Renascent

ANOTHER IGS MAN GONE

BREATHING through your nose is as normal as it is. While walking with your legs seems usual in the course of the day. But living in the day and dying through the night in a snap is abnormally normal here in Modun.

After the end of the world, which was once called Earth, rose the new cosmos. Before the Modun was built and established, people on Earth lived from being a small organism growing to become a full grown human species and died in many ways. They only lived and died once in their life. All humans around the world died because of a virus called, Pretuby, a virus that killed humans on their teenage years through a series of hallucinations and delusions that lead them to kill each other, to kill every live species including themselves. It has killed all of the race and produced us. Produced through the blood spilt from the Pretuby victims.

And we are called the Igs men. We are born every day, and die every night. And it is a normal thing, like breathing.

"Grey is really lucky to be outta here, Luke" says Bren.

Yes, Luke's my name. We, Igs men don't have surnames, though.

"How'd'ya know?" I ask while getting out of my tub, fixing my white suit and looking through Bren's tub beside mine. Igs men usually wake up after the Dying every night in their respective tubs. Every time we wake up here in our tub we are like new born humans. Clean, healthy, young, and strong.

"He must've found it there," he says looking a little disappointed. "in the Bowm." He continues. Because last night when everyone, except me, ran during the Quake, Grey has already been missing, even when we woke up just this past ten minutes. He didn't come back from the Quake last night. And Bren told me that there is only one good reason why he's gone missing. He said he might have found his other piece in the Bowm in the last Run last night and died there together with an Igs woman and has been reborn in Eilf. Never to come back.

No one knows what it is like in Eilf. No one knows. No one would find out unless they try to join the Run every Quake. But sometimes I think that Eilf does not even exist. Because no one from every Igs men, who had gone missing during every Quake and never been reborn the next day, came back. And I don't know why Bren thinks it's a good thing not to be reborn. To never come back.

"You always seem to be a little disappointed when one of us never came back," I ask without looking at him. "When it was you who always tell me that it is a good thing to never be reborn."

"You really don't understand how it's done here, am I right?" he asks.

"I never ran in my whole existence," I pause and look at him and find him looking at me right through my very eyes. "And I am the only Igs man who doesn't. So definitely I really don't understand."

Or so I thought. He says that there are also a bunch of first time runners like me. And then he says that there's a huge difference with wanting to do something and not wanting it. He says that I perhaps don't want it.

"Grey's found his other Piece." He says.

"That's the only thing why we're here, Luke. To find our other Piece. We are not even living in Modun, neither here in Merps," He pauses and looks away from me. "We are just breathing, we're not even alive. We don't even have life."

I flinch a little as if my heart fell on the floor. I panic with the words he just said. We are just breathing, we're not even alive. We don't even have a life. What does he mean?

"By the way," he continues. "It was between Grey and I who ran to get to the Bowm first." He grins a little. "And I think you should know it."

"But just right before I reach the Bowm first," he says and it comes to me that it should've been Bren in the Bowm. "We stopped right before the Igs woman's threshold and told me something." He pauses again and looks away setting his white suit. I am in shock at the moment. He should've been the one missing. He should've been the one who's never coming back.