You'd think that it's like drowning, clawing for air, for life. That it’d be a sudden gasp and you’re back in the world. But it's not. It's a slow, agonising, deliberate pull through all your worst memories. Like being sucked into a black hole while on a bad booster.

You draw breath, try to see the world. But they're not your lungs, they’re not your eyes. Everything looks subtly different, everything feels different. They say you can't tell and that it's the same in every measurable way - that it’s all in your head. They're wrong.

Usually around the second, maybe third breath, your brain kicks in. You remember the fury, the heat, and the pain of the destruction that brought you to this point. You get to live it again, like being stuck in sleep paralysis. At this point, the point where the memories suddenly stop, it finally hits home:

You died.

You never get used to that either. We were never built to cope with dying more than once. Sure you can replace the parts but we're never the same. We’re refashioned from the empty husks of those stuck planet-side. They sell us their death to forestall ours, but it’s all an illusion. We talk the same, walk the same, think the same, but some part of us knows we died out there in the cold and we’re never coming back. We’re no longer one individual, but a chain of separate lives all fooled into thinking we’re the same. Some of those reborn can't even cope the first time, they just sit screaming to themselves forever. The rest of us just throw up. The company doesn't tend to put that in its PR material.

It usually takes about a day to get used to the new reflection. The one that’s the same as the one you had before.

In every measurable way.
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From the journal of Leke NeDrax, 13th September YC112