100 Deaths, Chapter 1: Embracing the Red of ‘Tribes: Ascend’

I am going to die 100 deaths.

We will all die once. Ninety nine more shouldn't really make much difference. We are all on the bridge, suspended above oblivion, our own hands hacking at the rope. We are all cutting time to the quick. When our death comes, that single personal death that is worth a million, that prime death, it is unlikely that we'll be able to look back at what just transpired. The knife, forgotten. The tumor, gone. The wreckage, vanished.

Ninety nine lives, lived however briefly inside 99 different worlds, created by countless human beings whose bridges are already spitting fiber over the edge. Deaths I can recount. Deaths I can feel. Ninety nine resurrections and 99 new stories. Preparation, in some small way, for the roar and silence of death 100.

It is now, and I am alive.

My eyes open upon rolling fields, and the distant sound of gunfire. Already, experience tells me that this life will not be a long one. The gunfire has a strange ring to it, strange enough to make me fear it. A blast, a whip, the sound of the wind being carved in two. It is the sound of quick violence. It is the sound of death at high speed.

I move, and my motion is a slide, a flow. I rise over a hilltop and boosters on my back explode into life. I am flying. The world below me is alive with others—they are darts, swooping low over the hills and streams. Some are solitary creatures, cutting across the action like drones on urgent, secret missions. Some fly in formation, bird-like, changing direction and dynamic like they act with one mind.

I crash to the surface and my own limbs are my skis. Faster, faster—much faster than I'd like—I approach the stage. My color is blue. I see the blue on my arms, on my legs. I feel the blue in my mind. My instincts are blue. I am a blue wolf, running with a blue pack. In the distance, I can see red flags. They call to me.

When you close your eyes to the sun, as a child, little specks appear, dancing in the red dark. As you age, those specks multiply. They become familiar, they breed. We love to watch things dance. We watch the dance as we sleep. We blink, and we catch a moment of choreography. It pleases the eye. It is our eye. Our heartbeats are music. We love to dance, and watch others dance.

And so, this life—as brief as it must be—is beautiful. Spinning, gliding into the battle, I raise my weapon and let loose a disc of blue energy. It crackles and spits off into the hills. I am Fred Astaire as I pirouette up the grassy bank. I am Gene Kelly as I crash down the other side, muscular and fierce, loosing death in every direction.

My every fiber pulses with the red energy of the objective.

My enemies are red. My goal is red.

Go to the red.

But the sky is blue and the fields are green, and aren't we always drawn to the colors that gleam in the places that lie far from our job? I boost into the sky, to touch the blue that is me, and find the black that is nothing.

I heard it. That's the truth of it. I heard the disc approach me. I heard its crackle. And then the world was gone. Death number one.

I had achieved nothing in this life. I'd been born, I'd reveled in the beauty of what was before me, and then vanished. I'd been blue, and felt some fear and fascination with the red, and then I'd left all notions of color and emotion behind me.

The dance stays with you, though. The glorious liberation of that sweeping movement across the land, like the shadows of the clouds themselves. The sense that your feet are barely, barely, touching the earth as you move towards friend and enemy alike, there's nothing else like it.

A life well lived is a life that leaves you at the exit door with a strong sense of how beautiful your experience has been. This rare and wonderful opportunity to reflect upon my passing leaves me with no doubt that my first life was special indeed.

I wait in the darkness to be born again, but I can still see the dance. I am a child on a beach, eyes closed, seeing those little dots of life shimmying across the red sea.

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