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I still can’t let my emotions get the best of me. I have to plan Nick’s
memorial service. I know it sounds like something that can wait, and maybe
it can, but I’ve got it in my head that we have to do something special for
him. Weeks ago, I remember him telling me about his stories. He had all
sorts of aliens and “supernatural” creatures (who weren’t really
supernatural, just higher level science). You know his fascination with
immortality, right? Well, the pseudomortals were his very first attempt at
that kind of plot device. Or no, it might have been his second, because
Gavix may predate them. Anyway, pseudomortals could die, but after four
days, they would come back to life in new bodies. The exact mechanics of
this would not be apparent when you start reading, but over the pages, you
would learn more about why this is. It isn’t random. Evidently, while the
pseudomortals were a relatively short-lived subspecies of humans, they sort
of opened the world up to the idea of the four day gap. It became a key
tenet of multiple fictional religions—which we now know actually weren’t
fictional at all, but his Earth believed them to be. The pseudomortals
merely tapped into the laws of life and death; they didn’t create them. The
basic idea is that after you die, you stay in a parallel dimension for four
days before moving on to the true afterlife, and these religions formed
rituals and conventions based on this concept. So even though Nick never
lived in a world that had these religions, or even had the four day rule, I
thought it would be nice to honor him by laying him to rest on the fourth
day after his death. The problem is, none of his writings came with him on
his multiversal adventures. Everything he was ever able to tell us had to
come from his memory. So even if I’m remembering everything he said
correctly, he might not have been remembering it exactly how he wrote it
years ago. He admitted that he couldn’t recall what the religious rituals
were like, but he knew that they were more involved than just having a
funeral after four days, and then going home. There’s a part where you’re
supposed to enjoy the deceased’s favorite activity? And he thought that the
memorial and burial were on different days?
I’m freaking out about this, and I keep forgetting for a fraction of second
that he’s gone, so for those brief moments, I think that I can just ask him
to try to remember, because he’s the expert, but of course, that won’t work,
because the whole reason we’re doing this is because he’s the one who’s
gone, and I’ll never see him again, and I’ll never find out if Dimitri Orion
ever gets his job back, or how the crew of the Atom Ship escapes the
supervoid. And I know none of this means anything to you, but I think my
emotions are breaking free, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get them back in
the bottle. They’re still searching for Dutch, but I can tell that their
hearts aren’t in it anymore. At this point, they’re looking for a body, not
a person. So actually, I have two memorials to plan, but I don’t have any
clue what Dutch would have wanted. We didn’t talk about this stuff, because
we’re all so young, so why would that have come up? Because our lives have
been in danger all year, that’s why. We were so naïve. We thought it would
be some psycho who wanted to test their immortality or portal opening
powers, not just an icy road. The edge of a mountain switchback? After all
this, how is that what finally took him out? He would be so
disappointed if he were here to find out about his death. Okay, I’m getting
too morbid. I gotta go. Talk to you tomorrow. Or not. I promise you nothing.
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