On the Last Day You Die
You open your eyes to a yellowed lightbulb hanging by wires from a ceiling. Banzai Bill stands over you. He’s always standing over you.
“Get up,” he says. “I’m sick of your shit.”
Every instinct tells you to stay down, curl up, and fade away, but you get up because he’s your sergeant and because, like the rest of the squad, you’re afraid of him.
This new body sags with a persistent ache. Age spots cover your hands. Yellowed nails and bulging veins.
“Are you kidding?” Words croak from a dry throat. “You junked me into an old man.”
You’d hoped all that empty landscape surrounding you would have prevented them from bringing you back.
“There weren’t any other bodies available, shit-for-brains.” Banzai Bill chucks your rifle toward you, but the reflexes of the old-man body can’t keep up.
The rifle’s stock slams against your face and clatters onto the floor. Pain radiates along your cheek, and your eye begins to swell shut.
Sonya picks up the rifle and hands it to you. “We almost junked you into a fucking cow.”
The rest of the squad laughs at the joke.
“We haven’t even reached our goddamn target,” Banzai Bill says, “and you’ve already needed a resurrection. We should have left you dead. I don’t give a shit how much they spent on your training.”
“You’re lucky we found this farmhouse,” Sonya says. “Your jumper was draining fast.”
You reach back to feel the jumper doming from the rear of the old man’s skull. That’s you popping and juicing into this stranger’s body. Strands of nanos string through the cerebellum like fingers tickling meat. You’re an invader, forcing your will into his flesh and bone. His body is now your body. At the same time, it silently rebels against your occupation—the stab of arthritis in the knee joints, the teeth ground down from a life of worry, hands unfamiliar with the use of a gun.
You can tell by the old man’s softness he wasn’t a fighter, but the farmhouse screams Human Only sympathizer: no nanotech, no modification ports, no transhumanist propaganda. The squad wouldn’t have thought twice about killing the old man for the cause. One government soldier is worth a thousand old luddies.
Banzai Bill steps close and snarls, “When we get back, I’m putting you on a shelf until command can deal with you.” He addresses the squad but he’s looking at you. “No more dying until we clear out that rebel cell.”
When you fight for the transhumanists, they never let you die. Junked into body after body, you carry forward all your training and experience. But you secretly hold onto something else, a thing you refuse to leave behind—that last kernel of yourself. It’s a moment from your childhood, not so much a memory as a feeling: sunlight pouring through glass, a woman humming a song, butterfly wings on a lilac bush. You let the images swirl inside you, scraping the rough edges and shooting sparks into the darkness. You close your eyes and reach for them.
That’s when you hear the whine from across the room—from under a table in front of the sofa. A dog, dirt brown and scraggly. Not big but not small either. It follows you with its eyes as if it knows you or, rather, thinks it does. You look like the old man, smell like the old man.
“Here, boy,” you say with the old man’s voice.
It sidles toward you the way dogs do, and you lift your hand, not sure if the illusion will keep you from getting bit. After all, the old man is dead, and you are not the old man. The dog can sense this too, but it needs him, wants the safety of him so badly it’s willing to give you a chance. The dog presses its head into the cup of your hand, needing the connection. Deep down in all the meaty parts that aren’t really yours, you feel its fear, its insecurity. You want to curl up on the floor beside it. Feel its warmth beside you.
From the kitchen down the hallway, cupboards creak open and slam shut. One of the guys is a good cook, and soon you’re all eating the first decent meal you’ve had in days. Sonya finds you poking at your potatoes and bacon on the back porch; she sits next to you on steps that drop into a yard overlooking a gully. She’s your team leader and nothing like Banzai Bill—not brutal, not mocking. You share a weariness you can hear in her voice.
“Funny thing about your gun going off like that,” she says.
“I can’t believe you found someone living out here.”
“Like I said, you’re lucky.”
You drop the scraps of bacon and potatoes on the deck. Dog’s been waiting, eyeing your plate, and now it devours the food. You admire that.
“You ever think there’s a life out there that doesn’t feel so heavy? A body that feels like you belong in it?”
Sonya looks up with a softness that startles you, and for a moment you think she can see that part of yourself you keep hidden away.
“You’re a lot like my brother used to be,” she says, her voice now distant. “He was a dreamer too.” She pulls her gaze away, and hard lines return to the corners of her mouth. “Fucking weak.”
“Not weak. Fucking exhausted.”
“That’s all of us.” She grinds her last bite of bacon and steps toward the gully where Dog is sniffing around bushes.
A hare springs into a run, and Dog takes off. Fast. Bounding over clumps of fennel and skirting a hedge of gooseberries. The chase kicks a cloud of dirt into the air that scatters the afternoon sun.
When Dog trots back to your side, sunlight fills its eyes, and you swear that goddamn thing is smiling. You brush your fingers through its fur and smell the wild, smell the freedom—an earthiness that rests on the tongue. You swallow, taking it inside of you—hoarding it—and for the first time in your life, you know exactly what you want, what you can no longer live without. You don’t even realize that the muzzle of your gun is pressed beneath your jaw until you look up and see Sonya staring at you.
She shakes her head. But she’ll do it. To save the last dreamer she knows, she’ll do it.
You never get used to dying. Your mind shrinks into a space so fucking dark it obliterates all the light in the world. When you wake up, your tongue is lying in the dirt. Banzai Bill is screaming at Sonya, and the rest of the squad is holding him back.
You stand and catch Sonya’s attention. She watches you through the chaos, and the hint of a smile lifts the corner of her mouth. You raise your voice into a sharp bark that slices through the afternoon, a bark that silences everyone. Startled, they turn to stare at you, and that’s when you turn to run like a motherfucker back up through that gully.
Banzai Bill’s bullets thud around you, but there’s no way they could touch a thing so free.
Time slows into a buttery swirl of sunshine pulsing on grass and your heart’s pounding, pounding, pounding and the thought occurs to you that you finally own this fucking world, and your heart is pounding to keep you moving and you know that one day the darkness will find you again—find you one final time.
Until then, you stick to the light.
Sam W. Pisciotta is an intrepid storyteller hurtling through spacetime on the power of morning coffee and late-night tea. He writes stories for people who want to visit other planets, learn magic from birds, or camp in haunted forests. His M.A. in Literary Studies from the University of Colorado trained him to deconstruct various texts; living life taught him how to put them back together. Sam is a graduate of the Odyssey writing program. Find his stories in Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, PodCastle, Nightmare Magazine, and other fine publications. Connect at www.silo34.com and @silo34 on Instagram, and @swpisciotta on Bluesky Social.
Copyright © 2025 Sam W. Pisciotta.