The second those “things” met this world, the sea boiled and the sky fell down. A wave higher than any skyscraper washed ashore, stranding all the extinct creatures. Corpses piled up on top of the white sand made out of more corpses. A young Bridget could only cling tightly to her doll and watch. Nothing lived on that beach.
—Those were the dreams of extinction I had. Even as I grew older, they wouldn’t set me free. In my dreams I watched the world end. So many times. Countless past extinctions that decimated life on this planet again and again and again. I even dreamt of the destruction to come. Human corpses used to wash up on my Beach. They all seemed to look like me somehow. All of them had the same umbilical cord.
That strong and intelligent girl learned to live with her nightmares of extinction. She could never escape from them, but she didn’t let them overwhelm her, either. They never drove her to suicide or madness. Her dreams of extinction made as much sense as living in this world did. That’s how Bridget came to accept them in the end.
Senseless people did things for senseless reasons. They started wars, they hurt each other, killed each other. It was the same as the Beach. Bridget decided that she needed to understand why.
Ever since she had tried to destroy her dream, the Beach had turned into an even more frightening world. She needed to understand why that happened, too.
Bridget devoured knowledge. She learned about life and the universe. She learned about people. About the world. She learned about everything. She strived to understand this world in a human way. Her entry into politics was an extension of that learning.
—It wasn’t quite the right answer for me, but it wasn’t a mistake, either. Then I faced my first hurdle.
“It’s stage three,” the doctor explained, showing Bridget an X-ray. Bridget felt numb. It felt like this was happening to someone else. The doctor cast his eyes downward and cleared his throat. “I’m afraid it’s going to require removal.”
It was just after Bridget turned twenty when the cancer was discovered in her uterus. She’d be lying if she said she wasn’t shocked, but she had no choice in the matter. Bridget obediently accepted the surgery.
As soon as she lay down on the bed and breathed in the anesthetic, she lost consciousness.
“Don’t worry. It’ll all be over when you wake up. You won’t even know. You won’t even dream. It’ll feel like it only took a few seconds,” the doctor explained before the surgery.
“Like Rip Van Winkle,” Bridget smiled back.
What the doctor said was right. But it was also wrong.
Bridget was on the Beach.
The surgery was over in a second. As she came around, Bridget felt a dull pain and the faces of her doctor and parents swam into view. She was in a hospital room. It felt like she had only just been knocked out.
But Bridget was still on the Beach. She couldn’t tell if she was dreaming or awake. She couldn’t tell which side time was passing on.
—I was split across two worlds. My ha in one, and my ka in the other.
They existed simultaneously, but that existence was a contradiction. So Bridget came up with a story and gave the other Bridget on the Beach a name. “Amelie.” Ame was French for soul. A soul that’s a lie.
As a human of this world, Bridget had to abide by its laws. Bridget had to give birth to Amelie. Then she saw it. A human corpse had washed up on the Beach. One that looked just like her. If that was Amelie, then Bridget had to revive her somehow. She felt like if she didn’t, then humanity would go extinct.
Bridget had consciousness and a body, but no soul.
Amelie had consciousness and a soul, but no body.
—But Amelie wasn’t restricted to the Beach, she could appear in this world, too. Just as I could visit the Beach in my dreams, Amelie dreamed and came to this world. Just like how a BT comes here, too. You can see dreams, but you can’t touch them. That’s why it’s not incorrect to say that no one has ever met Amelie.
Amelie on the Beach was Bridget. That’s why she looked just like her (even though I didn’t have a ha). That was fine at first. But in this world, Bridget’s body followed this world’s laws and began to age, while Amelie remained twenty years old on the Beach.
It was just after the first Death Stranding when Bridget realized she had to explain that gap somehow. America had collapsed and Bridget sensed the dream of the Beach she had been having since she was a child sliding into reality. The crosses, the corpses with their umbilical cords, the dolls, and the things from across the sea she had seen so many times. And Amelie’s birth. She had to weave them all together to create one strand. She had to use it all to unravel the truth behind her extinction dreams and the situation that the world found itself confronted with.
The first lie that Bridget told was that she had a daughter named Amelie.
She confessed to her young but skilled ex-special-forces aid, John Blake McClane, that Amelie had been born before the Death Stranding and suffered from locked-in syndrome. That she didn’t know why at first, but after she heard the theory that the Beach linked life and death, it all made sense. Her daughter’s soul had deviated toward the Beach, but after the Death Stranding, the Beach connected to this world and her daughter’s soul—Amelie’s soul—finally linked back to her body.
His sympathetic disposition was a blessing. He could understand and attract others. His disposition was similar to Higgs, whom Amelie would go on to meet later. Despite the fact that he knew all too well how the world worked, he never exploited anything for his own ends. He was the kind of person who pushed forward without question, as long as it was for someone or something else’s sake.
Bridget told him that Amelie had finally been born into this world. That her soul had converged with her body and she could move. Now, she could go back and forth between this world and the Beach. Maybe she could use such an ability to overcome this unprecedented disaster.
John believed in Bridget and swore to dedicate himself to American reconstructionism.
They formed Bridges and dedicated it to building a system that would restore America.
That system was the Chiral Network.
The Beach was connected to the world of the dead. Which meant that it was also connected to the past. Light and electromagnetic waves never disappear, they just continue to diffuse. They continue to the ends of the universe without disappearing. The electromagnetic waves given off by someone’s brain, the memories of events recorded by the light… they never disappear. We humans perceive that world as the world of the dead. Which meant that if humanity could piece those fragments back together, then maybe we could find a way to avoid another Big Five-level extinction. It was a revelation to Bridget.
In exchange, an umbilical cord grew from Bridget’s abdomen. It wasn’t an umbilical cord that connected mother to child, but an umbilical cord that connected her to Amelie on the Beach. She tried to cut it again and again, but it always came back. It was just like the umbilical cord that she saw on all those extinct creatures on the Beach.
—That’s right. My umbilical cord was just like the one I saw on all those animals. I was the existence that you deemed the Extinction Entity. But why me? Why did humanity have to go extinct? That was another reason why I activated the Chiral Network. I wanted to know more about the past. Know more about the path the world had taken through extinction and rebirth. I founded Bridges for that reason, too. But events were keeping pace with me. The voidouts began to happen more frequently. People were born with DOOMS. The BBs were born. But the longer I fought my war against the inevitable, the weaker I became. My ha had cancer. The Beach’s punishment, maybe, for not playing along like a good little EE. And then, just like that, my ha was gone. I couldn’t finish what I’d started. So I asked you to do it for me… and you did.