After life fucks you over, what next?
We all know what happens before birth.
A certain organ we would not name clicks with another certain organ we still won't name for copyright reasons.
That click results in a series of events that could be both pleasurable and still lead to a walk of shame at daylight.
A million sperms battle for supremacy as they stream along, jutting heads and tails, fighting for life right through the gates.
Then one alone emerges above them, proud and great in glory.
It strikes that entitled egg that had been sitting there lazily the entire time poor sperm fought for dear life.
Sparks fly. Genes entangle.
Something undescribably biological happens…
And boom! Big Bang kind of eruption!
Narcissistic egg plus Conquering-warrior sperm get married for better or for worse.
They become one. A child. Creation at its peak.
Never mind that said child will give someone sleepless nights and require diapers for the foreseeable future and drain a certain gender of milk within that time.
A thing of joy, anyway. Birth and creation.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is death.
Death is a mystery.
Well, at least the other side. We all know that before death you have to actually die.
Like, one way or another, your life has to get extinguished.
That match-made-in-heaven between sperm and egg brought to an abdrupt end.
The mystery surrounding death comes after that ultimate poof.
You know, after those last words and final breaths.
What happens after death?
A question famous across universes and dimensions and…well, everywhere.
It's not as if anyone can travel to the great beyond and return to tell helpful tales about life after life!
Sure, we've had a few stories about seeing the light and blah blah blah but none of them holds any weight.
I mean, if death's all about flying up to paradise or plunging down to chaos then what's the point?
That's where he comes in.
Our textbook troubled MC.
Zukko.
You see, he gets to die and live to tell the story.
You're, in retrospect, reading the memoir of a dead, disgruntled soul.
Let's start with how he leaves the world.
No need boring you with his boring childhood and pathetically boring life before death.
Ok, maybe just a recap.
At five loving mother dissapeared.
Two years later grumpy daddy dropped him off at school and vanished.
No trace of them whatsoever was left behind.
Bet you're loving him already.
Things continued downhill from there, thank you.
Shitty orphanage where he got bullied for having no parents by other children who had no parents.
Shitty high school where he got punched just for existing.
Shitty excuse for jobs to keep a roof over his head and at least sustain himself enough not to pass out on the street.
The typical sympathy inspiring MC readers adore.
Let's just agree that at twenty he had nothing to his name.
No, not even a rat to call his uninvited house guest.
So pardon him for saving the laptop from a park bench.
The owner just left it lying around without a care in the world.
Zukko had been sitting close to the fountain.
Weary from his twelve-hour long shift at a rowdy bar that just ended ten minutes ago and thinking about his next twelve-hour shift at a much rowdier bar in an hour.
Nobody paid him any attention.
Who would?
He was just any other wayward new adult out of school and already certified wayward status.
Tall and lanky, his bony shoulders hunched and dull brown hair falling over his narrow face.
Zukko stared ahead without seeing.
Tired to the bone, he knew he had to begin his trek to the bar across town or he'd loose his job.
He already had two strikes for latecoming.
And without the second job, his shabby apartment would not be able to exist.
Sighing, he got up.
Bones creaked as his rangy body unfolded.
Splotched shirt creased to within inches of its life. Jeans faded almost to threads.
In such a state he could pass for a statue of destitution.
He'd just rounded the fountain when something crashed into him and he tumbled to the ground.
Oof!
His butt landed hard, drawing a grunt of pain from him.
He looked up to see the disgruntled face of a much larger boy about his age.
Compared to Zukko, the boy looked healthy and composed.
Sure of himself. Untouched by poverty and hunger.
A large smart phone pressed to an ear, he hissed at Zukko.
"Watch where you're going, beggar."
Zukko, already used to such insults, felt not even a touch of frustration.
He got up, dusting leaves from his backside.
"If you had eyes then you'd have seen me coming, Dude."
Big boy's face bristled. "Did you just insult me?"
"My bad. I have loose lips."
"I'll loosen your jaws, beggar."
Zukko didn't mind the insult.
In fact, he couldn't remember the last time he fought.
He craved it. A welcome distraction.
He squared his shoulders.
"Well? Either start breaking my teeth or just fuck off, Blowjob!"
The bastard glared at him but made no move to attack.
He caught the dangerous, carefree glint in Zukko's eyes.
His nose scrunched up, as if perceiving something foul.
"I don't play with gabbage. Get out of my way."
The boy…man spat at him and bundled away, chattering loudly into his phone about scums and dirty pigs all over the city.
"Pussy!"
Zukko gave his retreating back the finger, but felt a burning streak inside his chest.
Surely it wasn't his fault that he was poor?
He worked hard for everything.
Food, water, shelter, even the three hours or less he slept daily.
But nobody cared.
There was no one to care, period.
Shaking his head, he continued on his way.
There was a short cut to the main road through the cusp of trees surrounding the park…
Something caught his attention and he stopped.
Only a single bench existed this deep into the park.
The direction where the big boy had come from.
On the bench, the unmistakable screen of a laptop glowed.
Ehmmm…Zukko wasn't particularly new to collecting stuff knowingly or unknowingly abandoned, but…
He looked left and right.
Scarcely anyone paying him any attention.
The laptop felt heavy in his hands as he rescued it from the lonely bench.
A Super-Icon Multivariate with triple level processor speed, unlimited storage space, and inbuilt Bullpower batteries.
The batteries alone sold for a thousand dollars.
The entire laptop could buy him fifty times and still have change to spare for boxes of candy.
Sure enough, the wallpaper was a picture of the big boy.
Zukko leered.
"Karma is a bitch."
He closed the system and stuck it under his left arm.
Nobody stopped him as he left.
With each step he took, the coiling dread in his gut transformed into excitement.
Anticipation…something good at last.
A miracle.
He didn't bother going to the bar.
He would never have to work shitty jobs anymore if he played his cards right.
"Selling the laptop at Tech Market won't be a problem."
He reasoned as he hurried up the creaky stairs to his one room penthouse.
He'd sold several items of questionable origins at the market before.
Without a receipt, he could haggle the laptop for half its original price, but that would be something.
More than ten times what he'd earn in five years even if he took up five shitty jobs.
Jamming the bolts of the door behind him, he crossed the entire room in five strides to the small table in front of the equally small window that looked out into another apartment.
By some stroke of luck or curse, the laptop had remained on the entire time.
Good because Zukko couldn't remotely know how to turn on a system or bypass the password.
"How am I supposed to operate it?"
He had a phone.
Partially stolen property, but nothing compared to the smartness of the system.
He pressed a random button and the screen went blank.
His head snapped back in shock.
"What's happening?"
He prodded some other buttons.
No response.
"Do you need CPR?"
His natural instinct to smack the system back to good behavior kicked in.
He'd just lifted an arm to do bodily harm when lines of codes appeared on the screen.
Long scripts of green squiggles over the black background.
Zukko was transfixed by the symbols he could somehow understand.
Further painstaking research into the system's cloud storage revealed uncountable books, video tutorials, practice projects and AI apps.
All of them for building virtual and augmented reality games.
That was the day Zukko's life changed.
The day he discovered a purpose.
A conduit for his frustrations and fears, his hatred for the world and his sorry life
For five years he worked.
Learning and practicing. Failing and restarting.
Night and day.
Tirelessly.
Starving for days.
Living on junk food and soda if not.
Resorting to nefarious means to get required assesories for his digital art.
Until Chaos Uprising was created.
His life's work.
A virtual reality game of the kind of world he lived in.
One of darkness and dread. A horror game.
Now, how to actually make all his hard work worth it?
Sell the game to a famous company for millions.
Don't be naive, Zukko. The world doesn't work like that.
His first rejection was a wound to his soul.
The second a puncture. The third a blow to his chest.
By the tenth he barely felt anything.
Turned out you needed money and connections to actually make money and connections.
What an irony!
So, at almost twenty five, he still had nothing.
He'd wasted five years on a game he couldn't sell because it was too horrific and gory for the current market.
He still lived in the same shabby apartment. Still alone and broke.
On the night of his twenty fifth birthday, just a few minutes after midnight, he pushed through the glass doors of a pub and staggered into the street.
Drunk and high from cheap wine he'd spent the last of his pennies on.
His head was fuzzy, his eyes clouded.
Why am I even alive, he thought.
Light flared over the asphalt as the night sky lit up.
Over a million pieces of burning rocks each bigger than a mountain hurtled towards earth.
Zukko stared up at them mesmerized.
He'd heard news about an asteroid soaring too close to home for comfort.
But, like everyone else, thought nothing of it.
Those things never hit, everyone agreed.
Now here it was.
An apocalyptic level catastrophe no one had planned for.
The end of the world. The end of his miserable life.
Maniacal laughter poured from his chest, echoing through the eerily empty void.
"Fuck you, Earth. Fuck You!"
He opened his arms to embrace the fury of space.
"You're a strange character."
Zukko whipped around to see a smiling man behind him.
"What?"
Nothing visibly odd about the man.
Tailored black suit, tie unknotted around his neck, black shadows under his penetrating eyes.
Just any other man in his early forties.
He could pass for an accountant or CEO in training.
The man motioned to the sky.
A frozen sky, the burning rocks caught in flight, as if a great pause button had been pressed.
"In all my centuries I've never encountered anyone so happy about the end of the world. So ready for death."
A foreboding aura oozed off the man.
It sent needles crawling down Zukko's spine.
"Who are you?"
Had the man been on the street the entire time?
Zukko never saw anyone.
Where did he come from?
He appeared from thin air. Out of nowhere.
The man shrugged, a wry smile over his face.
"I've been so many things. I've been called many names. I don't have any at the moment."
Zukko's fuzzy brain couldn't wrap such words with understanding.
Even the air around him felt still.
The sky, the noise of life, all of them frozen.
Had the strange man stopped time?
The man scoffed, as if reading his thoughts.
"Time is a fickle thing. It either exists or it doesn't. Nothing special about it."
Zukko shook his head.
Could he be so drunk he was seeing things?
Hallucinating.
Yes, that sounded right.
He'd had three bottles of beer.
Was that enough to cause a blackout?
The man's face hardened.
"Your world is about to peak. You wait for the end like a starving man. You think death is the ultimate ticket to peace?"
"Well, it's better than my terrible life. Nothing can be worse than what I'm living."
"You think you have it tough, don't you?"
"I've hovered on the sharp edge of a knife right from the moment I popped out from my mother's womb. I'd rather not have been born."
His voice cracked, but he continued his rant.
"The world ending is the best thing that has ever happened to me. Let it burn!"
The man's eyes glinted with mischief as he drew closer.
Zukko flinched as if slapped.
The man's presence was overwhelming in a discomforting way.
"Cherish your last breath, Zukko. From here all bets are off. No rules. No boundaries. It's kill or be killed."
Nothing minutely warm remained on the man's face now.
"You, my friend, have been marked for misery. Misery worse than you could ever imagine."
Cold wind rushed against Zukko as time restarted.
He blinked once and the street was empty.
What just happened?
He got not even a second to ponder about it.
The lightspeed rocks touched down almost at the same time at different parts of the planet.
It released great shockwaves of raw energy and fire everywhere.
The poles shattered, the core splintered, and earth broke apart in a burst of fiery inferno.
Nothing survived.
What happens after death?
Find out for yourself.
Our MC, as it so happens, just poofed.
Author Note: I hope you enjoy this novel as much as I do writing it. Add to your libraries and leave one or two power stones. Thank you.