100 People who have died across the galaxy.

100 People who have died across the galaxy is a series of short stories.

20 - The Traveller.

£400,000 was the sum he was offered (or ,in the case of catastrophic failure, his next of kin.) He had needed the money, and in his darkest moments wondered if dying would be so bad.

He relaxed in the black, comfy chair.

There was a brief period after the traveller had heard the switch flick, then, everything.

Life. , the entire catalogue of all knowledge, human and alien, mundane and divine playing out before him, and he knew everything, and so he was sure he knew nothing.

Every experience ever catalogued by man, every poem, every fragment of the world, all history, the echoes of civilisations long dead, and the sounds of all governments, all people, every ship's current cargo, it's serial number, the factory it was born in, the area it's metals had been mined, who mined them, the struggles of all things, the lesser struggles at the top, the brutality of everything, and the beauty of every sunset, every mountaintop, every cairn of stones, the elation of a thousand first loves, and the soulcrushing pain of lost ones.

the traveller was no longer the same as his brother, he realised, he had tasted the fruit again, he made that reference, understanding the significance of legends from a place far away, that he had never visisted, but knew every detail of.

At once he was wracked with the sympathy for monsters and the hatred of angels, his face contorted in so many reactions to abject horror contrasted with the beauties of the galaxy.

The images came in the next second, he could no longer see, only the pure information, thousands of scenes playing out before him, all being intensly focused on at once.

A child took it's first step, giggling happily, their first foray into the world captured on film. The same child stood a decade and a half later, bleeding from the face, crying in fear as an officer of the occupation shot him, caught on film again. The occupation officer shot himself in his bathroom, decades after that, described in the obituary. By the end of this second, he had come to love humanity, and himself within it.

He saw so many lives ended, so many lived through to their end, so many sad deaths, so many sad lives, and a greater number of happy ones, he saw what heaven would be like, if only for a short while.

He'd learned the rules that goverened the sciences within the first second, and already had some notes.

The dance of the stars was made bare to him, the beautiful majesty of so many thousands of players, so many thousands of dancers on this beautiful stage of ink, flickering torchs against the cold darkness. He had lived for 20 years, and this vast window into the past laid before him, a giant time machine, stars whose light outlived them called to him every night, and he slept through it all. He thought of his dead grandmother, he felt the gripping fear and the pain for a moment he was there his, brain dying, clawing at the last scraps of life and consumed with pure anger at everything, himself, any god that may have been listening, he cursed them all and screamed. Then feeling of a great relief at the sight of his own face, the face of himself as a boy, visting. He felt the pain of the man he passed on the streets on a wednesday morning, he felt the effects of excommunication from civil society, being placed into the hellish pit of an underclass. He felt the sheer ease of the man at the top of the company. He felt the liberation of becoming a she, he felt the hell of becoming a she, the experiences brought him to the conclusion that the gender binary was outmoded, then essential, then he had no conception of it whatsoever. He was gay. He was straight. by the end of this second, he had defined himself.

"My god." he whispered. "I was so blind."

The researcher took down some notes.

The vastness of everything swallowed him, the lives of millions fully studied, his brain processing information at an incredible speed, there was no limit to his knowledge.

the traveller stood up, electrodes still clinging to his head, the sensory experience of the comfy chair perfectly remembered, he had learned the extent to which he could control his body, he willed himself to ignore the many jolts of pain his brain attempted to send, his brain was no longer his master anymore, sending signals based on it's animalistic fear, it was his partner, a tool to his self in the same manner as his hand.

He looked at the clock upon the wall, he had perfectly memorized the room in the first picosecond of the switch, he had recognized that only 3 seconds had passed.

He manipulated the muscles in his throat, for the first time in his life, his voice boomed. "I feel very well." the windows shattered. "I have learned much." "My name is not my own." "I would like to be called 'a traveller' from now on." "Thank you." his speech was over in less a quarter second, though it felt normal to him. He sat down.

He noticed that the experiment they had formulated didn't expose him to all the knowledge they had available, and that he was an experiment for a "civillian" version of the invention.

He had known the taste of the fruit of knowledge, but now he was cursed with the temptation of adam, the world again, in the same way he had just become more than a man, here was a chance at more still, divinity, injected through machines.

"Nothing is left here." "I was blind, and you gave me sight." "I have now seen the bars of my cell." "If you inteded that i stay here, i'm afraid i can't, you've given me the key, you see." By the end of this second, he had learned all he had yet to learn.

He ran towards the terminal, and expanded the data-track, he had read every paper on cryptography, knew every cipher. His fingers moved like lightning on the terminal, the scientists's child's name came blank, his wife's name, blank. The brand of coffee he had drank since he was 15 cracked open the safe.

He was no longer beholden to his curse of instinct, every beat of the heart, every breath, every atomic movement he could control in himself was controlled, there was no more beast, he was free of the demon who had obscured his senses, he could perfectly describe the beetle. The flashes weren't in his head anymore, they were on the walls, pounding brutal light.

He had learned so much, he knew that to try and express it in words would take all the paper in the universe.

His brain stopped. In the milliseconds before, he recognized it as an absence seizure, he knew every detail of it, he'd read a thousand papers about it. he recognized his own death, he had reckoned with it a thousand times in his travels since the switch came on. He fell down, his face turning blue. he died.

At the federal research society, two scientists idly looked through a sheet of paper, covered in acronyms and data that only really made sense to the twelve people working at station 5F, both sat in brown, slightly ratty chairs.

"So, 672 happened again?" "Yep." "And you didn't call me?" "Well, the failsafe worked this time, and it was midnight."

"Fine, i'll write up the report, you get to work on the new one." said the portly alien on the right, as he got up and left the "observation room" as it was known.

Richter sighed. He looked at the small black rectangle that contained the traveller, and held it out at arms length.

"Sorry, traveller."

20- The Traveller