Death Buys Life

A Science Fiction One Shot

Photo by Daniele Franchi on Unsplash

I arrived when you had ordered but nothing played out how you predicted. From the get go I was outmanned and outgunned, my paltry squad was halved in the first minute of combat. The rest of us dead by five minutes. Promised glory but turned into a short lived red mist and a long lasting dark stain.

That was my first death.

I have since gone back to look upon the dark stain that was me, how foolish I was, how foolish we all were back then.

We are foolish no more.

When I awakened to my second life I had forgotten everything you taught me, it was only on my third death that I could remember the details, then nothing could stop me. Time was my ally and I had all the time in the universe.

You see, dying, isn't the end, in fact, it had become a beginning. Life had become cheap and infinite. Sure I had signed “my life” away without a thought on how it would be spent but if I am reborn again and again am I really spending my life? If death is not an end then life is priceless, valueless, meaningless, and then the most meaningful thing in all the worlds because I am no longer restricted to a normal life with normal aspirations. I can fail infinite times, I can plan to take four centuries attempting to succeed at some esoteric goal, life doesn't matter yet everything, everything, becomes possible.

But first I had to die again and again and again and again and again and again and again and, you get the picture.

Money? Who cares. I'm paid like any regular employee only I don't have to pay rent or buy food, or clothes, or entertainment. After a century I was mega rich with the right investments, so were my whole squad. Immortal soldiers could have become the whole damn economy if we had shore leave to spend our riches, instead money lost meaning. I guess that was the only downside to being a military experiment. It was a miracle the government continued to pay us rather than loop hole our first deaths as reasons for not doing so but I guess they knew we'd turn tail if they pulled something like that, or at least try to, and then the men upstairs would have to spend their time hiring assassins or whatever they do to immortals who walk away from it all. Or perhaps our pay was so paltry in the grand scheme you simply didn't care.

The government money has been a significant help, I like to imagine whole departments getting sacked for continuing to pay us, for those who came up with the idea getting blasted by senior officials. They created us and we will destroy them.

You cannot walk away. There is no retirement. No switching careers. Once you're a soldier in the Lifers you're one till the end of time, or until someone finds a method to kill us I guess. I haven't heard of that happening but I suppose it could. I'm sure you have tried many times, deleting the files, destroying the hardware, viruses, editing our genes to add genetic disorders, all sorts I am sure. Yet here I stand.

We landed on some icy moon and my toes froze off. I couldn't walk. They nuked the moon in the end. I was vaporised before I even saw the white flash.

That was my fourth death.

I was still a rookie then but when I awoke from stasis I could taste the nuclear explosion, feel the burn on my new skin, only there was no burn. It was in my mind, the feeling had carried over, the feeling I had after, or during, my death. I don't think much about how it works anymore, it just does. So long as you have a flesh printer and a digital copy of yourself you can go and go and go.

Of course that was the first thing we set out to acquire. A printer and database of ourselves, the first one was straightforward but the second. Well when you sign up for the Lifers you sign away the intellectual property rights to your “material being”, meaning you no longer own your image, similar to big galaxy wide celebs and their “likeness” but down to the hairs in our ears. That we had to steal and, hell, had the government made certain to store those files deep and secure. But as I said when you're practically immortal time is your ally and all we had to do was plan and wait and eventually a mistake would be made that we, that I, could take advantage of.

My fifth, sixth, and seventh deaths all happened aboard the Maw of Terror, an embarrassing name for a serious warship, but it took seventy six days to seize control of it after fifty days of pursuit. I can't remember what war it was in. War of the Eight Sisters... The Yin-Balg War... The Gersham Incident. I don't know. After my twentieth death I stopped paying attention to what the conflicts were about and with whom, all I cared about was who my target was and when I could kill him or her. I think that was what lead to wanting to “go it my own”, the lack of humanity, the lack of meaning. The men upstairs had stripped all of it away through efficiency and machine thinking, treating us Lifers like a battering ram. I mean, yeah, each time we die we get reborn but there's a lot more going on that just meat for the grinder here. Any idea what you could do with a spy who can infiltrate, find out everything, then end themselves to get home? Or hyper-trained operatives on decades long hunts. Little known fact, the bodies age but when you die the system can put you back into any age body you want. Course the government chooses your peak physical age but you could come back as an eighty year old or a ten year old so long as the likeness was on file, it is impossible to come back younger than when your first file is made but older, well, all you have to do is live a little and that was one thing we weren't being allowed to do.

The tenth death was a commendation. I'd gone two years in the same body, an achievement for my squad, the VIIth, hell the whole of the Lifers, and so I got to choose how I wanted to die and where I wanted to be reborn for a months leave. I chose to be shot into a star like the gods of old and reborn on Tula for a month of cocktails and smoking hot beach babes.

I was bored by the third day and offed myself to get back on the frontlines. My squad mates laughed about it. There's just nothing like being sent into certain death and fighting to come home in the same body. You fail nine out of ten times but when you do it, well, there ain't nothing else like it. Two years of it felt like heaven.

Well we eventually got the printer and the data, though I wasn't even in the same sector, let alone system, when that happened. Shame too, sounded like a great adventure. Soldiers died, like really died. See when a “traitor” dies they don't get reprinted, not straight away at least. The techs comb through the stuff that comes back, it isn't computer code it's something else something closer to... music... weird shit. Anyway, they comb through it looking for information. Easier than interrogation. If they can't find anything then the rebel is reprinted and interrogated, though a lot of times they don't remember details or memories become jumbled. No one is quite sure why but after enough deaths, too much tinkering, things become... frayed. The brave men who signed up for that mission were mad, they were choosing to risk real death. I don't know if I could have done it if I had had the option.

Not that any of that matters out in the field!

Out in the field it's do or die! Kill or be killed, no need for memories, no need for coherent thought, just rely on your training and trust your gut. That – instinct – never goes away, no matter how many times a man dies, it is ingrained deeper than anything else. The will to survive. No amount of “mental fraying” rids a man of the will to survive. No amount of fraying rids a man of his lust for revenge. Give me and my squad enough time and we will topple any regime you ask us too, but first we have a personal grudge to see to. One I am here to settle.

Once we had our own printer that was the beginning of the end for our old employers. We had elevated ourselves from nuisance to freedom fighters, or terrorists according to you. Now our faces were plastered on every news bulletin across the worlds, and that brought support in certain circles. Circles advantageous to us. Circles disadvantageous to you. It is true the majority of people, the froth of humanity either don't care or disdain us, so far removed from the reality of war and cutting edge technology I don't blame them.

I do blame those who knew, those who were aware, those who built the technology, those who funded the research, those who chose to use it, and those who advertised it.

All of them.

All of you.

It has taken me and us “rebel” Lifers centuries to find you and I am disappointed to see some of you are old, far older than you should be, while others are young, far younger than I predicted. Do you not use the printers? Why not? Is there some downside to immortality you have forgotten to tell your soldiers?

Don't answer.

I already know the truth. We... I found it early on, in the first fifty years or there abouts. The mind goes... fuzzy after the first “life time”. Memories drift. Turns out humans just aren't built to last more than one hundred and fifty years, even with new bodies, young and spry, something ephemeral simply snaps and we all go a bit mad.

How am I here, I know you're dying to ask.

As I'm sure you now know searching on those little computers of yours that I am approaching my five hundredth birthday and should be comatose or at least incoherent and illogically violent to the point of needing to be restrained.

I will not tell you the secret.

One immortal is enough for our galaxy, at least I think it's just me. If I figured it out, others could so who really knows. I never told my comrades, I couldn't saddle them with the curse, for this is a curse, an exciting curse into the unknown but a curse nonetheless. The point is the people who once held your positions made my life, and thousands of my comrade's lives, very, very miserable. Sure we had a good time for a century or so but eventually are friends went mad, our spouses died, we saw our children pass on, we buried untold numbers of grand children and great grand children, because, believe it or not, some of us had lives before joining the Lifers. Hard to imagine I know.

I watched a star explode off Hethsemi Prime. A fleet of ships sailed into it, some notion of an honourable defeat. We defeated those... I can't even remember who it was, a real uptight peoples, aliens, humans, I don't care. We crushed them. Embarrassed them. When they surrendered they requested a single condition, to sail into their star like their ancestors. We granted it just to laugh. Some of the rookies were solemn, treating their opponents with honour, as a soldier should, but those of us decades into our service we'd lost all the reverence. A sad state. Childish in fact. Well when those horrendous warriors flew into the star something in their engines reacted and the whole thing went boom. We survived the star's death, just, but the system, all six planets and thirteen moons, did not. Have you ever seen an asteroid field be born? It's beautiful, and noisy, and outrageously dangerous. Then we died to the trillions of projectiles spinning close to the speed of light. We all awoke in the printer ship off Talik, had a drink, then boarded our replacement. Must have cost a fortune to reprint the entire VIIth plus the ships.

It was worth it just to see a star die.

There are a thousand memories I could share. Things that would make you weep, things that would make a man on the street crumble, sights so beautiful, sounds so haunting, a galaxy of wonder, and the only ones to see it were the most brutish of us. It isn't fair. What an artist wouldn't give to see what I have seen, I dread to ask one. I dread to imagine the works of aching beauty that would result. You see, in my almost five hundred years, I learned how not to be brutish, at least not always, I grew an appreciation for the finer things, for culture, for history, for ancestry, and find our worlds, your worlds, lacking. You have created a condition for man no better than that of mould on a wall. I weep for what we have become.

Once, near the end of my service, we dropped from orbit. The Hail we called it, were we are shot out of our star cruiser hulls like missiles, clad head to toe in the thickest alloys possible, armed with more weaponry than an entire battalion of regular meat. Oh it is beautiful, and deadly. A third will wake up in the printer before they even reach atmosphere. Another fifth will fuck up the landing and be nothing more than a crater of twisted flesh and steel. Those who survive do some real work. Like lighting a forest of dry kindling, we tore through that planet, those people, conquered them before dusk. It was beautiful.

I stormed the palaces of Mo'kali'ral, you've never seen so much diamond in your life. Pillars of it, carved with such intricate stories of their ancient race. Stories of how they rose from the deepest pits of the earth in pursuit of godly wisdom, of how they strove to reach the farthest lands, the sky, and then the stars, of how their Emperor led the way to the gods and stole the secret of interstellar travel. The skulls of those gods hung above his throne of perfect gold and obsidian mined from the deepest depths of Yo'tal. Now those halls lie empty, the diamond crushed into little gemstones for jewellery, jewellery you probably wear. Yo'tal is gone, hollowed out then ground down. I would have liked to see a moon ground into dust.

You officials, corporate giants, elected members, meeting here without the knowledge of the public, your voters, your customers, and the media turn a blind eye because otherwise the journalists would be frozen out and there is always someone willing to accept a bribe, who cares about one with principles. What is the next system, the next civilisation, on your list? Who are the Lifers going to conquer for your bank accounts? Who is next to be rendered into a fine gristle only for you to extract everything of value from their home and planet? Or perhaps there is war against one of the other empires that can match you man for man, only no one else has the technology so victory is inevitable, in your eyes, and lives cost nothing.

What do I want? Serenity. Peace. A reason not to pick up a rifle in the morning. I have lived a hundred lives, seen more than anyone else, travelled the galaxy from edge to edge and yet I have had no life. I signed it away all those centuries ago. I no longer remember my ex-wife's face, no longer remember my children's voices, my home town was demolished to make way for skyrises. I had a little life and only when I thought it was ruined and signed up for the Lifers did I realise how precious it was. To you all of this is ancient history, to me it was everything. I have lived longer than any human yet have had the least amount of life. Instead I remember the smell of energy weapons, the faces of the men in my squad, the view of hull from my bunk. You stole my life and I am here to take it back. My life begins with your deaths.

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Thank you for reading!

A new novella begins on Thursday, read the Prologue if you haven’t. Find it here: