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

“Deadman told me that man, Clifford Unger, was in the US Special Forces,” Heartman went on. “He must have seen a lot of war in his time. His misery and hatred, combined with your BB acting as some sort of catalyst, may have brought these battlefields to our world. It’s just a theory, but perhaps that man who can summon BTs also summoned Cliff’s anger.”

“You think Higgs is pulling his strings?” Sam asked.

Sam found himself unconsciously gripping Cliff’s dog tag in his pocket. What if Higgs summoned Cliff and that battlefield to get in Sam’s way, now that he could repel the BTs?

“I don’t know. But evidence does suggest that Higgs brought them here,” Heartman mused.

The window on the wall went into shade mode and the lake outside disappeared. The interior of the room slowly grew darker.

“Oh, before I forget, I have a favor to ask,” Heartman quickly interjected.

“Could you just… relax until I come back? Time stops on the Beach, but not in the Seam. Rest assured, it’ll only feel like three minutes to you,” Heartman explained. Heartman closed his eyes and the gramophone placed at an angle to his lounge chair began to play music. It was Chopin’s Funeral March again. “We’ll continue this shortly.”

The AED emitted a beep and the EKG flatlined.

As the Funeral March echoed quietly throughout the lab, Sam had no idea what to do. It was just him, Mama’s corpse, Heartman’s temporarily deceased body, and a gently snoozing BB. There wasn’t a single person who was truly alive or truly dead in the entire room. Although it was unclear what really defined who was alive and who was dead in the first place.

All Sam could do was settle himself on the sofa and wait for Heartman to come back. He was still holding onto Cliff’s dog tag. It was covered in scratches and listed his name, affiliation, and religion, but no matter how long Sam stared at it, he still didn’t understand anything about Cliff. He didn’t understand Cliff’s relationship with Lou, nor anything about the man’s life or death. If Higgs was harnessing Cliff’s anger and summoning the battlefield to get in the way of Sam’s mission, it seemed like a very roundabout method. There must have been other things that he could have done that would take less time and effort.

For someone who talked so big about bringing humanity’s extinction, why didn’t Higgs just use a nuke or voidouts or something to destroy all the cities and take out the Chiral Network knots? No matter how effective a repatriate’s blood and other bodily fluids were against BTs, they were just still byproducts of one body. It wasn’t like there was enough of Sam’s blood to get rid of every single BT. They still posed a massive threat.

Higgs had once been a respectable porter. Fragile’s comments and Bridges’ data backed that up. In fact, when he first started working with Fragile, his main motive had been to help other people. But that had all changed when he jumped ship and began working with someone else.

That meant this new partner must hold the key to everything. But neither Bridges nor Fragile knew who it was. Higgs had made good use of Fragile’s DOOMS and organization, so his partner must have offered him something even more powerful. Maybe Higgs’s true intentions lay beyond extinction. His proud proclamations about how he was the particle of God and the arrogance that went with that claim seemed to imply as much.

Sam suddenly snapped back to his senses. The Funeral March music was gradually winding down.

“No luck.” Heartman sat up and wiped away his tears. He quickly tapped the hourglass on the table next to him and the still sand suddenly began to flow upwards.

Sam reflected on how this strange backward hourglass represented Heartman’s heart, which desired nothing more than to rewind the past.

“Oh, sorry. Where were we? I know it may seem like a nuisance, but I’m acclimated to it now. Most of life’s basic functions fit rather easily into a twenty-one-minute time slot. Sleep is the tricky one,” Heartman commented light-heartedly.

“I die for three minutes and live for twenty-one. The cycle of my life is much like yours, except for the fact that yours is split into twenty-four-hour periods, while mine is split into twenty-four minutes. But when I’m dead on the Beach, time seems to go on forever. Because time doesn’t exist on the Beach. It’s like how time passes when you’re asleep. But this cycle is my reality. Consider the BTs that return from the past and the timefall that accelerates the degradation of everything it touches. How can our sense of time cope with such irrational phenomena?

“How do you think we got here? I believe that it was because of our awareness of time. We can imagine a future beyond ourselves. We know that even the Neanderthals buried their dead and laid flowers. We humans can see a tomorrow. We conceived concepts like eternity and an afterlife, helping our societies to outlast us as individuals. And in order for societies to outlast the lifespan of the individual, we conceived of an afterlife, and a future beyond ourselves…

“Alas, the Death Stranding threatens to undo all our progress. Take me, for example. I want to find my family on the Beach and pass together with them into the world of the dead. This phenomenon has managed to produce a man as strange as me. Honestly, the twenty-one minutes I spend here—all downtime, nothing more. Time spent waiting to go back to the search. My body may be present, but my soul is on the Beach. I’m already dead…”

Sam thought that it was most likely a piece of fiction that Heartman had concocted for himself. It was to explain his truth and share it with others. If someone only talked about their own story to themselves, they’d go nuts. They’d withdraw into themselves, becoming the king of a kingdom they were the only inhabitant of. That’s why we all need someone to share our story with. That’s what making a connection is ( maybe Heartman, Mama, and Lockne and Deadman too were all struggling to try and create: a place for themselves in this world ). Maybe Bridget’s plan to rebuild America was nothing more than a narrative, either. Immediately after the thought struck him, the cuff link on Sam’s right wrist began to feel much heavier. He ended up blurting out anything to escape its weight.

“I know that feeling. Lost my family in an accident,” he said, not really knowing what family he meant, in all honesty. Was he talking about Lucy? Bridget and Amelie? Or about the photograph he had lost. Perhaps he was even talking about the parents he had never even met.

“Well! I never expected you to open up to me,” Heartman commented, inverting the hourglass. Through some sort of sorcery, the flow of the sand turned and began falling from the upper compartment to the lower one. The amount of sand sat in the top never lessened. Yet it still piled up below. “I’m the same as you.”

MOUNTAIN KNOT CITY OUTSKIRTS // SATELLITE CITY

“Don’t worry, it’s alright. Trust me,” a voice told Heartman.

Even if he closed his eyelids, the light raining down still managed to hurt his eyes. He was wearing a mask and vaguely aware that the anesthesia would make him drop off any moment now. The doctors had told him that the surgery would take the better part of a day, but when he next opened his eyes it would all already be over. Ten hours would pass in the blink of an eye. He experienced the exact same phenomenon whenever his consciousness switched to its Beach phase. But when he spoke of this phase to others, they always likened it to a near-death experience. The structure of his story and the motifs within were shared by many people. They always described looking down at themselves from above. That they heard their name called when they attempted to cross a river, only to find themselves alive again when they turned back. That they were going to meet the friends and family that had passed on before them. Or that they were passing through a tunnel with a light at the end. The records Heartman saw always mentioned the same details, over and over again. Then, after the Death Stranding, all of that was replaced with talk of the Beach. A beach and the ocean. All near-death experiences became the same.