SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

I don’t know what I would have said, but I wasn’t given the chance. With a swift action, Osiris pushed a button on his bracelet, sending me to a new land, one lush with green grasses and tall trees. A few birds chirped in the distance and the sun was warm, but not overly so.

I didn’t care, though. I was numb.

My life meant nothing to Osiris. I was just a body. He could use me over and over through whatever means he chose. I was nothing special to him.

Instead of living my life as he wanted me to, I made a decision that day. I would live like I wanted. Maybe there wasn’t much of a difference in what I would have done, but it was different in my mind. It was different in my motivation. I stopped living for Osiris and started living for myself.

It was probably a few centuries before I saw him again. I lived more than a half-dozen lives in that span, but he kept resurrecting me and depositing me in a new place without a rest stop in his chamber. Each time, I was dressed like an ancient Egyptian and I had the bronze medallion. The places I went were different in climate, culture, and people, but one thing was always the same. Me.

I encountered Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu (who wasn’t as hairy as the stories say). I met Hannibal. I saw Athens before Sparta overthrew it in the Great Peloponnesian War. The terra cotta warriors were new the first time I saw them.

Decades sped by as my lives continued to come and go.

When I saw Osiris again, I knew the Egyptian gods of old to be unreal. I had seen the “power” of a vast number of other gods, and had decided for myself that my master was a false one. He held dominion over my life, but he was no god.

“Your name is not really Osiris, is it?” I asked on a rare trip back to his chamber.

“I was wondering when you would ask me that,” he replied. In that moment, the garments he had worn in my presence for years vanished, replaced by a utilitarian article of clothing. “I can be rid of those now.”

“What should I call you?” I asked.

“The only name I’ve had on your world has been Osiris, so that is as good a name as any. It would make me happy to hear you continue to use it.”

And so, like any adolescent, I stopped doing what he liked. I found ways to make him unhappy. I ran towards death like a moth towards flame. I went through body after body until I finally realized I was probably living my lives just as he wanted me to. He was testing my body’s capabilities and I was simply providing him with more and more opportunities to test me.

For centuries, I managed to live full lives. I even settled down and met a few women.

But it wasn’t enough. There was one thing I lacked.

I wanted to die.

It wasn’t that my life wasn’t fulfilling. I certainly found various ways to entertain myself throughout the years, but after a certain point, it was all the same. One man’s dictator is another man’s king is another man’s president. They’re all the same. And that’s what my life was like as well.

Dying from smallpox wasn’t too different from wasting away due to scurvy, or kicking the bucket after meningitis, or even a good bout of pneumonia. When you’ve had them all, the ending is unchanged. One death was the same as the next.

And Osiris’ words came back to me again and again. The first time I had died, he had said, “ I cannot say each death will be as seamless as the one you just experienced .” He was right. Each time I passed away, it was as if someone had jabbed another dagger into my ribs and sucked my organs out through a straw. My brain was jelly for longer and longer each time as I recuperated. I finally decided that the more years that passed between one death and the next meant a little bit more suffering for Bek.

By the time I reached the Middle Ages, the pain was almost unbearable. So I began to think about how I could actually die.

I was obsessed. I spent at least one of my lives simply contemplating death at a Buddhist temple until old age snuck up and took me in my sleep. That was a good life. I wish I could do that one again.

I came to one conclusion: Osiris had to die. For me to die, he had to die.

How do you kill a god? First, you acknowledge that he isn’t a god.

In one of my few trips back in the Middle Ages, I confronted him. “You are not a god.”

He regarded me with thin eyes. “No.”

I knew I couldn’t fulfill my next statement yet, but I made it anyway. “One day I will kill you. For all the times you have killed me, you will pay.”

He laughed and turned a dial on a dais. “Good luck with that. Have a nice death, Bek.”

He’d sent me to the summit of a mountain. I suspect it was Mt. Everest or K2. Either way, I lasted a few hours.

While he held the power of my resurrection, he also seemed unaware of how many lives I was living. He wasn’t attuned to each of my lives, and he’d even mentioned “my world,” leading me to believe he was some sort of alien who had come to our planet to conduct his own particular brand of experiments—with me at the fore.

So, he wasn’t a god. I was still stuck with the problem of killing him. I had a lot of time to think about it, and I finally came to the conclusion that I was a clone. Each body after my first, born thousands of years ago in Egypt, was simply a clone. It explained the identical form and age as that first body. It allowed Osiris to prepare many duplicate sets of clothes as well. I didn’t know if he had hundreds of clones sitting in storage, or if he simply printed up a new one each time I died, but either way, I was a clone.

That eliminated several different methods of taking Osiris out. After all, I was given a new body and new clothes each time. I was a constant. His control. That meant each body would be the same each time. No variations.

But just as I was Osiris’ control, he had inadvertently given me one as well. Sometime in the 1400s, I had scratched the necklace with a 17-carat diamond I’d found in a South African mine. I had never tried to do anything to it before and was scared that perhaps Osiris would be angry.

That was during my rebellious stage, though, and I didn’t care. After death came a few weeks later when a shaft of that diamond mine collapsed on me, I reappeared in Renaissance Italy. I looked at the necklace and saw that the medallion was unchanged. There was a long scratch on the back, almost scoring the bronze piece from top to bottom. I smiled. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had found my control. Just as I stayed the same in each life and location for Osiris, the medal Osiris had sent with me was the same each time as well.

For hundreds of years I didn’t dare act on my knowledge of the necklace. I learned metallurgy and other crafts. I created my own works with many types of metal, and curated collections based on the design of Osiris’ medallion. When the technology finally advanced, I ran the medallion through an X-ray and tested it. I found the homing device Osiris had planted in it. His technology was far beyond my own, so duplication was probably out of the question for a while, but that didn’t stop me from trying. Eventually, I settled on adding to the medallion, and making the extra mass not just bronze. Something a bit more…explosive.

Even then, I needed a way to control it. I needed to be awake and conscious during the moment of transfer. I had to get Osiris to talk to me. He hadn’t given me an audience since the waning days of the Roman Empire, so I wasn’t hopeful, but I knew I needed the medallion to be ready whenever the moment struck.

I had spent the past few decades killing myself over and over. Any way you can imagine to kill yourself was probably on my radar at some point during those years. Every time, I’d just reappear on Earth, ready to live and die again.