Red as far as the eye could see.
Beautiful it was. But desolate.
Nothing growing. How could we eat?

Arcites and I walked onwards
On a path through the barren hills and cliffs
Avoiding deadends as best we could

Fretting about food
For we had walked for hours
And nothing green, nothing alive

Arcites said unto me let us work our way up higher
Through these hills
In cooler climes things may change to our advantage

Bleakly we continued. No sign of any life.
No sign of man, or creature. No tracks even.
Upwards we went.

From a high vantage we had a good view and finally found another human being
A young woman standing outside a cave far in the distance.
"Should we call to her?"
"She may frighten and run away. Let's sneak closer." said my companion.
"But that may truly scare her. For better or worse let us call to her now."

We did so. We called to her.
And she ran away.
We ran after. But soon she was lost to sight as our route to her had many obstacles.

We eventually reached to where she had been and then ran down a corridor between two cliffs the way she had gone. Sensing a trap I kept an eye above. "Look out! I shouted and Arcites narrowly avoided a rock the size of two fists from above.

On ahead we went, the path rising and then taking us to the top of the cliff. And there she sat.

""We mean you no harm!" I shouted.
She sat there and scowled.
"Then fuck off!"
Arcites spoke, "We are sorry dear lady. Please forgive us. It is so wonderful to see a pretty face after so long with my dour comrade here. Please let us speak with you. You have absolutely nothing to fear. Your apprehension is certainly understandable with the looks of my friend but truly we mean no harm. Certainly if my companion were to try anything I would defend you, though I think him better than that." 

I interrupted his speech, "Lady where are we and where can we find some food?"

"Fuck off creep." she replied.

"Please be quiet Nicolas. You are bothering this beautiful lady."

I decided to let Nicolas do the talking. He was obviously smitten by her. To me she appeared to have a perpetual scowl and had already tried to kill us once. Perhaps she had had past bad experiences. I couldn't say. In speaking with Nicolas she divulged that she knew nothing of this world either and had been here only a little longer than us. She said she knew of no food. Her name was Sara. We were getting hungry. More important than food was water. With her we now continued our search.

Almost immediately we then came across mushrooms growing in perpetual shade between the cliffs and crags.

"Could be poisonous. What do you think fair lady?" said Arcites.

Sara shrugged.

"This one looks almost ready!" The small red men gathered around the man hanging from the tree. His head was attached to a branch like an acorn would be. The branch sagged so that he was almost sitting. He was almost twice the size of the ten red men gathered all around. The one who spoke before started lightly slapping the sleeping man's face.

"Wake up. Hey, wake up!" he said. Gradually the hanging man opened his eyes and after a minute or two was finally able to focus.

"Do you remember where you came from?" The small red man asked.

"I.... I was in a hospital. What happened?"

"You died and went to heaven! Congratulations!" The red men laughed gleefully.

"I did? Is my wife here?"

"We probably ate her long ago." Said the leader of the red men as he stabbed his spear into the man's stomach. The man struggled frantically but he was still attached by the head. They held his arms and legs while they pried out his eyeballs.

"How do you like heaven?" Asked one of them with glee as the man screamed. They ate him alive, biting chunks off of him until he finally stopped struggling.

There was no one else ready to wake up today so they judged a few who might tomorrow and left them alone and then began cutting pieces off the less well formed ones. Then each by himself settled down to eat the raw flesh. There was nothing here to burn. They ate every little bit while they stared at each other.

A slightly larger one stared at the de facto leader as he chewed on a nose, a less savory morsel.

"What?" he said in challenge.

"Why you always tell them this heaven?"

"Cause it's fucking heaven, retard."

"I's wonder if not a joke, for real."

"Well, it's not hell. I didn't die and go to hell. I was as good as anyone else. Didn't do nothing anyone else didn't do. I had a right to be happy at least. That's all I did. For me this is heaven. Maybe not for him." he motioned at the morsel in his hand.

"It's a fucking joke." said another red man. "This isn't heaven. There is no killing in heaven."

"Speak for yourself pansy. Nothing wrong with eating meat. Can't eat meat without killing." said another man. "This world may not be heaven. But we can only do the best we can with what we got. Just like in the previous world, the strong survive. Kill or be killed."

On the first day I awoke and found myself in a cave on a cliffside. I had no idea how I had come to be there. It was very dark and I stumbled and felt my way to the light. My body felt funny. But it was too dark to see. In the light of the entrance I examined myself and without a mirror at least I seemed to be the same. But I felt different somehow.

I was on the side of a steep cliff. Down below stretched a barren plain. It had no grass, no trees, no plant life at all that I could see. Just a reddish dirt and in the distance my view was obscured by a reddish mist. The wind blew rather hard across the cave entrance. There were no clouds in the sky and also no sun that I could see, yet there was light. I stared upwards trying to understand. It seemed different somehow. Was I in a vast cave?

No sun. No moon. No clouds. Just a uniform reddish light across the entire sky. If that was the sky.
The constant harsh wind suggested weather, suggested I was outside.

I sat for hours at the cliffside cave entrance thinking of what to do. And trying to remember how I had came to be here. I vaguely remembered being in an ambulance and then a hospital. The conclusion was obvious. Which was fine except for not being there for my two year old son. I did not want history to repeat itself with him. Thinking about it caused me anguish. Like me, he seemed different and would need someone with wisdom. I wanted to get back to him. But if I had died, I wouldn't get back.

It didn't appear to be much of a world. Very empty. Slightly ominous. But if I had died, it was a lot better than ceasing to exist. I pondered my options: explore the cave or climb down the cliff. I would have to eat. It seemed unlikely I would find food stumbling around in the dark cave. So I half climbed and half slid down the cliff to the barren plain. From my new this vantage I could see that this cliff stretched onwards to the left and right in an almost straight line. Climbing up higher than my cave looked to be impossible. I now wished I had examined the back of the cave to see if it ended.

I began walking to my left, keeping the cliff walls well in site and periodically looking back to the cave opening. It could prove to be the best shelter available and I was anxious I wouldn't be able to find it again.

It felt as if the plain to my left ought to be an ocean. Like the cliffs to my right were the result of millions of years of waves. To my right the ground did very gradually slope downward but there was no water in sight. The air was cool but not uncomfortable. I walked for a couple of hours before I finally saw something. It looked to be a person off in the distance. They seemed to be naked like me. I couldn't tell their gender from their stride. I walked briskly to catch up. And even began jogging. I appeared to be a skinny naked lady with red mid length wavy hair.

She was not more than 30 yards away very slowly carelessly wandering along when she finally saw me. She was startled and then looked in all directions as if to examine her options. Then she stared at me while walking backwards.

"Hello!" I shouted. "I certainly mean you no harm!"

She continued to walk backwards while staring at me.

"My name is Joble. Where are we?" I said.

She hesitated and then replied, "I'm Linda. I don't know."

I motioned at my naked body and hers and grinned sheepishly. "Haven't seen any clothes around I guess?"

"No.".

How long have you been here? What do you remember before coming here? Where shall we go?

Let's go our separate ways. - -- bewilderment. Why??? Is that a good idea? I mean you no harm.She is like crazy and wants nothing to do with him and starts screaming gibberish. This isn't the afterlife she wanted! He better stop pretending! She knows who he is. And he needs to get the hell away from her!

And then a roar far away. ..... A huge creature appears flying in the far distance. They stand frozen, very afraid. The roar it makes is terrible. "Stand still." They aren't sure if they should sprint for the cliffs. Get low to the ground or just stand still. It wasn't flying directly towards them at first but now veers towards them. Joble scans the cliffs and thinks he sees some shelter, maybe. I think we should sprint for the cliffs. Birds usually have extremely good eyesight. It's huge and I have a bad feeling about this.

....they run.

They survive. It's a horrible thing. But that's too soon.

I have traveled all over and found nothing but these little vile creatures. I keep trying to watch the little bipedal reddish black creatures as there is clearly some structure to their actions. They must have some way to communicate. They are about half as tall as me with thin limbs though some are much taller and thicker than others. I watched a group of them ambush a huge boarlike creature, killing it with spears. They clearly can work together. But they mostly seem to just eat each other. I don't know how their numbers sustain. They always run from me, unless there's a lot of them. Then they have tried attacking me. I have grown less afraid of them as one popped up behind me and threw a spear at me and it just bounced off. I have had to kill some as a warning. Throwing them doesn't work great as they bounce right up and come back for more. As I've grown less cautious I have traveled farther and farther. I have found what I'm calling emotion zones. Certain areas that produce different mental feelings. Took a few days to figure it out and I worried for my sanity. But as long as I stay in the cliff cave my mood is fine, more or less. But I have found a place where it's quite hard to not fall asleep. Another where I was filled with rage. Another of melancholy. In a way it's exciting. I have felt this place quite empty. These areas suggest a level of complexity and order.

Yesterday I took two 'Mattios' as I will call them, because they remind me of a hateful short person I had a slight aquaintance to, to the sleep zone. Just held one each by their neck while they waved their arms and hissed and spitted at me. They fell asleep before me and I laid them down and left. The next I came back and found them gone without a trace. Perhaps I will have to try again and see if they do eventually wake up. I suppose I can do such experiments with each zone. Not sure what this will accomplish but it's something to do. And I will keep exploring.

I was a human from earth. I must have died. I was very suddenly sick and then I awake here. All the same body parts of a human but I think freakishly strong and I guess what a human would consider a monster. I have left behind a 3 year old on earth who really needed me. That is driving me crazy. I guess I might never see him again. I don't know. And I had so little time with him. He was my time machine. I couldn't change my past but I could give him the life I should have had. And no, I die when he was only three. What will his life be like now? I try to tell myself it will probably be OK. It looks like he's going to be better looking than me and he's quite intelligent. And any average person or even none at all would be better than the parents I had. He will probably be fine. I tried to fill the first 3 years of his life with happiness. That matters I'm sure, though he may not remember me. I hope to see him again someday.

But except for that extremely important thing I don't mind my situation now, though it could be called hellish. I'm alone. I live in a cliff cave. The only other sentient creatures appear to be entirely evil. I am though incredibly strong compared to them. In fact if 100 ambushed me I might still survive. They are small. They don't have any special weapons. But they have plenty of hate. They like to impale their own kind. Also cannibals. I'm a terrible monster to them I'm sure. No doubt they want me dead. My great worry is that they will destroy my source of food. It may not have occurred to them or possibly they don't even know how. They are quite stupid. They don't even have fire. It is a massive kind of tree. Incredibly beautiful and even has both edible fruit and nuts. I mostly store the nuts and eat the fruit for now. It seems to sustain my huge body and strength.

This world is strangely reddish mostly. A reddish dirt. A reddish fog. I am bone white with skin almost as tough as stone. It yields slightly to the touch and then no more. There is no soft spot anywhere. This world could be seen as a hell. I have no idea what purpose I could possibly serve here and why in the world I am uniquely here, the only of my kind.

I eat fruit. I watch the dark demonic imps down on the red plain. I sing songs to myself trying to remember how they went. And I try to remember the happiness of the past few years.

Now I know there is a life after death for surely I have died. There are "gods". There is magic. And I am stronger than all those around me.

But I am alone. Surrounded only by creatures as different from me as they could possibly be.

I doubt my sanity. Maybe I am a lone crazed hermit. How could it be that I alone am so different?

I found myself laying on the ground looking up at the roof of a cave. Not far to my left there was light from the sunlite world. I was close enough to the entrance that it wasn't really dark. It was slightly cool.

I realized that the sensation of my body was somehow very different. I was almost afraid to understand how but eventually as I became more awake I flexed my hands. There are things we don't notice about how our body feels until it's no longer there to feel. The stretch of my tendons and skin was absent. That stretch I think is a large part of how you tell how your hands are positioned. It was gone yet I could still tell how my hands were and when I was moving them.

In position did anything feel like it was stretching. I could hold any position without any effort. And again, you don't realize the difference here between the usual very very slight effort that one normally feels and no effort at all until you experience it.




Absolutely nothing but a skeleton. No muscle. No sinew. This filled me with terror. Was the afterlife that of a rotting corpse? Yet I could move. I could lift my hands despite no biceps. I could sit up despite no stomach muscles. I dared not feel for eyes. But I could see. I realized I had no tongue. No lips. And this especially distressed me. I could not speak.

But I felt something. Something beyond that of a skeleton. And though I had no lungs I felt some kind of ebb and flow like that of breath. I tried to concentrate on it. It reminded me of the ocean. Something vast and eternal.

I tried to control it and found I couldn't.

o tongue. No lips.And I could feel myself in some sense. I felt something beyond my skeleton.

But having no tongue. No lips. with a bone white ultra tough skin. So tough and hard I thought at first I might be an exoskeleton like an insect or crab. But when I flex my muscles they move beneath my skin. Seemingly very large and strong. My muscles seem are different but they ultimately protrude more than they did in my previous life.


So I capture one. I hide behind some rocks and it runs by coming or going from some errand that I cannot discern. When it's ten feet away I jump up. It sees me and runs. But it hits its top speed in a second. I just keep going faster and faster and snatch it up. It's more a problem of stopping my bulk and changing directions. Takes a second or two. It tries to bite during this time and I see it can't even bite through my tough skin. I think I could crush it with one hand. I take it back to my cave in the cliff and put it in a hole from which it appears it cannot escape. There it scowls at me with a look intelligent malevolence.

"Can you speak?" I rumble in my extremely deep voice. No response. Continues to stare with a look of hatred.

"I'm sorry that I have captured you. I will let you go once we have spoken some. I must know, why are your kind so mean to one another? Why do you torture and eat each other?" I continues to just state with hatred. I think I may start to get annoyed about that.

I throw fruit and edible flowers in the pit. It ignores them. For three days it eats nothing and just states hate. I wonder if it's a carnivore. I will not kill for it.

Here in my cliff care my mood swings greatly from day to day. I watch these little bipedal black creatures do horrible things to one another on the plain and I see how precarious my position is. The trees I eat fruit from barely can support me. I only get liquid from the fruit and it seems to never rain. They must get water from underground I assume. I hope.

I am completely alone.

But my existence has continued after death. And I must admit being the only one like me strangely has made my happy. In life I recall that when young it made me happy that I was different. But that quickly got old. I wonder if this is the same. The only difference being I'm seemingly a lot more different. In life I worried about being fired. Now I worry about a mob of these black creatures attacking me. Not terribly different.

I decide to capture a second black creature and see close up how it interacts with it's fellow. I decide to call them imps. The capture goes just like the first. The new imps look at each other with suspicion for a moment but then both just return to looking at me.

They eat and kill each other. It's a short brutal existence for humanoids. I have not seen them eat anything but each other. Which should mean they should die out... Yet their number does not decrease. There is abundant fruit here. Dragonfruit mainly. I'm not sure how long a diet of just fruit is good for me but I actually feel quite good on it. I observe from a safe distance. They have chased me a few times. But I very easily outdistanced them. I just worry about ambush or being caught at night.

So I sleep high on the edge of what I call the streamfall. They never come near it. It's loud but not exactly to the ears. I found that when I was running from them. They repeatedly stopped chasing as I neared it. So I found a crevice high up the side of it. There I could kick anyone who tried to follow; though no one comes anywhere near that close. They won't come anywhere near it. It's deafening but in a nice way somehow. It soothes me. I hear the screams of everything in it.

I'm taller. Bigger then them. Could probably win easily in a one on one fight. They aren't much for cooperation.

I eat my fruit. There's nothing else though to do here. I'm so lonely.

So it's been for a long time now and I guess I shall go exploring. There are areas where instead of a reddish tinge to the air, it's more of a thick red fog. I can explore in those directions. But I could be ambushed. I could come upon something I can't outrun.

I suppose I have an exoskeleton. This means I'm like an insect. And that is horrible to me. It's nice to touch your skin and have it yield. Mine doesn't. I'm solid. My face is solid as stone.

I always hated spiders. But I'm bipedal. Not like a spider at all. It's all those legs in a circle around a center that bothered me greatly. Never minded centipedes. Liked crickets and grasshoppers. And my face is like a human face. Everything in the usual place. A nose. A mouth and so on. I can speak. I chew and swallow. I speak and can sing. But no facial expressions. And I feel as if my emotions are not what they should be.

I hum a lot though. I can't frown. But I can hum in a minor key.

In my past life I once loved stoicism. Then I came to not think much of it. This exoskeleton is a sort of stoicism. I feel strong. I'm a bit unemotional. I suspect I'll be just fine out in the red fog. Still I try to be cautious. From a distance I see humanoid creatures being eaten alive every day. This isn't Kansas.

I hum a tune from another world. Trying to hold on to what once was. Not that it was so great. I mainly think about the negatives. How badly I had been treated. In particular by T. Who I suppose I had loved. Though I never thought of it like that back then.

It had been a cold world without love. But from it I still remembered the idea. I remembered the music. I remembered I had loved.

And so now I tried to remember the music. And I tried to imagine a future where I found her and things were how they so easily could have been.

I don't really know what this body is capable of. I seem quite fast. Quite agile. And strong. At least when punching rocks it doesn't even hurt. But I don't know what's out there. I could just be a snack for something.

There is a swamp with a water plant. It was on Earth. Or something similar. Papyrus? Not certain the name. I remember the ancient Eyptians made paper with it. And there are berries to make a sort of ink with. And I write this account of my existence. Though I expect it will never be read.Or at least I will certainly never benefit from it.

As to no benefit I think there is a great beauty in doing something to benefit others where I will not benefit. I want to believe there will be others. I want to believe I'm a part of something. I want my existence to matter in some way. Even if I die before others benefit. I want to believe in a life after death.