Somehow, the room appeared the way Sam had always pictured a room belonging to Heartman would appear. The look of the man himself, still fiddling with his device, fit Sam’s image to a tee, too.
The windows displayed on the monitor that monopolized one entire wall were closed one by one, until the monitor itself faded out. Then a large picture window appeared. The entire wall was a window. Heartman beckoned Sam, who was squinting in the bright light.
Outside the window, Sam could see the heart-shaped lake.
“That’s my heart right there,” Heartman said, pointing outside. “That crater was made by a voidout. I see myself in that crater. My wife and my child.”
Sam was even more confused. Was that supposed to be some kind of metaphor?
“It’s like looking at the shape of my heart,” Heartman continued as the AED in Heartman’s chest projected a hologram into the air. A 3D image of an animated heart was pulsating rhythmically. “The doctors called it myocardial cordiformia. Mine is an especially unusual case. It doesn’t run in the family.”
Heartman gestured toward the sofa and encouraged Sam to sit down. Heartman sat back down in his lounge chair.
“You know, I never came to terms with their loss. In the days that followed, I became obsessed with an idea: that the Beach is real, and they are on it. Some of my colleagues ridiculed me for it, they said that it was just a theory or the dogma of some groups who shared a particular paradigm, but I knew it was real. I would induce cardiac arrest—three minutes at a time—and search for them. Day after day after day…”
That meant that the two people in the photo on Heartman’s bookshelf were his wife and child. Here was a man who Sam could somewhat relate to.
“All so you could say goodbye?” Sam asked.
“Quite the opposite. It is said that everyone’s Beach is different. So what if everyone’s afterlife is different, too? I find the thought terrifying. Spending eternity alone. Which is why I decided to find my family and make sure to move on with them.”
“You mean die with them?”
Heartman smiled at Sam’s question and raised his thumb.
“If death would see us reunited, then yes. But the repeated cardiac arrests took their toll on my heart. The muscle gradually deformed. And after a while they started calling me ‘The Beach Scientist—Heartman.’” Heartman got up from his chair and held out his hand. “So, I’m Heartman. Nice to meet you.”
Sam’s expression remained blank as Heartman approached the stretcher. Mama’s face slowly appeared as he pulled down the zipper. There was no paleness to her face, nor any hint of postmortem lividity or rigor mortis. It looked like she was sleeping peacefully.
Heartman let out a curious sigh.
“A body that doesn’t necrotize. No sign of decomposition. It’s as if she were still alive,” Heartman commented.
Sam recognized that look. It was the same look that Deadman had given him when they had first met. The look of a scientist filled with pure curiosity.
“She’s the perfect mummy. An impeccable corpse,” Heartman continued, fiddling with the body. Behind his curiosity there didn’t lie some great moral motivation to help mankind, but the innocent urge of child to disassemble a toy to see how it worked. Sam had to say something. He didn’t like the way Heartman was tinkering with Mama’s body so brazenly. It wasn’t about respect for the dead, he just didn’t want to see Mama’s body violated like that when Mama’s ka still lived on inside Lockne. Luckily, Heartman seemed to sense Sam’s disapproval and looked up.
“Where’s the other thing you were supposed to bring? Ah, found it. Behold.”
Heartman showed Sam a small case that he had removed from the depths of the bag. From it, Heartman took out a transparent cylindrical container that Sam had never seen before. It seemed to be made of reinforced plastic and filled with some kind of liquid. Inside floated something that looked like a string. Were Bridges up to something again?
Sam remembered how Deadman and Die-Hardman had made him carry Lou all the way to the incinerator without telling him anything. Once again, he had found himself lugging cargo he was kept oblivious to. Back then it had been with Bridget’s corpse, and this time it was with Mama’s. He was furious at Bridges for once again using him as an unintentional errand boy. Sam’s anger must have been showing on his face, because Heartman wiggled his index finger at him to placate him and indicated toward the container.
“It appears to be an umbilical cord, yes?”
Sam didn’t even bother responding. He supposed that it did, but it also looked like the remains of some kind of weird creature. One that lived on a planet with an entirely different kind of ecosystem.
“Human, by the looks of it. I think?” Heartman remarked, showing Sam his cuff link and throwing him a meaningful look. Heartman was telling him to play along. Sam didn’t know what Heartman was up to, but he could understood that much. The situation seemed awfully similar to when Deadman had raised his suspicions about the director.
“It doesn’t look biological. I can’t say for sure without looking into it further, but I don’t think this was an ordinary conduit between fetus and placenta. It looks more like a BT’s tether.”
Heartman showed Sam the container up closer. Once he got a good look at it, Sam could see a substance like fine particles writhing around upon its surface. He had no idea that BT tethers that materialized like this could be harvested.
“And this was Mama’s?” Heartman wondered aloud to himself.
Sam had been the one to sever it, but he had no recollection of picking it back up. Heartman gave another meaningful nod.
“Yes… A body that doesn’t necrotize and an umbilical cord connected to the Beach… These are remarkable discoveries, Sam…” Heartman commented excitedly.
Sam began to back away, hoping to escape the hug that Heartman looked like he might give him at any moment. Heartman gave Sam an apologetic look, and placed the container with the umbilical cord in it back on the stretcher, before closing the body bag back up.
“Would you mind looking at this for a moment?” Heartman asked, turning to the monitor on the wall.
It showed a four-legged creature lying in a snow-covered field—a mammoth. Sam wondered if it had been dug up around here and continued to gaze at the monitor, unsure of Heartman’s intentions.
“Look closely. Can you tell what it is?” Heartman asked.
He zoomed in on the mammoth’s abdomen. The camera was picking up something strange. An umbilical cord was extending out from its belly.
“Do you see it? An umbilical cord is extending out of this mammoth’s body. This record, made before the Death Stranding, happened to get left behind. And look here.”
Heartman switched to the next photo. This one showed an ammonite with a similar cord. It was dangling from the center of the ammonite’s spiral-shaped shell.
“So far, I’ve only managed to dig up these two photographs, but I have been able to establish that neither of them are fakes. Now, the umbilical cord issue might be one thing, but what’s stranger is that neither this mammoth nor this ammonite were found fossilized or preserved in ice as you might expect. Both of these species have been extinct for thousands of years, but, as you can see in the photographs, they look as though they only died yesterday. Just like Mama. And I’ll bet that even more of these specimens are out there, waiting to be found. My colleagues are on the hunt as we speak. Once you activate the Chiral Network, I might even be able to retrieve some of the past records, too.”