Ruha remembered dying.

It is said that some could see a white light at death, that death felt much like going to sleep, or like meeting an old friend or a lover – Ruha remembered death as a tightening noose slowly choking his sight, taste, smell, the darkening claws piercing through his heart in agonizing sloth, gobbling up his memories bit by bit.

Looking back, not that he was capable of looking back at this moment, not with how his head seemed to be splitting away at the seams – Ruha would have preferred his memories stayed in death’s stomach.

At least that way his brain would be better able to handle these new memories. The human mind was really not suitable for handling more than one lifetime’s worth of memories – this seemed true for a human in intergalactic era as well.

No, multiverse. This was an interverse era – one of the many new terms that Ruha was learning, courtesy to migraine inducing extra memories. Galaxies were one of the smaller celestial bodies at the present time – and Ruha wished, with the minute bit of brain he could actually control to think independently at all, that either the onslaught of these huge amount of information would stop battering him so that he could breathe or kill him back to a non-sentient state already.

His head did not agree. Ruha’s form was curled up in a foetal position, his fingers clawing at his forehead time to time, and grasping at the floor the rest of the time. The room, mostly filled with canvasses in various degree of completion and a bed shoved to a corner, was silent of all but its sole occupant’s gasping sobs and whimpers, deceivingly calm with gentle blue walls and stretches of natural daylight filtering in through a floor to ceiling glass window that kept all sound from leaking out.

The curled up shape on the floor stayed in that position for well over an hour. When the young man pushed himself up to a seating position, leaning against the wall exhaustedly, his entire body was wet with sweat, dark hair sticking to his forehead and neck before cascading down to the floor. He leaned his head back, baring a pale throat that was still heaving for air, and wiped at his eyes and cheeks with a trembling hand.

Ruha opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling. It was a darker blue than the walls, leaning faintly to grey.

Last night he died.

Heart attack, probably. He always did have heart issues.

It was last night to him. At present, even with the waves of memories from his new body, he could not calculate how far back his time was.

His new body. Yes. He was in another person’s body now.

Alive.

And with this person’s memories. Only the memories seemed more like… like I am living in an encyclopaedia. Of multiple related and unrelated and semi-related topics and area. That knows neither indexing, nor cataloguing.

And of them very little was related to the person himself, that is, to the person Ruha was now. What little there was – was mostly like a filmstrip being played, Ruha could barely feel any involvement, or emotions in those memories. Only the memories related to painting seemed to have a first person point of view, though even there, emotions were completely absent.

In fact, that was the common characteristic in all the memories. No emotions. There was a part in Ruha that had been guilty, still was, though he knew he could not do much if anything at all to remedy it, at the knowledge that he had taken over someone else’s life, in a very literal sense that he would never have thought was possible at all if not for his present reality. The lack of emotion in the memories of his… host body? he really didn’t want to be a parasite – was relieving to a certain extent. While it was very possible that the lack of emotion was a result of the absence of the original soul, Ruha could tell, instinctively, perhaps, that there was something specifically unusual about the state of the original person – of course, his coming in this body specifically was enough proof of that – and the idea was calming in a way, that this person might have been related to him in a way, that everything, as impossible as it felt, had happened because of some larger, perhaps cosmological reason. Ruha could swallow coming to future, appearing in a body that felt a lot like his and yet not his, living after dying and all of the related and subsequent impossible things, thanks to his habit of reading a variety of speculative fictions, but he drew the line at considering conspiracy theories of mad scientists and what nots behind these matters. He would rather believe in godly intervention and his atheism could go eat itself, he just needed to remember that this body was pretty much an empty shell and that he was definitely not a murderer. Or a soul murderer. Were those a thing now, in this future of who knew how many eons? Would he have to go on run from cosmic police?

“He was a like a living doll. I didn’t even know what happened. It’s not my fault.”

Perhaps in a world of impossibilities if he said something enough it would be true. Ruha’s tongue felt dry and bitter at his attempt of speech. His memories, that he have borne hours of severe migraine for to assimilate, at least partially, only partially, with his pre-existing memories, told him that there was a washroom attached to this room.

It was as large as in his head. Ruha supported himself against the stone table containing the basin and faucet, his legs still trembling slightly from exhaustion, though he could breathe now. He could also feel the body was completely healthy – albeit that might have been his assumptions – but somehow it was vastly different from his own body where he could feel his weak heart and every related pains.

The stone was not marble, though it was white with a grey undertone to it, looking strikingly like marble. His head returned to him that the stone was called taynix, and was a common material for use in toilets and washrooms due to being glossy and easy to clean. This stone also took to being pigmented from a variety of media, thus allowing for a large range of customizations.

Perhaps it would have given him more data – Ruha still had not got the hang of stopping his brain from throwing out every piece of memories about anything he registered – as it was, he looked up at the mirror covering the entire wall above the basin and his head stopped thinking about taynix facts.

The youth in the mirror had milky skin, that had gone past being fair and to an unhealthy pallor that was only heightened by the sweat glistening on it. Ruha bent down at the sight, splashing water on himself several times, before drinking in large gulps.

When he straightened back up, the image looked less like a ghost. His initial feeling had been right – Ruha’s past face have been somewhat similar to it, not like twins, but close enough that they would have been considered as blood relatives. He was obviously younger now than he had been at death – Ruha had died at twenty nine. The boy in the mirror looked barely twenty – in fact Ruha only considered this body as an adult because his memories had told him of the present custom of gaining adulthood, and because this body was, quite obviously, biologically adult. Though, he could not find any memory relating to his actual age in terms of years.

He sighed and pushed the wet strands of hair back from his forehead. Ruha now had long hair, till around his knees. It was darker too, a solid black. His eyes were the same in shape, with elongated corners and double eyelids framed with long lashes. But his iris… Ruha was faintly speechless as he stared at his own reflection.

He had never heard of silver eyes outside of anime.

His irises were a startling silver, almost glowing. The pupil was black, with a tiny silver dot in the middle.

Ruha tried to remember if he was still human. His brain returned a cheerful silence at his query.

He checked his ears. It looked like human ears. Fingers and toes – five in each limb. No tails, no wings, no tentacles, no… anything nonhuman.

Ruha had nothing against being nonhuman. He just wanted to know his own body – a lifetime of a diseased body meant a heritage of a certain amount of paranoia about being aware of his own physic at every moment.

At any rate, he was whatever he was. Ruha sighed and splashed some more water on his face, before deciding to turn towards the large bathing chamber. The wash room had transparent wall separating the bath area – there was no lavatory because as Ruha’s memories had reminded him at his noticing this lack – the present era was one where any and all kinds of bodies, on ingestion of any material, transformed it into energy particles before absorbing it – the impurities too, are turned into energy particles and are ejected from the body automatically, and the surrounding atmosphere has a natural attribute of purifying all such impurities. In fact bathing too, was more of a pleasure than necessity.

It’s a wonder that people has a digestive tract at all. Ruha supposed that was because the ingestion of energy was still done orally for a lot of species, not to mention eating was a pleasure too.

Focus on pleasure seemed a basic characteristic in all his memories. Ruha groaned softly as all the faucets in the bathing chambers came alive, water jetting out at him from every direction. The settings, he remembered, was already set. Ruha could, and would, he noted to himself, play with the setting later – but for now this was quite heavenly for him, another proof of his earlier hypothesis, even this host of his, who he thought to be a living doll, was apparently quite decadent in at least his bathing preference.

It made sense, he figured, padding over to the pool area and lying down in the water. It was just deep enough that in a half lying position the water would be till his throat. The headrest seemed to be made from a softer material that sank comfortably as he leaned back. The faucets here too were perfectly aligned to his position – the jets hitting him with a constant pressure from all directions, even underwater. Ruha squirmed softly, deciding to keep his legs closed and drawn up as some of the jets hit certain body parts that he had always tried to ignore, his heart condition requiring complete absence of any stimulant to physical excitement being one of the main reasons. While this new body obviously did not have any such regulation to maintain, Ruha did not have any emotional energy nor placidity to think of exploring that particular avenue at the moment.

A futuristic world that considered galaxies to be smaller celestial bodies would be advanced enough for its residents to be able to focus on pleasure as the primary goal of existence – particularly when said residences were pretty much immortals, as Ruha received from his memories, all bodies being indestructible by time. Other factors might have harmful effects, even fatal, but at least time had no effect on any being in this universe, er… these verses.

As fantastic as it sounded, with his present reality of dying and then waking up in this body, Ruha was quite willing and ready to accept all encyclopaedic details that his brain threw at him at face value. Living doll or not, the original host of this memories had lived in this world far longer than him.

He spent a long time in the water, washing himself carefully, trying to get familiar with the feel of this body. In fact, it was more about getting familiar with this body in his own speed – rather discomfortingly, the skin and limbs felt too much like his own, he would forget that his body was different now, before trying to move a certain way and suddenly realising that the body was not the one he had lived in all his life.

Now, this is the body I will carry, this is the body that is me. Ruha stood up from the water, pushing away the strangeness of the thought of living forever from his mind. Naked for all but a bracelet on his left wrist, he padded out of the bathing chamber, then the wash room and to the closet in his bedroom. He had thrown the sweat soaked clothes to the machine in the bathroom, that he recognised as a washer. From his memories, Ruha knew that there was a person who took care of these daily matters for him, but his caretaker would have to get used to the fact that Ruha was capable of taking care of his personal needs and preferred to do so. Not that he was concerned that his caretaker, Lephis, he remembered, would question it – even in the emotionless memories it was very obvious how much Lephis cared about Ruha living as comfortably as possible, considering this was a public shelter, and was constantly worried that Ruha could not function by himself.

At least the name was same in both lives. His memory told him that his name was Ruhnir here, though there was no memory of anyone using that name nor could he remember where he got that name from – Lephis and others in the shelter seemed to call him Ruha, and that was the name that was attached to his SPIRIT. He pulled out a long shirt, light violet, and black slacks, similar to what he had been wearing earlier, only in different colours, and touched the materials thoughtfully. Cotton, according to his brain, but this was far softer, almost cool to his skin, than he remembered cotton to be. The trees evolved, he supposed, wondering absently if the species, of anything, from his earth had remained at all. He winced moments after he had put his clothes on, sighing at his own absent mindedness. Having forgotten to wipe himself dry, now the clothes were wet at sticking to his skin, not to mention his hair, which had pretty much drenched his shirt, dripping a pool over the floor.

Ruha blamed his host body. There was not a single memory of wiping himself dry. Likely this living doll had worn wet clothes till they dried by themselves every day.

He didn’t bother changing his clothes – the room was comfortably warm, they would dry soon enough. But his hair could not be left like this. Looking in his closet, Ruha could not see anything that seemed like a towel, so he took a long vail like cloth, a blue gauze that he would have expected to see around the arms of some upper class woman in an evening party, and certainly not in a man’s closet. At the moment though, he did not feel like considering the issue of his sexual identity based on clothing choice, not least because his memories were absent of any particular data regarding any preference at all, whether for dressing preference or for sex partners.

Ruha rung his hair dry, then decided to tie it up wrapped within the gauze on his head. Looking at the pooling water on the ground, he stayed silent for a long moment before turning to the door resolutely.

It was not like he knew where the cleaning mop was!

Thank you for reading, and you can read it from my blog, here, if you want to read ahead by 2-3 early chapters. I am also translating I Heard That I am Poor in the same blog, and there are other shorter works as well (like this) so do drop by if you are interested. 

You can follow me at @Sphinxdroid.