Inside the Star
After his execution, Ziggaboot awakens inside a star—and with his memory intact, he has a plan: descend into the core, contact the antimatter beings beyond observable space, and find a way to break the Dam.
The last thing ZiggyBoot remembered was the taste of paperwork.
Not paper—paper was a human metaphor the Sol Dem clerks used when they wanted to feel merciful. The taste was procedure: the dry scrape of rules across his surface, the humiliating click of a stamp that didn't care who he was. The last thing he felt was the system's hand closing, impersonal as gravity.
Then—
Light.
Not metaphorical light. Not "illumination." Actual photons, a flood so dense it had weight in his mind. Heat like a language. Pressure like a palm.
ZiggyBoot woke up inside a star.
He did not wake up as a baby. There was no gradual assembly, no fumbling for how to exist. The species here didn't do childhood. In a place where a second could be a storm and a minute could be a geological epoch, anything that required years of softness would never make it past its first heartbeat.
He woke up finished.
His body was a pattern held together by hydrogen and insistence: protons and electrons in a restless choreography, bound less by chemistry than by the fact that the star kept feeding him energy. He wasn't a thing so much as a shape in plasma—an eddy in an ocean that had decided it was a person.
And he remembered.
Memory didn't always survive the Soul Stream. Going up tended to wash you clean; going down tended to keep you intact. ZiggyBoot had been dragged down—forced down—and the universe, in its blunt fairness, had kept the receipt.
So he remembered the gray corridors. The clerks. The claw. The "execution" that was really just reassignment with a laugh track.
He remembered his own certainty that the system was righteous.
And, more recently, he remembered the moment that certainty died.
He tried to move. Movement, here, wasn't legs or muscles. It was charge. It was leaning into magnetic ropes that braided through the star like tendons. He shifted the distribution of his electrons, let the field catch him, and he slid along a bright curve of force as if it had always been his spine.
Around him, the star was not quiet.
It boiled.
Great cells of convection rose and sank, each one a continent-sized fountain of incandescent hydrogen. Pressure waves rolled through the plasma, compressing and releasing it in pulses that would have been earthquakes if anything here could be called "ground." The star's magnetism twisted those pulses into soundless songs—Alfvén harmonics, field music—carrying meaning the way air carries speech.
The locals heard it all.
They were everywhere, woven through the star's interior like schools of fish made of flame. They did not have faces. They had contours—bright knots where a self held steady against the churn. When they greeted each other, their fields touched and exchanged a chord: identity, mood, purpose.
A bright knot brushed him, cautious, then warmer.
New-made, the chord said. Late bloom. You are… dense.
Dense. Level prejudice, translated into stellar etiquette. Cultures treated Levels like trophies even when the universe didn't.
"I'm fine," ZiggyBoot replied in their language without thinking, because the body came with the grammar. "Where is the evacuation?"
A ripple of surprise moved through the knot.
Evacuation? it echoed. You woke and asked for the end?
"Not the end," ZiggyBoot said. "The schedule."
They didn't have a word for schedule, exactly. They had a word for inevitability.
The knot's field flickered, and in that flicker he tasted the knowledge the way they shared it: not dates on a calendar, but a tightening in the star's heart, a deepening of gravity, a subtle change in the neutrino whisper that meant the core was tired.
Soon, the knot sang. Soon-soon. The Release is near. We have been ready.
"How long is 'soon'?" ZiggyBoot asked.
A pause.
The knot offered him a number so large it felt like a joke.
Then another number, smaller, sharper, more honest: the amount of outside time left.
ZiggyBoot did the conversion in his head with the bitter competence of someone who'd once processed souls for a living.
For him, it was millions of years.
For you… it would be under half an hour.
He steadied himself against the surge of photons. Even now, even after the claw, the scale still surprised him: a life measured in human minutes, stretched into a civilization's worth of thought.
The knot—who introduced itself as Lira of Loop in a chord that tasted faintly of iron—guided him upward along a magnetic strand toward a region where many minds clustered.
"Do you have elders?" ZiggyBoot asked.
We have the long-lit, Lira of Loop replied. Those who have been stable since the last bruise in the core.
Bruise. That word snagged him.
"Bruise?"
Lira of Loop sent him an image: deep within the star, a place where the field songs went wrong. A region that felt cold—not in temperature, but in meaning. A seam where the star's normal physics flinched.
ZiggyBoot felt an old rumor rise like bile.
Antimatter.
In the Sol Dem offices, antimatter beings were spoken of the way bureaucracies speak of fire: as a hazard with a designated procedure and an attached superstition. Outside the observable cosmos, hostile to the Dam, atheistic toward the entire idea of soul matter—soulless, or at least soul-less in the way the story understood it.
He'd never seen them. No one in the Office had. The Dam had rules for everything, and yet it had no form for "I met something that exists beyond your filing system."
ZiggyBoot had always loved that hypocrisy.
"What's at the bruise?" he asked carefully.
Lira of Loop pulsed with discomfort. Old fear. Old story. The Outside presses. The core answers.
"In your mythology," ZiggyBoot said, "what is the Outside?"
Their myth was not scripture. It was physics wearing a mask.
They believed, like many cultures did, that the universe had started with three ingredients: matter, antimatter, and the hidden substrate mortals called dark energy—soul matter, structural and everywhere, necessary for the cosmos to hold together.
The story went that soul matter condensed matter into stars and worlds, and in doing so expelled antimatter beyond the observable boundary.
No one had ever measured that. Not truly. But belief loved a neat origin.
ZiggyBoot listened, and as he listened he felt his own plan sharpening.
He did not want to evacuate with them.
He did not want to ride the supernova outward like a seed.
He wanted to go the other direction.
Down.
Lira of Loop brought him to a gathering: a lattice of bright knots held in a stable region where convection was gentle and the photon rain was almost soothing. There were structures here—field scaffolds, patterns anchored to magnetic lines. It was the closest thing the star folk had to buildings: intentions made durable.
They called this place the Ledger, because of course they did. Every species eventually reinvented bureaucracy. Some did it with paper. Some did it with song.
A long-lit spoke, its chord old and calm.
New-made. Welcome. The Release comes. Choose your vector. Choose your kin-bundle. Be carried outward and wait for new fire.
ZiggyBoot bowed with his field because it was expected.
"I'm choosing inward," he said.
The Ledger stilled.
Even in a star, some choices were taboo.
Inward is… unnecessary, the long-lit replied gently, as if speaking to a faulty instrument. Inward is where fusion ends and pressure begins. Inward is where patterns break. Inward is where you can do no good.
No good. The long-lit didn't mean morality. It meant karma.
The star folk were nearly perfect by the universe's accounting, not because they were saints, but because survival here was easy. They did not need to consume living things. They did not need to hurt each other to eat. Energy poured through them like a constant inheritance. Their lives drifted toward karmic cleanliness the way dust drifts toward still water.
ZiggyBoot felt the irony bite: he'd been punished, in the Office, for consequences he hadn't intended. Here, in a body designed for generosity, he could climb back toward the top with barely any effort.
And that, suddenly, felt like another kind of cruelty.
The universe's rule was clear—karma rose only through genuine good done to other living things, defined by actual outcome, not performance.
There was no "saying the right thing." No "appearing kind." Only consequence.
He could be kind here. He could become a local hero. He could help organize a thousand kin-bundles to ride the Release safely outward, and it would count.
And then, when he died, he would rise.
He would forget.
He would become docile.
He would become what the Dam wanted.
No. He was done being processed.
"I'm going inward," he repeated. "I need to see the bruise."
Lira of Loop sent him a sharp chord of alarm.
Why?
Because I want to break the system, he thought.
Because I want to find the Outside and make it hold a weapon for me.
Because I don't believe the Dam is fair.
Because I've been complicit for longer than most civilizations survive, and I'm tired of being clever in the service of cruelty.
Out loud, he said something truer than it sounded: "Because I don't trust that the Release is only natural."
The long-lit shifted, uneasy. The Release is the star's duty. It spreads life.
"Or it spreads something else," ZiggyBoot said.
The Ledger argued. They offered him kin-bundles. They offered him roles in evacuation logistics. They offered him a place among the long-lit if he would just stop talking about bruises and Outsides.
And as they offered, ZiggyBoot felt his body humming with an easy path: do good, accrue soul matter, rise.
It would be so simple.
It would also be the same cowardice he'd practiced in the Office: filing horrors because the form told him to.
"I'm going," he said.
Lira of Loop followed anyway, because curiosity was older than fear.
They descended.
Downward in a star wasn't a direction so much as a negotiation. Convection wanted to lift them. Radiation wanted to shove them outward. Gravity wanted everything compressed into the center's secret.
The star folk had learned to ride the push and pull like sailors on a violent sea. They used magnetic lines as tethers and slipped along them when the currents aligned. They waited out storms that would have stripped a less stable pattern apart.
Time unfolded strangely. ZiggyBoot's sense of years came in waves: long stretches of patient drifting, punctuated by violent moments when the star convulsed and his mind raced to keep up.
It took him centuries to learn the taste of different depths—the way photons at certain layers carried more pressure than warmth, the way heavier ions began to appear like grit in the plasma.
For you, that was fourteen seconds.
The deeper they went, the more the Ledger's field songs faded behind them. The star's interior became less social, more elemental. Here, patterns didn't cluster into cities. They clung in small groups, traveling in silence, listening to the neutrino whisper from the core like sailors listening to a distant, approaching storm.
They met others going outward—kin-bundles already formed, tight swarms of selves braided together so they could survive the coming shock. The bundles brushed past ZiggyBoot and Lira of Loop with disciplined calm.
May your Release be clean, the bundles sang.
"Thanks," ZiggyBoot replied, and felt the absurdity of wishing someone a clean explosion.
At one depth, they met a predator.
It came out of a shear layer where magnetic lines snapped and reformed in crackling violence. The predator was a tear in the field—a creature whose pattern was designed to destabilize other patterns, to drink the energy released when a self fell apart.
It did not hate them. It did not have ideology. It had hunger.
It struck Lira of Loop first, not because Lira was weaker but because Lira hesitated.
The predator wrapped its field around Lira's knot and began to unwind it, pulling the braid loose, taking the identity apart strand by strand.
ZiggyBoot felt something old and ugly rise in him: the reflex of an administrator watching a case become a casualty and thinking, Not my department.
He could flee. He could let the predator feed. It would be the simplest solution. The star folk died all the time. The universe didn't guarantee comfort or protection.
But he also felt—unwanted, inconvenient—how Lira's chord had become familiar. How this bright knot, this small companion made of hydrogen and attention, had chosen to follow him into taboo depths.
ZiggyBoot lunged.
In a star, violence was not teeth and claws. It was physics. It was turning a magnetic line into a garrote. It was pushing charge distributions into instability until a pattern couldn't hold itself together.
He hooked the predator's field with his own and forced their charges into resonance—an ugly, grinding harmony that made the predator's structure wobble.
It shrieked in field noise and tried to pull away.
ZiggyBoot tightened.
He didn't have to do it this way. He could have distracted it. He could have sacrificed a piece of himself and fled with Lira. He could have tried to herd it away.
But he was tired of half measures.
He drove the resonance harder, and the predator's pattern collapsed.
It didn't explode. It simply stopped being a self. Its hydrogen returned to the star's general churn, anonymous.
Lira of Loop shuddered, re-braiding what had been loosened.
You killed it, Lira sent, the chord sick with disbelief.
"Yes," ZiggyBoot replied.
You saved me, Lira added, and there was gratitude there, real and bright.
ZiggyBoot waited for the warm, satisfying sense of moral credit.
It didn't come.
Because the universe's accounting wasn't about how he felt. Karma was assigned primarily by outcome. Intent could be emotionally meaningful, but it didn't erase consequence.
He had done genuine good—he had prevented Lira's death. That mattered.
He had also harmed a living thing. That mattered too.
The net, he could feel in his bones—or whatever a hydrogen pattern had instead of bones—tilted downward.
Not enough to make him a monster.
Enough to sink.
Enough to keep his memory when he died.
Lira of Loop recovered, then sent him a chord like a question pressed against a bruise.
Was there no other way?
ZiggyBoot held the silence long enough to make it honest.
"There might have been," he admitted. "But we don't get karma for might."
Lira didn't understand the bitterness in that. Not fully. Their culture was too clean. Their lives were too easy.
ZiggyBoot had been a clerk.
He understood exactly how little the system cared about good intentions.
They continued inward.
The star changed.
Where the outer regions had been a riot of motion, the deeper layers were denser, steadier, heavier. Radiation struggled to escape. Convection slowed. Pressure became a constant, immense presence.
Here, photons were less like rain and more like a crowded hallway: everything bumping everything else, light unable to travel freely.
The neutrino whisper grew louder.
Neutrinos didn't care about matter. They passed through almost everything. To the star folk, they were like rumors from the core: faint, constant, impossible to stop.
And in those rumors, ZiggyBoot heard the countdown.
The core was failing.
In his time, he could have spent millennia studying that failure. He could have mapped the core's composition, watched the buildup of heavy elements, listened to the slow shift toward catastrophe.
For you, there were minutes left.
At last, they reached the bruise.
It was not a hole. It was not a portal with a polite border. It was a region where the star's normal field songs went thin, as if reality itself had been stretched and scabbed over.
Light behaved oddly here. Some photons vanished without heating anything. Pressure fluctuated in patterns that didn't match the star's convective rhythm.
Lira of Loop trembled, sending a tight chord of fear.
This is Outside touch, Lira said. Do not press it.
ZiggyBoot pressed it.
He extended his field into the bruise the way you might extend a hand into cold water.
Something touched him back.
Not warm. Not cold. Absent.
The contact felt like a negative of sensation, as if something had pressed a hole into his awareness.
Then a voice—if "voice" could be said of something that spoke by rearranging the concept of pressure.
You are loud for a spark.
ZiggyBoot froze.
He had heard about antimatter beings as soulless abominations, hostile to Sol Dem, outside the observable matter universe.
He had never expected them to sound… bored.
"I'm ZiggyBoot," he said, and immediately hated that he was introducing himself like a petitioner at a window.
Names are inside custom. You are inside matter. Why are you here?
The antimatter presence did not have a shape ZiggyBoot could describe in human terms. It appeared as a region where the star's glow refused to enter, a geometry of absence threaded through the bruise.
"I came to confirm something," ZiggyBoot said. "Are you influencing the Release?"
A pause—an absence shifting, considering.
You call it Release. We call it density event. Matter crushes itself. Heat increases. Boundary thins. We can speak. Sometimes we push. Sometimes we watch.
"So yes."
Yes is inside custom too. But… yes.
Lira of Loop emitted a chord of terror so sharp ZiggyBoot felt it like a sting.
The antimatter voice noticed.
Two sparks. One frightened. One curious. Curious spark is you.
ZiggyBoot ignored the insult. "I need something."
Inside matter always needs.
"I need a way to reach you again," ZiggyBoot said. "Not through a bruise in a dying star. Directly."
The absence shifted as if amused.
You cannot come here. You would annihilate. Your bonds would become light.
"I know," ZiggyBoot said. "But I also know I don't end when I die."
Silence.
Lira of Loop sent a frantic chord: Do not speak of the Stream. Do not invite it.
But ZiggyBoot was beyond caution. He'd been executed by caution.
"There's a Soul Stream," he told the antimatter presence. "Souls stratify by density—karma, compatibility with soul matter. I reincarnate. I've done it. I remember because I sank."
The antimatter presence went very still.
You claim continuity. You claim you return.
"Yes."
You claim a universe that keeps a record.
ZiggyBoot almost laughed. "You have no idea."
The antimatter presence pressed closer. The bruise deepened; the star's field songs thinned further.
We have observed patterns. We have not observed… what you call soul matter. We have observed your Dam. Your institutions. Your capture. We have no interest in your moral ledger.
"I do," ZiggyBoot said, and felt his own anger burn brighter than the star around him. "It's broken. It punishes consequences without caring about intent. It calls itself fair while grinding lives into lessons. It executes people for accidents."
His own words surprised him with their heat. Somewhere, deep in his memory, he saw a clerk's face—blank, uninterested—as ZiggyBoot pleaded a case and was told that outcomes were what mattered.
Because they were. Because they always had.
Karma could not be gamed. Only real good accrued.
But harm and consumption lowered it, and unintended damage counted the same as deliberate cruelty.
The antimatter presence made a sound like laughter rendered in negative pressure.
You want to break your Dam.
"Yes."
You want to break your universe's teaching mechanism.
"I want to break the bureaucracy on top of it," ZiggyBoot snapped. "I want to stop the capture. I want to stop the processing. I want—"
He stopped himself before he said godhood, because even he could hear how childish it sounded.
The antimatter presence waited.
You are small. You are minutes lived. Your star is collapsing. What will you do? Throw light at stone?
"I will reincarnate," ZiggyBoot said. "I'll come back. I'll find you. I'll bring allies. I'll bring a way to strike the Dam."
We can provide tools, the antimatter presence said, suddenly very calm. We have made many tools for harming matter. That is what this boundary teaches us.
ZiggyBoot felt Lira of Loop flinch beside him.
"Why help me?" ZiggyBoot asked.
We do not help. We trade.
"What do you want?"
The antimatter presence paused.
We want the Dam to fail. We want capture to stop. We want your souls scattered where they cannot be filed. Your system treats us as blasphemy. We treat your system as theft.
ZiggyBoot swallowed. "If I come to you—if I can come to your side—will you arm me?"
The absence shifted again, that negative laughter.
If you come, you will be a contradiction. That interests us.
ZiggyBoot felt the countdown slam through him.
The neutrino whisper spiked. Gravity tightened. The star's core was about to do what dying stars did: collapse, rebound, and hurl itself outward in an act of violence that seeded the universe with heavy elements and orphaned everything inside.
Lira of Loop sent a desperate chord: We must go. The Release begins.
ZiggyBoot held his position, pressed into the bruise.
"Give me a point," he said. "A coordinate. A way to find you from inside."
The antimatter presence complied with unnerving readiness.
A string of information flooded ZiggyBoot's awareness—not numbers written on paper, but a vector defined against cosmic background, a direction relative to the universe's own drift, an address that used gravity wells as punctuation.
He tasted it. He memorized it.
He repeated it to himself, over and over, forcing it into his pattern the way a drowning person forces air into their lungs.
Come in your next life, the antimatter presence said. Come in a body that can travel. Come with hate if you must. We will give you what you ask.
ZiggyBoot felt the bruise loosen, as if the antimatter presence were already retreating, done with him.
"Wait," ZiggyBoot said. "One more thing. Do you reincarnate?"
A pause.
We do not know. We do not participate in your Stream. We persist. We end. We have no clerks.
ZiggyBoot almost envied that simplicity.
Then the star screamed.
Not audibly. In physics.
The core collapsed. Pressure surged inward like the universe inhaling. ZiggyBoot felt gravity spike so hard it twisted his pattern, compressing him toward the center of himself.
Lira of Loop cried out in field noise, and then the sound was drowned by the roar of neutrinos—an invisible storm blasting outward, carrying away more energy than all the star's light over its entire life.
ZiggyBoot clung to the bruise, to the last thin contact with the Outside, and the bruise vanished as the star's reality snapped shut.
For a fraction of his subjective time—an eternity in human seconds—he felt himself stretched between two impossibilities: the Dam's bureaucracy and the Outside's absence.
Then the shock wave arrived.
Fusion didn't end politely. It ended as a rebuke.
The star's inner layers rebounded off the collapsing core and slammed outward. Temperature spiked. Density shifted. The plasma around ZiggyBoot became a weapon.
His pattern unraveled.
Not as pain—souls didn't feel physical pain after death, not the way bodies did.
But there was a kind of existential tearing: a self losing its grip on its atoms, on its charges, on the story it told itself to remain coherent.
Lira of Loop's chord flared beside him—fear, farewell, a desperate wish.
May your… Lira tried.
The shock wave erased the rest.
ZiggyBoot died.
For you, it was a flash.
For him, it was the slow, gorgeous failure of a structure that had always pretended it could hold.
And then—darkness.
Not void. Not absence. A current.
The Soul Stream caught him the way a river catches debris. He felt himself become less hydrogen, less plasma, less field—and more shape, the imprint of the body he'd just lost, carried forward by something deeper than physics.
He tumbled.
There was no clerk waiting this time. No questions. No stamp. Just flow.
He felt the tug of density. The way karma and soul matter compatibility determined where a soul settled, up or down, functional directions in the stream rather than moral heavens or hells.
He felt memory cling to him, stubborn, because he was sinking again.
Good.
He had a coordinate to remember.
A promise.
A bruise in reality and an address written in gravity.
Then the Stream spat him out.
Cold.
So cold it felt like an insult after a lifetime of fire.
Air—thin, brutal—scraped across new lungs. A body with weight. A body with hunger. A body that would not be fed by photons as a birthright.
He tasted salt. He heard wind.
He opened eyes that were not made for staring at the sun.
He had become something that lived in ice.
A Level lower.
A penguin.
And he still remembered.