[RATING MA 15+]
The fever broke on the ninth day, but Sekitanki's mind didn't return all at once.
It came back in pieces—fragments of consciousness washing ashore like debris after a shipwreck. First: awareness of breathing. Then: the weight of his body against stone. Then: pain, arriving in waves, each one mapping a different injury until he was a complete cartography of damage.
His right arm was still black, but the swelling had decreased slightly. Either the infection was stabilizing or his body had given up fighting it. Both possibilities felt equally likely.
He lay in his shelter and watched light change across the entrance—green dawn becoming green noon becoming green dusk. Time passing without him. The world continuing whether he participated or not.
How long was I out?
Memory was unreliable. He remembered falling. Remembered water. Remembered eyes in the darkness and teeth and his thumb driving into something soft and wet. But the sequence was wrong, the causality broken, events shuffled like cards.
The amphibian. I fought an amphibian.
The thought arrived with crystalline certainty. He'd done that. Actually done it. Fought a prehistoric predator with his bare hands while fever cooked his brain.
He should feel something about that. Pride, maybe. Or horror at his own desperation. Instead: nothing. Just the familiar emptiness, watching his life from the outside.
I'm broken, he thought. I've always been broken. This place didn't break me. It just revealed what was already there. His mother's face surfaced in memory—not recent memory, but ancient. He must have been five, maybe six. She'd found him crying in his room after school. Some classmate had called him weird for reading during recess.
"Hankō," she'd said, kneeling to his level, wiping tears with gentle hands. "You're not weird. You're just... different. Special."
"I don't want to be special," he'd sobbed. "I want to be normal."
She'd hugged him then, and he'd felt safe in a way he couldn't remember feeling since. When had he stopped letting her hug him? When had he decided that being special was more important than being loved?
The memory hurt worse than his infected arm. Sekitanki forced himself to sit up. The movement sent fresh pain through his ribs—still broken from the fall, probably. Everything was broken. He was a collection of damaged parts held together by stubborn refusal to stop functioning.
Outside his shelter, the Carboniferous continued its eternal cycle. Insects hunting. Plants growing. The slow accumulation of peat that would become coal that would power a civilization that wouldn't exist for hundreds of millions of years.
He was so utterly irrelevant to all of it. The thought should have been crushing. Instead, it was almost liberating. I don't matter. I never mattered. The universe doesn't care about genius or emptiness or any of it. It just is. And I either survive or I don't.
He crawled to the entrance and looked out at the forest that had become his world. The hallucinations started that afternoon. Sekitanki was trying to fashion new weapons from fallen branches when his father appeared, sitting across from him like they were back in their Tokyo living room.
"You're being dramatic," his father said, adjusting glasses that couldn't possibly be there. "This victim mentality doesn't suit you." Sekitanki stared. His father wore the same cardigan he'd worn every Sunday, blue with leather patches on the elbows. His face was exactly as Sekitanki remembered—kind but tired, disappointed but trying not to show it.
"You're not real," Sekitanki said.
"Does that matter?" His father picked up a piece of wood, examined it. "You're talking to me anyway." "I have oxygen toxicity. Brain damage from the atmospheric composition. This is a hallucination brought on by fever and infection." "Always with the diagnoses." His father smiled sadly. "You couldn't just be a kid could you. Had to be a scientist studying son of mine."
The words hit harder than any prehistoric predator. "I didn't know how," Sekitanki heard himself say. "I didn't know how to be both. How to be special and normal. How to be genius and human."
"So you chose genius and wondered why you felt so empty." Sekitanki's hands shook. The wood he'd been carving fell from numb fingers.
"I'm sorry," he whispered. "I'm sorry I stopped coming home. I'm sorry I made you feel like you weren't enough. Like nothing was enough." His father flickered—image degrading like bad reception.
"I know you are," he said. "But sorry doesn't build bridges. Sorry just acknowledges the ruins." Then he was gone, leaving Sekitanki alone with the forest and his breaking mind.
Dr. Yamamoto appeared at sunset. She sat at the edge of his shelter, lab coat pristine white, clipboard in hand like she was conducting rounds.
"Your vitals are terrible," she said without preamble. "Blood pressure elevated from constant stress. Immune system compromised. That arm needs amputation."
"Can't amputate with Stone Age tools," Sekitanki replied. He'd stopped questioning the hallucinations. They were better company than silence. "You could cauterize it. Fire. Controlled burns to kill the infection."
The suggestion was logical. Horrifying, but logical. "I'd pass out from pain. Then I'd die while unconscious."
"Better than dying while conscious." She made a note on her clipboard. "You're exhibiting signs of severe psychological trauma. Disassociation. Emotional blunting. Possible PTSD."
"I was emotionally blunted before I got here." "No." She looked up, and her eyes were sad. "You were depressed. Clinical depression masquerading as genius eccentricity. We all saw it. Nobody knew how to help."
Sekitanki felt something crack in his heart. "Did you mourn me?" he asked. "When the mission failed. When I didn't come back. Did anyone actually miss me, or just the research I represented?"
Dr. Yamamoto flickered like his father had.
"I cried," she said softly. "At your memorial. Your mother held my hand. She said you'd always been chasing something none of us could see. Said maybe you finally found it."
"I found death wearing the face of giant bugs." "Is that worse than the slow death you were living before?" The question hung in the air between them. Then she dissolved into evening mist, and Sekitanki was alone again.
But her words remained. Is that worse than the slow death you were living before? The attack came at midnight. Not from outside. From within.
Sekitanki woke to find himself standing at the edge of his outcropping, toes hanging over empty space. The fall would kill him. Quick. Clean. Over in seconds.
Just step forward. The thought was his own. That was the terrifying part. Not a hallucination. Not fever-induced madness. Just the cold, logical conclusion his mind had reached.
You're going to die anyway. The infection will kill you slowly. Why prolong it? Why keep fighting when you're already defeated? He looked down at the darkness below. Couldn't see the ground. Just black emptiness waiting to receive him.
One step. That's all it would take. His left foot lifted. Then—"Hankō! Get away from there!" His mother's voice. Terrified. Real in a way the other hallucinations hadn't been.
He turned and saw her standing at his shelter entrance. Not the mother from his childhood memories. Current mother. Older. Gray hair he'd barely noticed. Face lined with worry he'd never let himself see.
"You think I don't know?" she said, and she was crying. "You think I didn't notice my son disappearing? Didn't notice you choosing emptiness over us?"
"I couldn't help it," Sekitanki said, and his voice broke. "I tried. I tried to feel things the way normal people feel things. But everything was just... hollow. Nothing mattered. Nothing was enough."
"So you came here to die." "I came here to find what was missing." "And did you find it?" Sekitanki looked at his ruined body. His infected arm. His broken ribs. The weapons made from dead things. The shelter built from desperation.
"I found that I'm the same person here as I was there," he said quietly. "Empty. Broken. Unable to connect even when connection meant survival." His mother stepped closer. She looked so real. He could see individual tears on her face.
"You're not empty," she said. "You're scared. You've always been scared. Scared that being normal meant losing what made you special. Scared that being special meant losing everything else."
"So I lost everything trying to keep nothing."
"Not nothing." She reached out, and even though he knew she wasn't real, couldn't be real, he felt her hand on his cheek. Warm. Solid. There. "You kept yourself. Damaged and broken and empty, but yourself. And yourself is trying so damn hard to survive even when survival feels meaningless."
"Why?" The question burst out of him. "Why am I fighting so hard when I don't even want to be alive?" "Because you don't want to be dead either. You want to be different. You want to be someone who can feel connection without losing genius. Someone who can be special and normal simultaneously. Someone who matters to themselves as much as they matter to their work." Sekitanki's legs gave out. He collapsed to his knees, and his mother's hallucination knelt with him.
"I don't know how to be that person," he whispered.
"So learn. You learned quantum physics. You learned to kill prehistoric predators with sharpened bones. You can learn to be human too." She flickered. Starting to fade.
"Mom—" "I love you," she said. "Even when you're impossible. Even when you're empty. I love you. Remember that when the darkness comes. Someone, somewhere, loves you." Then she was gone.
Sekitanki knelt there at the edge of the outcropping, close enough to fall, far enough to choose not to. And chose.
He crawled back to his shelter, leaving the edge behind, and cried for the first time since arriving in the Carboniferous. Cried for his lost family. His wasted years. His empty genius. All of it pouring out in sobs that shook his broken ribs and made his infected arm scream.
But he cried. Which meant feeling. Which meant something other than emptiness. When the tears finally stopped, dawn was breaking. Green light filtered through alien leaves. Insects chittered their eternal chorus. The world continued not caring. But Sekitanki cared.
About his mother. About his father. About Dr. Yamamoto who'd cried at his memorial. About all the connections he'd severed in pursuit of genius that had never filled the void.
I want to go home, he thought. I want to go home and tell them I'm sorry. Tell them I understand now. Tell them that emptiness isn't strength, it's just emptiness.
But home was 359 million years away. So he'd have to survive until he could build a way back. Sekitanki looked at his infected arm. Then at the fire pit. Then back at his arm.
Dr. Yamamoto's hallucination had been right about one thing: the infection would kill him if he didn't act. He gathered dry wood. Built up the fire. Found a flat stone. Heated it until it glowed. Then, with his left hand and more courage than he knew he possessed, began the work of burning the infection from his flesh. His screams echoed across the Carboniferous morning, mixing with insect sounds and bird calls that wouldn't exist for another hundred million years. But he didn't stop. Didn't let himself pass out. Survived the pain because on the other side of it was another day. And another chance to become someone worth surviving as.
TO BE CONTINUED... [NEXT EPISODE: "Blueprint of Hope"]