In the instant before her death, Youko experienced a wave of alienation. As one nerve after another snapped, her connections to the real world melted away. The brain she’d used for twenty-four years was being destroyed. The most important evidence she had that she was herself, was ground to pulp. She was cut off, cast out of the world. It felt like everything in the world was screaming that her existence had no value.
Before the pain signals reached her, Youko was dead. But a strange sensation hit her instead. Like she was falling... no, rising? It was an unstable feeling, like the ground had vanished. This wasn’t anything as simple as floating through the air because a truck had hit her. She was falling or rising in some entirely unfamiliar direction. The sensation assaulted her from all directions, like it was trying to crush her. Like an orange in a clenched fist, Youko burst!
Falling... Falling... Falling... Thrown out of the world she’d always known. If she compared it to a human experience, the thing it most resembled was the moment of birth. Being launched into 100% pure unknown.
But at the end of it was something familiar. Like a long-since forgotten friend or a TV show once watched, her sense of self developed. Something familiar was approaching — something from beyond her memories, beyond her own existence. What a relief! She felt as secure — no, more secure than she had when she was still part of the world.
Then, out of nowhere, loss! Youko was falling again. The familiar sensation vanished. Never to return. Oh, no! No! No! She wailed and screamed but to no avail. All that remained was a sad hollow. Nothing else. No other sensations. No touch, no temperature, no wind, nothing else around her. Like standing in a world without light in lukewarm water the same temperature as her body. She was frustrated, but this did not make her pulse race, did not make her sweat. She tried to scream but no voice emerged. She had no tongue or throat or voice box, so how could it?
She was lonely! Why was she so lonely? Because she was alone. Fundamentally alone. Nobody else even existed here. Youko was all alone in a world that seemed to go on forever. She had lost her body, the one thing closest to her. In a world without anyone to interact with, she wasn’t anyone at all.
Youko remembered when she’d first graduated and entered the workforce. She had found herself somewhere where she didn’t know anyone. A place without anyone around to define herself by. If she took that experience and multiplied it by a quintillion she might get something like what she was experiencing now.
Someone. She needed to find someone else. Someone in this place besides herself. She knew there wasn’t anyone. She knew her efforts were futile. But she had to find someone, so that she could interact with the world again.
And she found something. Extremely faint traces of someone. Someone’s shadow. Someone’s breath.
It was hard to describe. Youko had no sight, so she couldn’t see what they looked like. At most, she could sense their presence. Like when you sense someone standing behind you, except she felt something similar in front of her.
The presence spoke. “Pull,” it said.
Pull? What did that mean? The only association Youko had with that word was the gacha. Oh, that made sense. The presence she felt was a gacha. Thinking about it, it seemed obvious. The thing that defined her was a mobile game! All she had to do was pull from the gacha, and she could be someone.
This understanding allowed her to see. Her eyes focused, like waking from a dreamless slumber. Before her eyes was an icon, one that looked like Earth. It was the normal outfit gacha icon she’d seen constantly playing Evo Gals when she was alive. The words “11-pull gacha” hovered over the Earth. Youko reached out her finger. She had no finger, but just like touching the screen of her phone, a set of cards appeared, backs to her.
The first card flipped. Drawn on it was not a cute boy or girl, not a cool man or woman, nor a terrifying monster, but a familiar illustration from the biology textbook she’d used in high school. At the edge of the card was written the following:
N: Nucleus
Youko became something. Something with a nucleus. The system worked just like Evo Gals. But instead of the Girls from the title, the character was Youko herself.
This was a game that involved making outfits of flesh to dress up her soul.
The second card started to turn. Once again, a very unappealing illustration. Just a bunch of little grey spheres gathered into a tube. She glanced at the letters, and saw the rarity was Normal once again.
N: Microtubule
Tiny fibers appeared inside Youko’s cell. They strengthened the borders that gave her cell shape.
She hit the skip button to flip the rest of the cards.
N: Chitin
N: Phagosome
N: Mitochondrion
N: Cellular Membrane
N: Protein Complex Set
R: Lamellipodium
N: Chemoreceptor
N: Microtubule
N: Chitin
Mostly Normals, but that’s what the normal outfit gacha gave out.
The cards became part of Youko’s soul, giving her an interface to interact with the world around her. In the most fundamental sense, something else made Youko into something. They established Youko’s identity. What was Youko? A shapeless translucent slimy wriggling fluid. A microscopic organism that could change shape freely, wriggling, widening, spreading, becoming bulbous. She’d seen this sort of thing through a microscope in science class. She was an amoeba.
She’d been reincarnated as an Amoeba Girl.
Now that she was an amoeba, Youko had thought she’d be able to see again. This had been foolish. She remained trapped in darkness.
Youko didn’t have any eyes. In fact, she didn’t even have any nerve cells capable of perceiving light. All she had were chemoreceptors capable of detecting nutrient density. With no nerve cells, she shouldn’t have been able to think, either, but Youko did seem to have retained her consciousness. She could talk to herself. What was up with that? If reincarnation was possible, then maybe it wasn’t that weird to think without a brain. It definitely seemed like the soul existed, at any rate.
Unfortunately, Youko’s consciousness had trouble controlling her body. If she turned her mind towards it, its simplistic world view overpowered her, making it impossible to perform any complex movements. All she could really do was respond to the chemoreceptor’s input. She’d been hoping to live a comfortable amoeba life, benefiting from her previous life as a human, but that wasn’t really working out.
Amoebas lived simple lives. They reached out with their pseudopodia, and if they came in contact with bacteria or algae, they surrounded them, brought them inside themselves with phagosomes, and assimilated them as nutrition. If you asked Youko what that felt like, she’d have had trouble telling you. She had no sense of touch or taste.