon its surface. He had no idea that BT tethers that materialized like this could be harvested.

“And this was Mama’s?” Heartman wondered aloud to himself.

Sam had been the one to sever it, but he had no recollection of picking it back up. Heartman gave another meaningful nod.

“Yes… A body that doesn’t necrotize and an umbilical cord connected to the Beach… These are remarkable discoveries, Sam…” Heartman commented excitedly.

Sam began to back away, hoping to escape the hug that Heartman looked like he might give him at any moment. Heartman gave Sam an apologetic look, and placed the container with the umbilical cord in it back on the stretcher, before closing the body bag back up.

“Would you mind looking at this for a moment?” Heartman asked, turning to the monitor on the wall.

It showed a four-legged creature lying in a snow-covered field—a mammoth. Sam wondered if it had been dug up around here and continued to gaze at the monitor, unsure of Heartman’s intentions.

“Look closely. Can you tell what it is?” Heartman asked.

He zoomed in on the mammoth’s abdomen. The camera was picking up something strange. An umbilical cord was extending out from its belly.

“Do you see it? An umbilical cord is extending out of this mammoth’s body. This record, made before the Death Stranding, happened to get left behind. And look here.”

Heartman switched to the next photo. This one showed an ammonite with a similar cord. It was dangling from the center of the ammonite’s spiral-shaped shell.

“So far, I’ve only managed to dig up these two photographs, but I have been able to establish that neither of them are fakes. Now, the umbilical cord issue might be one thing, but what’s stranger is that neither this mammoth nor this ammonite were found fossilized or preserved in ice as you might expect. Both of these species have been extinct for thousands of years, but, as you can see in the photographs, they look as though they only died yesterday. Just like Mama. And I’ll bet that even more of these specimens are out there, waiting to be found. My colleagues are on the hunt as we speak. Once you activate the Chiral Network, I might even be able to retrieve some of the past records, too.”

To Sam, it all seemed a bit out-there. Still, he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the monitor. Had that cord dangling from the ammonite really connected it to the Beach? And what else did that imply?

The AED’s voice rang out across the room. Heartman shut down the monitor and the view outside the window reappeared.

The heart-shaped lake was right outside. If that lake which had been gouged into the earth by a voidout was the same as Heartman’s heart, that made his heart itself a scar. The fact that he had chosen to settle near it and looked down on it every single day as he went about his unusual routine told Sam that this man was living in the past as well. Mama and Deadman were the same. They may have adopted the name of Bridges, but they were attempting to build Bridges toward the past.

“Each person has their own Beach. Just as an umbilical cord attaches one fetus to one mother, we are attached to one Beach. That’s the rule. But I’m the exception. My Beach is connected to others. As if it were the beneficiary of a coronary bypass. Maybe this twisted heart of mine made it possible. I just want to find them. I’ll be back soon, hopefully from where my family are,” Heartman said to Sam as he reclined in his chair.

“You probably think what I do is strange. That no matter how special my Beach is, that doesn’t mean that my wife and daughter are still there waiting on it. And you’re right. There’s still so much that we don’t even understand about this world, so how can we possibly expect to understand anything about the Beach? But I have a theory. When a ka departs its ha , it goes to the Beach, which forms a corridor between this life and the next. Under normal circumstances, a body is incinerated within forty-eight hours of its passing and before it can necrotize, so that the ka can pass over to the other side knowing that it has no ha to return to. Its attachment to this world disappears. But once a body necrotizes, the ka becomes bound to this world. But because it doesn’t actually have a body to come back to, it becomes a BT.

“In any case, the ka doesn’t spend a long time on the Beach. But there are exceptions. For example, those who didn’t die a natural death. Those whose bodies were wiped out in an instant without necrotizing or being incinerated don’t become BTs, but their attachment toward this world keeps their ka from leaving the Beach. You can laugh it away as the delusions of a mad man if you like, though, since no matter how many times I wander the Beach, I never find my wife and daughter.”

The AED announced how long Heartman had left.

“My body will never go back to the way it was now. I’m willing to bet on that. But it all has to have some kind of meaning. The battlefields—the endless wars you found yourself trapped in—they’re from a time that actually existed. From a world war that took place over a hundred years ago. That war was a particularly nonsensical one. One in which weapons of mass destruction slaughtered people on a vast scale. The inherent meaning of each individual death was snatched away from those victims and they became nothing more than a number. They had no idea why they died. It’s the same for those who die in a voidout.

“If that strong attachment to this world and the yearning to stay connected to it created that battlefield, then that might support my theory about voidout victims becoming trapped on the Beach.”