I opened my eyes to a world of pain. I was almost glad for it, because it meant that I was still alive. I blinked away the tears of restless sleep, trying to wipe my eyes with my hands and feeling a revolting sticky sensation instead. Looking down, I saw that my fingers were covered in sticky blood. Dust had stuck to them, resulting in a congealed mass of revolting dark red.

  My face felt sticky and I almost cursed. Did I just smatter all that on my face? Disgusting.

  I sobered down quickly as I looked at the rest of my body. My bare skin was slick with sweat, I was shivering, and there was blood everywhere. I was literally lying in a puddle of it, but the thought of moving was enough to make the pain return. My legs felt hot, especially the part hidden by the makeshift bandages. They pulsed with heat and pain flared at every little movement.

  Groaning, I pulled myself up. It was a titanic effort, but it paid off by helping to ease the nausea and vertigo. I was still parched from last night, but now I was also starving and in pain. I couldn’t move, though. What could I do?

  That’s when I remembered the blinking notification at the edge of my vision. Good, something to take my mind off of the tragedy that has been my second life so far. I nudged it with my awareness, and was surprised to see that it responded to my commands with the same ease as my old implants.

  It unfolded into text before my eyes.

  General Level up!

  General Level 1 → 2

  +1 to all stats.

  1 General Skill point available.

  Opening the status was trivial. Even though RPG games and novels had somewhat fallen out of fashion in the last decades, their influence on the culture was still very much present. I was pleased to discover that this world followed some sort of game-like rules. Perhaps I wasn’t doomed to die.

  Status: Sol Nightguard

  General Level 2

  Str: 11

  Dex: 11

  Vit: 11

  Int: 11

  Wis: 11

  My face fell. There was nothing here that would help me survive having my legs shattered after falling a dozen meters through a hole in the ground, I tell you that. If leveling up gave me plus one to all stats, then it meant that my baseline was ten. Even though getting a ten percent increase across the board was nice, it wasn’t nearly enough.

  The thought was punctuated by a sharp stabbing pain coming from just the left leg. I looked at it, and saw the soaked bandage that used to be my t-shirt. I didn’t dare touch it, even though my mind was trying its best to conjure up all sorts of disturbing images of what I might find beneath. Infection, yellow pus—

  I blinked, feeling bile rise up in my throat. No thinking about my wounds, period.

  What about the General Skill? I had a point, right? Perhaps…

  General Skills available:

  Running

  Athletics

  Survival Rations

  I didn’t know if I wanted to laugh or cry.

  “Running?” I cried out. “Is this some sort of sick joke?”

  “That’s what this world is, a sick joke of the gods,” a snappy voice said. It was sharp and annoyed, distinctly a girl.

  I had never expected a response to my random voicing of thoughts.

  “Hello? Is anyone there?”

  I looked around, but saw nothing. The lights didn’t quite reach all the corners of the room, casting many places in deep shadows. Two of them called to me, but no matter what I said the voices did not return. I was pretty sure the voices had come from two different people. One had been soft, melodious and caring. The other angular and rather pissed off. Not at me, I hoped.

  Refocusing on the skills, I picked the only one that made any sense here, and immediately activated it.

  For once, the survival rations turned out to be food and water as I had hoped. Rock-hard bread, salted jerky and lukewarm water, not nearly enough to fill me, but they kept the gnawing hunger at bay. The water felt like a blessing from the heavens, liquid nectar of life.

  I always hated warm water, but this time it felt heavenly.

  I finished it and the food way too quickly. I must have eaten like a barbarian, but I didn’t care.

  Then I made the mistake of looking at my legs again. The food was suddenly heavy and acid in my stomach, but I fought with all my might to keep it where it was. I needed the strength. When I looked again, this time I was prepared for the gruesome sight and the food did not rebel too much. My mind did. I could see the angry red lines of infection crawl up my skin, disappearing into my shorts, making a beeline towards my heart.

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  “Infection shouldn’t be this quick, right?”

  My voice echoed in the empty room, eliciting no response. I looked around, suddenly feeling very self conscious about it—someone had spoken to me twice already, after all.

  I did not spot anyone, but the exercise proved to be a good distraction: the room was huge and interesting. Ornate statues of white marble lined every wall, nooks and crannies were filled with stained glass in abstract patters, and the ceiling was decorated with intricate carvings of food, animals, leaves and strange creatures.

  My eyes kept returning to the places where the light did not reach. Looking there, I felt strange presences, and the feeling of being watched. They must have been the sources of the voices. But, while the sensation made my skin crawl, I found it hard to look away. The more I stared, the more the suspicion grew. In the corners of the room, to my left and to the right, where the light did not reach…

  Then I looked at my legs again. Angry, red, swollen. The pain was a muted droning of heat and settling paralysis. I couldn’t feel my feet anymore, and not because of the hazy curtain of pain. It was like they weren’t there, and touching them they felt cold and dead.

  I grimaced.

  “Fucking mutant bacteria,” I muttered.

  I looked up. One of the dark corners of the room caught my attention, but once again I saw nothing there. I don’t even know why I kept speaking.

  “Yeah, I’m betting these tiny fuckers got the System just like I did. Imagine that, super powered bacteria. I wonder how they level up, though. I leveled up by falling into this hole, so it stands to reason that they might level up by infecting people?”

  Even though I was beginning to question whether the voices I had heard were even real, I did not stop talking. Perhaps taking kept me sane, I don’t know.

  “This is my first day here,” I said to the darkness. For a moment, I felt as if it was interested in hearing more, and that’s all I needed to keep going. “First day, and I’m already about to kick the bucket again. Funny, right?”

  I chuckled, and the sudden movement brought new waves of pain. I tried to shift my body so that I could be more comfortable, but my legs protested.

  “Fine, I’m going to stay here in a puddle of my own blood. At least I don’t think I’m bleeding anymore. But it’s the infection that’s going to get me, isn’t it? Did you know that long ago, at least where I come from, people had no idea that infections came from bacteria? Hell, they didn’t even wash their hands before touching an open wound!”

  I paused, catching my breath.

  “But then again, I imagine running water wasn’t all that common back then. Perhaps that’s why they called those times the dark ages. Heh. I remember listening to a podcast, and one of the hosts was adamantly saying that the middle ages weren’t dark at all! You see…”

  I kept talking and talking. It kept me awake, and in my mind I slowly grew convinced that it was also keeping me alive.

  “…so I wanted to rent out this beater hauler. It was literally falling to pieces, right? It was called Brida. What does Brida even mean? Who calls their ship that? But despite the damage, I saw something in it. I thought it was my diamond in the rough, and I had to have it. The Benaris Station did not have a bank, but Jupiter Orbital did. There was a seven minute light lag delay, and I was paying for every second of tight-beam usage. But it was all worth it! They approved the loan, and I ran back to the docks to the Brida, ready to pay cash to have it and have it now. Except… they thought I was swindling them! Ah, but you see, it all worked out in the end.”

  I grimaced, feeling the pain rise.

  “I must be boring you with my ramblings,” I said to the shadows. “I’ll just… rest. Yeah, I’ll close my eyes for a minute.”

  The moment I did, I heard a whisper. “Sol,” it said, and the voice was the gentle and caring one. A woman, calling my name.

  I gasped, feeling stale air rush into my lungs. My world was pain, and I saw the angry lines of infection above my shorts now, all the way to my abs. They advanced quickly enough that I thought I could track their progress in real time.

  I looked at the shadow to the right. “You want to hear the rest before I kick it? Well, there’s nothing much. I had bought into a dream and an illusion, that’s what. I had my loan, cash enough to buy a ship and start hauling. Sure, I was in deep debt, but what did it matter? Turns out I had fallen for the fucking propaganda.”

  I paused to catch my breath again. It came in short, ragged bursts. At least my legs weren’t hurting anymore. Examining my status, I saw that the [Survival Rations] skill had come back online and I activated it.

  As the food appeared, so did a message.

  General Skill level up!

  Survival Rations 1 → 2

  Funny that I might not live long enough to see what changed with the new level. I ate, then drifted in and out of consciousness for a while.

  The infection kept spreading, and I kept talking. I told the strange beings in the shadows, that I was now convinced were real, about my adventures. I bought a hauling ship, even more beaten down than the Brida, and slowly fixed it. I started from the engines and the cryo-sleep pods, sacrificing everything else. Then, with the money that came from hauling, I slowly turned it into my home. I would fly between stations, load up on ice and rare metals, then set off again into the dark night of space.

  I talked for days. The infection stopped hurting as much, but the heat never left. I ate the food the System gave me, reaching level three and then four. It still wasn’t enough to fill me, but it was enough to survive. I used what little strength I had to slowly inch closer to the corner of the room, to one of the shadows I was talking to.

  I thought I could see something there, but then I would blink and it would all just be darkness.

  I kept talking. The hauls were boring. I literally slept my life away in cryo-sleep. I was ranting, I realized, but I didn’t care.

  “You see, cryo-sleep doesn’t stop aging. Each haul was at least three years, sometimes ten or even twenty. Of course the longer ones paid more, but it was barely enough to afford the Green. What’s the Green you ask? A miracle, or at least that’s what they marketed it as. One drop of it, one year added back to your lifespan. A ten year haul would buy me two drops of Green, a few months more than the toll the trip took on my biological age thanks to the sleep pod. Me and my colleagues, we all were stacking up Green like madmen. It was our currency, even more so than money. If you managed to extend your life faster than you burned it away, you could come out the other end of the tunnel with a hauler ship fully paid off, immortality, and a lot of money.

  “Of course, there were a million ways they got to you. The fusion engines needed repair. That one time the hull had a tiny breach that turned out to be a critical point of failure. Then you needed to take out another loan. The navigation software was subscription based. Then the block of ice you were carrying gets irradiated and becomes worthless. You reach a colony only to find out they don’t need your titanium anymore because they found a local deposit. And then, of course, the machine gods awaken into sentience, sterilize Earth with nukes and send out a kill code on all bandwidths.

  “Death coming at the speed of light. That’s how I died. My ship went dark and the cryo-pod did not wake me. There was no flip and burn to slow down on my approach to Prominence Vector. The fusion engines kept burning, and I hit the station dead-on at close to the speed of light. I vaporized the station and the planet behind it, but it didn’t matter. It had gone dark three years prior, and everyone was already dead. Five billion people, dead. And that was just there. Humanity numbered in the trillions, reduced to zero in less than a decade. I don’t know what sort of twisted god gave me that knowledge, but I know it haunts me now. I was the last human to die, because curse me I had chosen the longest haul to make the most money, but I died all the same. I am alive once more, I know, but I wonder. Am I the last?”

  I coughed, and spat blood. That’s it, I guess. The end of the line. The infection had gotten to me, and I was going to die.

  The shadows shifted.