Transcendence
By DieSukka of Deviantart
Shaking. Everything is shaking. You clench your teeth to keep them from rattling. It's hot. Not too hot, but it is quite noticeable. The rattling of everything around you, coupled with the sound of roaring wind batter your body and make you feel as if you've turned into jelly as you sit in silence, waiting. You close your eyes, hoping that it will help pass the time, but it does not and you open your eyes and look over to a picture of your family tucked away in a panel. Falling, you feel like you've been falling forever.
Everything stops and smooths out, except for the sound of roaring wind and the feeling of falling. A very coarse and gruff voice belonging to an older man interrupts the cacophony of external noise. He tells you, "Alright nuggets. We've reached our final drop point. Kid, you ready? Our men are depending on us." Kid. The Sarge called you Kid. You used to be a nugget like the other green academy graduates, but you were something else. You were ahead of the others. He called you Kid, because you were at a level above the nuggets. That man is your squad leader, an experienced veteran.
The sound of gunshots and shells erupt all around you. It all sounds muffled through the thick metal that surrounds you. You open your eyes again, greeted by near pitch black panoramic screens. The only thing you see is a pink, almost red glow. You pray in your mind that none of the enemy fire touches your drop pod. Your ears are greeted by the sound of tearing metal. As the drop pod you and your comrades were situated in breaks apart, as it was designed to, the panoramic screens flash to life. You are greeted by blue skies and clouds. You see the dense jungle below you. In your whole life, you have never seen so much green. You see a giant brown snake of a river, meandering lazily about the rainforest. With the ground rapidly approaching, you activate the thrusters on your unit, slowing your descent to a much less thunderous crash, knocking over several trees as you do so. One of your comrades is not so lucky. You hear his screams as his Zaku II's chest is Swiss-cheesed by enemy mobile suit machine gun fire in mid-descent, the cockpit torn by bullets. Luckily for the rest of your comrades, his mobile suit does not explode. You manage to somehow shrug off his sudden death. Perhaps because you never really knew him personally, as he was a last minute assignment to your team.
You have fallen quite a way, from planetary orbit to the surface of planet Earth, to be more exact. Your ancestors gave up life on this planet for life in the space colonies. And now you are fighting in this war of so-called "independence". Struggling at the controls, you move your unit backwards, careful of foliage behind you. Artificial gravity training back on the colonies is nothing compared to the real gravity of the planet. Still though, you quickly adjust to the gravity.
You and your squad were assigned to help a supply convoy that had been left behind in an enemy ambush escape into Zeon-occupied territory in America to provide supplies and escape back into space. With reinforcements from the north quite a ways away, you and your team were dispatched as a first response to hold off the enemies until they arrived. With the death of one of your members, however, your numbers have been reduced from five, to four.
"Dammit all to hell!" growls a surviving member through clenched teeth. He is your best friend from the academy and the rash hot-head of the group. "They only send five of us to hold off the Federation's forces? What the fuck were they thinking!?"
"Quiet," the Sarge says with a cold voice. "There's nothing we can do about now. We've been dumped out here. We just have to see it through. For now we just have to hold those Feddies off and buy the convoy some time." Everyone else remained silent. Perhaps some of them thought it was a doomed mission from the start.
Everyone, including you, starts to move slowly forwards, away from the convoy, and towards the approaching enemies. Despite being in the cockpit of a mobile suit nearly sixty feet tall, the canopy of the rain forest still towers over you. As you continue your move, an enemy GM pushes through the trees, staring you down. Out of reflex, you aim your Zaku's machine gun, screaming as you fire and riddling the enemy full of holes, killing him, but not enough to make his unit explode. Your heart races, your brow is drenched in sweat, and your mind races.
All of a sudden, you hear another scream, this time it's your friend's voice. Out of desperate hope that he's still alive, you force your unit into a run towards his position, pushing the pedals as far forward as they can go. Your heart skips a beat as another enemy unit comes at you from behind cover. This one draws a beam saber. You move your unit's arm to the side, drawing a heat hawk. The enemy comes at you, bringing his saber arm up and back and turns his torso in the same direction, and swings across, attempting to bisect you. You counter, pushing your unit in the same direction as
his attack, avoiding it and ending up behind him. You swing your heat hawk across, cleaving your enemy in two. Another one bites the dust. Remembering why you were running in the first place, you press on, eventually coming to the unit your friend piloted, or what remained of it. Looking down at the chest of his unit, you see that a hole had been left in the chest, with molten metal still glowing orange. The enemy you had just killed was the one who killed your friend. Overcome by his sudden death, Your heart feels as if it's tearing itself apart. "Fuck!" you shout, slamming your fist onto the console as tears obscure your vision.
"Kid? You okay? Kid!?" the Sarge yells into the microphone of his headset. "What the hell happened!?"
"It's...it's Miles sir" you say between light sobs as you wipe the tears from your face. "They got him..." You hear nothing from your commanding officer's end. Nothing but static. "Sarge?" you call out. Nothing. You can only assume the worst. "Danny?" you call to the only other remaining member. Still nothing. Shaking uncontrollably as your heart sinks, you realize that you're alone, stuck in between the Feddies and the convoy you were sent to protect.
In your realization, you are ambushed by another GM. Without much time to react, you send your Zaku flying to the left in an attempt to avoid the shower of bullets from the enemy's machine gun. Your unit lands on its back. It slides backwards a few meters and knocks down a few trees in the process. At the same time, you fire your machine gun blindly. Again, the GM does not explode. You move your unit back on its feet. You feel something warm grow cold on your side. Looking down, you freeze out of fear. It's blood. Your blood. A bullet from the unit you had just taken out had penetrated through the chest of your mobile suit and through your cockpit, right into you. It's a big hole in your side. You feel no pain, most likely from the sheer adrenaline rush due to everything that had transpired within the past half hour. You feel like you're going to be sick. Your body lurches forward as you retch, coughing up blood into the screen of your helmet. Unable to see, you frantically tear off your helmet. In a dazed manner, you turn in the direction of the approaching enemy forces. With labored breath, you realize that there is not much time left for you, and because of that, you become deathly afraid. Afraid of dying.
Another bullet pierces the cockpit and tears itself right into your gut. Still nothing. No pain. Just the feeling of being drugged on your own adrenaline. The front screen goes blurry, flickering with static. They grow closer. In one final act of madness and desperation, you floor the pedals and push on the throttle. The thrusters on the back of your unit come to life as your unit takes off running into the thick of the enemies. The added thrust propels your unit faster, the g-forces seemingly halting the flood of fresh blood from your grievous wounds. A shell fired from an enemy bazooka impacts the ground in front of you, detonating its payload of high explosives. The blast drastically slows down your progress as your head goes slamming into the console. Stars orbit your head from the impact, but you push on, slowly regaining the composure of soldier going through his last stand. More bullets wrack your unit, which has just lost its left arm and bury themselves in you and around you. Still no pain. Still drugged on adrenaline. You don't know where it's coming from, but it doesn't make a bit of difference. You hear a warning signal, a single, blaring, high-pitched honk. You know what it means; the reactor powering your unit has been breached.
All of a sudden, you slam into something, hitting your head on the console again. The screen flickers one more time. You see it. You've just run right into an enemy unit. Quickly, you force your unit to wrap its arms around the enemy in a bear hug. Your vision begins to blur, your breathing turns into a death rattle. But you feel nothing. More bullets, more wounds, more coughed up blood. The warning signal grows louder and faster. But there's nothing you can do as your unit's arm is wrapped tightly around the struggling enemy. You know that you're going to die, but you don't care anymore. You seem strangely at ease as Death's cold grip tightens around your neck.
Your vision melts. The sound of the alarm and sparking circuitry in the cockpit muffles and mutes. All around you, you see a vast array of colors swirling and coalescing, combining into more colors, and separating. Your life flashes by you, like a slideshow with the frame rate set way too high. Your family, your friends, and your significant other. All of it flashes before you. You hear thoughts, the thoughts of hundreds of thousands of people on both Earth and in space. You hear the thoughts of soldiers in the heat of battle, soldiers drawing their last breath, and soldiers returning home. You hear the thoughts of civilians; children, mothers, fathers, doctors, firefighters, police, professors, criminals, etc. You hear the thoughts of old people on their death beds, and the thoughts of newborn babies. Their thoughts collect together, and almost seem to overload your mind, crushing, stretching and kneading it like dough. Time and space, all of it seems irrelevant, as if you surpassed it, transcended it. You, in your euphoric state of near-death, feel as if you have been plugged into the collective consciousness universe. You think to yourself, "This..is this...what a Newtype is?"
In that moment, the reactor powering your Zaku goes critical, and explodes. The cockpit fills with intense light and heat as the nuclear explosion consumes everything within a certain radius, including you.
And then…
Nothing…
[an original story by DieSukka, http://diesukka.deviantart.com/art/Transcendence-179583948]
