The Wheel of Samsara pulled on me and I found no way to resist it. I had taken too long to do anything. The silver-blue thread was gone.

I was falling, falling endlessly into the Wheel of Life, spiraling into elsewhere…

I awoke with a gasp, sitting in a lotus pose. My body was hurting. I felt old, older than I had ever been at sixty in Aralsk.

“Majum, it’s time,” A female voice said. I felt an arm on my shoulder shaking me.

“Huh? What?” I blinked, clearing motes of light out of my eyes, attempting to focus on the indistinctive, blurry shapes around me.

A yellow-straw-haired, dark-skinned, gold-eyed woman crouched in front of me, staring at me with sad, loving eyes. Her body was painted with detailed, yellow spirals, akin to the tattoos worn by the Māori people from Eastern Polynesia.

“Whaaa…” I looked around. I was sitting inside some sort of a rickety structure covered with ragged cloth, akin to an old, moving circus tent. The floor was vibrating. The tent was definitely moving.

“Is this a… circus?” I asked tentatively. "...am I in a caravan troupe?"

“What’s a circus? Did you lose the last of your marbles, Majum? Last time I talked to you, you said you were going to meditate one final time on your past life, while counting the blessed beads!” The girl sighed. “Look, I'm just here to tell you that it’s time. It's your thirty third year, the day of acceptance. It’s your time to… go towards the Wheel.”

“To go… where?!” I inquired, my hands shaking.

I was old. Very old. I saw that I was holding crystal, prayer beads in my hand. I remembered that I had shaped these myself by rubbing and polishing balls of mud for hundreds of hours.

“To meet the gods, Majum. It is time to meet the gods,” the woman said.

An enormous migraine blossomed inside my head. My name was Majum Dusk. I was thirty three. I had a nice life taking care of the caravan, had a daughter named Mirana Dusk that was now standing in front of me, lost my wife… and now it was my time to meet the gods.

My heart started to stutter. The caravan could not support the old and feeble. The caravan had to keep moving… because stopping meant starvation and certain death.

The strange self-awareness of myself as a Soviet virologist named Vladislav Kerenski was wobbling inside my head, not sitting quite right.

“Mirana… L-let me pray one last time t-to the gods,” I said, trembling.

“One last time,” she nodded.

I slowly and painfully climbed up a ladder constructed from reeds to the top of the tent. As I finished the climb, I saw our three-thousand people strong caravan. Large tents wobbled atop beasts that looked like mammoths, numerous yellow flags flapping in the bone-chilling wind. The enormous, tireless beasts ambled forward, moving across the snow-covered landscape… alongside… the eternal gods, always moving forward on the eternal path surrounded by the high walls of glacial ice.

I had always bowed to the gods, prayed to them daily… but with the memories of my past life as Dr. Kerenski I finally saw them for what they were…

Enormous threads of truly gargantuan machines rumbled off to the side, behind a wall of mist and clouds. I could see the rust-covered tops of these ancient, titanic engines. The machines were akin to tanks, magnified ten thousand times. The monstrous tanks rolled behind the caravan and ahead of it. Hundreds of them. As far as my eye could see. Heat radiated off them, warming my face.

Enormous, tall glaciers shimmered from both sides. This was a world beset by ice and the gods… no, these ancient, enormous, rust-covered automatons kept the ice away. The gods had always kept us safe from Nierra, the spirit of eternal winter, according to the generations-old legends.

I looked down at my hands. Why was I being told to walk towards the gods at thirty three? Why was I so feeble and weak at the middle of my life?

My hands were covered in different pigments, blistering away… just like the hands of Khazakh people I had observed in Ust-Kamenogorsk, the irradiated people that had the unfortunate fate of living next to the Soviet Semipalatinsk nuclear bomb testing site called Polygon.

The blisters in my hands were a sign of radiation sickness.

I glanced at the enormous machines once again. I recalled how Soviet scientists had attempted to build a secret nuclear-powered land-submarine to attack America from beneath the world. The goals of the nuclear-powered “Battle Mole” project supported by General Secretary Nikita Khruschev were to attack underground military facilities, communications infrastructure, and installations such as underground missile silos from beneath. The project was utterly insane, but theoretically feasible. The enormous, nuclear-reactor powered mole could work for many, many years, as long as its reactor lasted and was designed to radiate incredible amounts of heat - enough to melt the earth itself.

The tanks that were eternally rolling beside the caravan… were nuclear-powered vehicles. They kept on moving forward… because someone had set them to this task long, long ago. They kept the glacier ice from enveloping the path taken by the caravan, made sure that the snow and ice on the path of life melted, made sure that plants and trees grew along the line of life, sustaining the last surviving animals and the people. The giant machines kept this world alive by creating a thread of life that possibly crossed this entire… ice covered planet.

I didn’t know exactly how big the ring of life was… maybe it was planet-sized, maybe it was only as big as a continent or even a nation, but this world was dying and these radioactive engines were its last lifeline that would not last forever.

All of my knowledge as a virologist was useless here because I was so feeble and old. My body was ruined by the radiation emanating from the tanks, my telomeres damaged by it to a point beyond saving.

Nobody lived longer than thirty three in the caravan.

My final meditation that allowed me to remember my past life had come far too late.

“Majum,” my daughter said. “Are you ready to go now? Are you ready to face the gods?”

“Yes,” I said, my eyes filled with tears.

I hugged my daughter with my shaking hands one last time.

"We will meet again, in another life..." I told her.

"In another life, father," she smiled.

I climbed down the offered rope ladder and started to shamble towards the radioactive mists emanating from the monstrous machines.

It was time to die.

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