This isn't how I wanted to die. Not like this!
There are good, glorious deaths—like for the Motherland, for Stalin; or in bed with a gorgeous top model with legs up to her ears and breasts tight as a drum.
And then there are dumb, idiotic deaths.
Like mine.
Allow me to introduce myself—my name is Yegor Fraev, I'm twenty-one years old, a student at a law school.
In my dreams, I'd build a career as a corporate lawyer, live in my own mansion, wake up in bed with young beauties, never marry until old age, and, when the curtain finally fell, knock up some babe and quietly move on to the next world.
In reality, I had a bunk in a six-person dorm room and a couple dozen rubles in my bank account.
And also, I got killed by an electric shock in the dorm shower.
To be honest, it's a dubious kind of fun when electricity runs through you. I think I even saw the water droplets on my skin boil and flash-evaporate. It was something like what happened to Revan in the Emperor's throne room, when Vitiate was roasting the legendary Jedi inside his own armor with Force lightning. And in Episode VI, when Palpatine was frying the younger Skywalker, steam was practically pouring off him, like the kid was drying out in seconds.
Like a battering ram to the chest, the jolt threw me away from the shower door to the far end, slamming me into the tile so hard all the air burst out of my lungs. Cracking the back of my head against the wall, I felt my eyes closing, and heat flared in my chest, as if someone had poured molten metal into my diaphragm. I wanted to scream from the pain, but not a single sound came out of my mouth. And then came cold and darkness.
Tenebrae damn you—what did I ever do to deserve this?
***
"LIVE!"
Not a plea—a command.
A voice stripped of emotion. Not a hint of asking. A direct order, not open to discussion. The vibrations coming from that bodiless bass jolted my consciousness.
I couldn't feel my arms or legs. Only endless drifting, as if I were falling from a great height into an abyss. Impenetrable darkness surrounded me—cold, making me feel wildly uneasy. Viscous—I was sinking into it like quicksand. I wanted to answer the voice, but couldn't, because I was drowning in the dark.
Is this what life after death is? Heaven or Hell? Reward or punishment?
The more questions I asked myself, the more I felt panic washing over me. I was scared. Terrified. I hate ending up in situations I can't control. And here, honestly, I didn't even know where I was, or what was happening to me.
As it had hundreds of times before, anger replaced fear. Bare, scorching anger, instantly swelling into rage—abstract, all-consuming rage.
I was furious. No answers, and this incomprehensible state—either flight or being dragged down…
Gradually, I realized who the target of my rage was.
The dorm commandant. A worthless, shriveled old bastard with perpetually greasy, thick lips, oily eyes, and filthy little jokes. Back in my first year, I'd heard rumors he'd ruined more than a few dozen freshmen girls, making life hard for anyone who didn't want to "put out." As long as I'd known him, he'd always been prowling the floors, eyeing the female students. But there hadn't been a single case where he actually did anything in the dorm.
And I'd told him about the exposed wiring a week ago—plumbers had been fixing the drain and smashed everything they could. As a result, our shower had bare wires, and the women's shower stopped working altogether. The guys from the neighboring room even offered to fix it, but no—he wouldn't allow it.
Then it hit me. Pashka, my neighbor, said the girls from our floor had to go down to the first floor now to take a shower. And right next to the women's shower was the commandant's room…
The previous commandant had been a kind old granny, and there were never any questions. But now… I'd bet my life that pervert wasn't in any hurry to fix anything, as long as the girls kept walking past his door. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if he was peeping on them in the showers.
No, seriously—what a piece of shit! I died because of a senile pervert! For that, he ought to be hung by the balls and skinned slow. And I'm not even sure they'd lock him up once they figured out what happened. We've got a humane state, for fuck's sake.
Goddamn it!
That's why, with all my soul, I'm on the side of despotism. Palpatine, for example, achieved the kind of order in his Empire the galaxy hadn't seen since the days of Vitiate—the ancient Sith Emperor.
But that's all fairy tales, as my stepfather used to tell me.
"You'll never amount to anything, screwing around with that bullshit!" he'd yell when he caught me rewatching Star Wars or playing games set in that universe.
I never knew my real father—he disappeared long before I was born. Mom didn't like talking about him, and my stepfather…
For a moment, it felt like the hatred I felt at the thought of my stepfather gave me enough strength to blow up a star.
If there was a person I hated with every fiber of my soul, it was my stepfather.
I never called him by name, never addressed him as anything but "stepfather." I hated the man who turned my life into hell.
He came into our lives when I was five. For sixteen long years I endured his taunts, his beatings, his mockery of my awkward—tall but painfully skinny—frame, my congenital nearsightedness, my scoliosis…
They say strong character is tempered in the fires of family conflict.
All I learned was how to hate. If I brought home a C, he beat me half to death. Anything went—fists, boots, belts. He accepted no grades but straight A's. I couldn't even have a B, because that was failure. And failures were meant to suffer.
And I suffered. For every single failure. I remember in seventh grade I won an academic olympiad among ninth-graders. Well—"won." I took an honorable third place. I came home with a certificate. A couple hours later I was taken to intensive care—"fell down the stairs." Even though I remember perfectly well that the "stairs" were my stepfather's fists. A few times he even beat me with a police baton—he served in our glorious police.
For the same reason, nobody ever reacted to my repeated hospitalizations: broken bones, bruised organs.
In sixteen years I learned to hate absolutely everything about him—from his fingernails to his stinking breath.
That hatred lived with me all the time. Even when I ran away from home at eighteen and enrolled in a law program in a neighboring city. None of my family members knew where I studied—and, frankly, they didn't give a damn. They had a kid together. What did my stepfather, and the woman who indulged him (the one I used to call my mother), care about me?
I grew up angry at life. Like a wolf cub, I hated my family. And I hated the people around me.
When you've been counting on no one but yourself since you were little, and on nothing but your own strength, you stop valuing concepts like friendship, like caring about someone. Only your goals matter. And who cares how they're achieved.
Some call it selfishness. Some call it charisma. I don't give a shit.
I call it my life—my style. I live for myself and for myself. And the rest of the world can shove its ideas about morality, manners, and everything else up its ass.
Part of me understood that you can't look at people like expendable material. But I shut myself down almost immediately.
Who are these people around me? Losers. The same kind of losers as me. Would any of them help me if I were being robbed? No. Would any of them donate me a kidney? No.
None of them deserve more attention than what's necessary to reach my goals.
My stepfather taught me that only individuals are worthy of attention. Important people who can solve problems. Whining, sniveling failures are slaves—the strong of this world have always wiped their boots on them and always will.
And if you don't want to spend your whole life on your knees, then you should step over the heads of the less fortunate on your way to the top. Climb so high that the opinions and desires of the crowd below can't touch you.
"If you want to sit around and do nothing, you have to sit very high," my stepfather instructed me.
I found an escape in Star Wars. The struggle of Good and Evil, the eternal conflict, decided one way or another by countless significant figures… Vitiate, Revan, Vader, Yoda, Dooku, Windu… Those are just the first associations… In reality there are hundreds and thousands—characters from books and films, games and all the other merchandise of that Universe…
I'd thought hundreds of times about what my life would be like if I ended up in Star Wars. Would I become a Jedi? No, unlikely. A Sith? That had its downsides too. Those guys had their own issues—especially the Force, which you can't always even understand…
But if I had it, anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances, I'd build my own Empire. Like Vitiate, I'd rule it for thousands of years, avoiding a crisis of power. Law and order of a totalitarian regime, clear rules and laws, harsh punishments. A state you could be proud of. And the Republic… a typical shit-democracy, where, sure, plenty of worthy people grew up who could've made the galaxy better, but…
"THAT'S INTERESTING."
That voice again—the one I'd already managed to forget. Goosebumps rippled through me. My nonexistent body seemed to regain its shape for an instant. I could even feel the coarse, sandstone-like floor tiles of the dorm shower…
What's happening? Maybe the voice will answer? But where is it? Where's the owner of the voice? In the dark? I need to find him—judging by everything, he isn't new here.
For some reason, I had the impression the owner of the voice was very close. If only I could thin the darkness a little, and there he'd be…
A mental touch against the darkness rewarded me with pain. Again I felt as though I'd been electrocuted. But much stronger than last time. And even the aftereffects of that touch were different—nothing like the first time. For a moment, I felt my arms and legs again, the cool tile beneath me…
"Yes!" the voice gained a hint of emotion. "Again!"
Honestly, it wasn't exactly a pleasure—to touch that again. I don't know how I managed it the first time, but now…
"AGAIN!!!"
The voice squeezed me like a press. It was strange—not feeling yourself, but still realizing you're being crushed like by a road roller. And crushed harder and harder. Without the slightest chance to break free.
It became clear the voice had decided, without appeal, who was who here. And the fact was, I wasn't the one dominating this situation. Fine. Let's see what happens next.
And, in the blink of an eye, I touched the darkness again. Through that icy contact, I felt the darkness filling me. Cold poured into my body in thick waves. And with it returned the sensation of my own body. Arms, legs, head… The numbness that flooded me nearly arched me into a bow, and a groan tore from my mouth.
"GET UP!"
The voice kicked me in the side. The fleeting sensation that my back was braced against something hard abruptly changed into countless tiny stings the moment my face touched sand scorching hot, like a skillet.
"Agh—ptoo!" I snapped my eyes open, spitting out the searing sand that had gotten into my mouth, and forced my head to turn to the side.
Wait—sand? I was in the shower!
The viscous, icy darkness dissolved as if it had never existed. I was lying on my back, feeling, even through dense clothing, the rough grains of sand pressing into the back of my head and the underside of my body, my legs…
Heat, like an oven… Even a light breeze brought no relief. The moment it touched my face, I felt monstrous pain, like half my face had been sliced off with red-hot metal.
With an inarticulate moan, I jerked like I'd been hit, away from the place where I'd been hurt. Pushing off the sand with my feet, not seeing where I was crawling because my eyes couldn't catch focus—feeding my brain a blurred pale-blue smear—I tried to get as far as possible from where I'd come to. My heart threatened to burst from my chest, and my mind was going insane from the sheer abundance of horror and pain rolling over me in waves, sometimes weaker, sometimes stronger, driving me mad. Like a red-hot needle driven into the back of my skull, these vague sensations of someone else's distant pain burned my mind from the inside.
I couldn't hear my movements—the whisper of sand, the singing of birds.
Nothing at all. Like I'd been deaf from birth and—
The next second, I regretted thinking about hearing.
A piercing sound, like a circular saw screaming in a lumber mill, slammed into my brain, a heartbeat later replaced by a thunderclap of unbelievable power. Dozens, hundreds of wails in different pitches—strongly reminiscent of blaster fire—rang out around me. But my eyes refused to obey. I couldn't see what was happening, or what kind of hallucination surrounded me. And that made me scared.